Reflections from T.J. Fackelman (Milwaukee Film), Beth Fetterley and Jamie Ferschinger (Urban Ecology Center), Milwaukee

What does "making it home," in other words making a home in Wisconsin, mean to you?

To me, "making it home" means we're taking the place where we live, work and play, and we're trying to make it a better and stronger by reaching out to our community and convincing our neighbors to take a vested interest in our "home." I also believe that "making it home" means discovering ways to sustainably live within our local environment, rather than fighting it.

What do you love about the region where you live? Why is this important to you?

Milwaukee in particular, and Wisconsin as a whole, are wonderful places to live because of the richness and diversity of culture, as well as the wealth of our beautiful natural landscapes. The geography across our state varies dramatically and changes throughout the year, providing people across our state with opportunities for farming, fishing, hunting, etc.

The Making It Home project brings people together from many walks of life. How would you describe the diversity in your community?

Milwaukee is an incredibly diverse city that benefits from its various cultures, ethnicities, religions and walks of life. As the densest area of Wisconsin, Milwaukee forms a melting pot that encourages different groups of people to work together. By holding the Making it Home events at the Urban Ecology Center we're reinforcing the importance of diversity in our community, because the Center is located at the intersection of very different neighborhoods and economic groups.

ON Beliefs

The 2010 Wisconsin Book Festival explores the theme of Beliefs. In the Festival's honor, we asked several authors, poets and other thinkers from across Wisconsin to reflect on the role beliefs have played in their lives. The multiplicity of perspectives you'll see here reflects one of the Wisconsin Humanities Council's deeply held beliefs: That when our beliefs get aired, shared and woven together, community life grows more vibrant and our individual lives are enriched.

On the Existence of Unicorns
by Kimberly Blaeser, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor, Lyons Township

In May, following a conference gathering in the south of France, I settle in with four friends at an outdoor table of a small pub. Half-finished glasses weep condensation as we tiredly laugh our way through various topics. I slip my feet from my sandals and seek the cool of the paving stones.

Moments later, I realize I am being followed again. Even here.

The whole thing begins innocently enough, with our friend Lee's declaration that his 50-something-year-old older sisters believe in unicorns. He wonders how he might dissuade them. I, of course, wonder how do we know? How do we know they didn't exist - along with dinosaurs, mastodons and other fanciful creatures?

It is then I feel the presence. You see, questions of belief follow me around. Always have. Or perhaps I wear them tucked into the hems of my skirts. See? That kind of allusion - if only I could touch the hem of his garment - weaves itself into the most ordinary of moments. You would think this particular pub moment an unlikely one for an exchange on belief - or at least for a discussion that continues to resonate weeks later. But as I say, I wear the questions.

Vampires. Unicorns. Mastodons. Spirits. Creator. The conversation gallops along, crossing and re-crossing the borders between play and sincerity. How, Aaron wonders, do we answer our children's do you believe questions? Where do I stand, someone asks, on Christianity versus Native spirituality?

The talk lands at Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning" and his literary gesture toward everyday wonders, toward the trees blossoming richly with an essence as elusive as faith or poetry. Amid banter and lines from Baudelaire, we nudge ourselves close and then closer to declarations. I quote Ed Castillo: Indian people can hold more than one thing sacred; and translations from Rumi: There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

We are from different countries, different religious and ethnic backgrounds, and yet we all seem haunted by similar questions. What do we believe and why? Do we insist that those with whom we share our lives also share our beliefs? Do our own beliefs change over time? And does that change entail some loss of faith or just the continuation of an ongoing search? Is it the belief or the search that feeds our souls?

Ultimately, we wind our way safely back to unicorns, then walk the darkened streets to the Hotel du Palais. Of course, storybook creatures like unicorns and dinosaurs, and imaginative transformations like flowers blossoming and becoming edible fruits, exist in certain times and places - in once upon a time, in a long, long time ago, or perhaps for those who will search, who will believe, in the here and now, the everyday.

Web Exclusive!
Five Myths about Poetry I Used to Believe in but Don't Anymore
by Marilyn L. Taylor, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, 2009-1010, Milwaukee

Consider, for a moment, that strange and relatively new phenomenon we call the urban legend. Virtually everyone knows what these are by now; they've been defined as "stories that appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously, are usually false, and nearly always contain elements of humor, horror or both."

A slew of equally suspect legends pervades the world of poetry. They tend to spread exponentially, haunting our poetry classes and workshops, indoctrinating good poets with bogus pronouncements. Worse, they encourage a subculture of self-appointed poetry soothsayers, committed to cultivating a following of True Believers. Not only are these proselytizers usually wrong; they can also stifle a bright, creative impulse under a blanket of biases. Allow me to list a few of them for you:

Legend #1. A truly good poem must have a serious subject. A light poem tends to be dispensable.
Nonsense. What about Whitman's wonderfully upbeat "Song of Myself"? Or Frost's "The Road Less Travelled"? Bishop's "The Fish"? Dispensable? Hardly!
Legend #2: Free verse is no more than cut-up prose, and the only good poem is a rhymed poem.
A hopelessly outdated belief. Pick up any good anthology of contemporary poetry, and the free verse therein will sweep you away with its music. As in:
Spinnaker
of a tipping ship
the moon low
and large. . . (May Swenson)
Legend #3: Rhymed poetry is a throwback; nobody writes it anymore.
Nobody, that is, except a throng of our finest poets, including Maxine Kumin, Ted Kooser, A.E. Stallings, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Nelson, Richard Wilbur, Molly Peacock, Gary Snyder - all of whom write relevantly and splendidly in rhyme.
Legend #4: "Poetic license" means that grammar doesn't matter.
It's quite true that grammatical rules loosen up for poetry, but to say that grammar doesn't matter is to ask for trouble. What if Elizabeth Barrett Browning had begun her most famous poem with: How does I love thee? Trouble. Clearly.
Legend #5: Poetry is autobiographical. If this claim had legs, it would mean I'd somehow visited ancient Greece, which I haven't; that I have a daughter, which I don't; that I'm capable of playing a scratch game of golf, which I'm not; and that I live in a tree - which I sometimes wish I did. Some poems, naturally, are indeed about the poet; but many more are not.

There are plenty of additional legends out there. It remains my belief that all too many broad pronouncements about poetry are, well, unbelievable.

To read more ON Beliefs essays from the across the state, please visit the Wisconsin Book Festival website.