Thursday at the Wisconsin Book Festival: Blessed are the cheesemakers?

Novella Carpenter and Michelle Wildgen spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at A Room Of One’s Own Thursday evening, day two of the Wisconsin Book Festival. Considering the foodie themes that run through their work, it wasn’t too surprising in a town that packed the Kohl Center for Michael Pollan.

Carpenter, author of the urban farming adventure Farm City: The Education Of An Urban Farmer, read first, clumsily stumbling over the sentences as though she was seeing them for the first time. Fortunately, her quirky charm and self-deprecating asides made up for the stiltedness of her reading. Carpenter described the vacant lot she’s populated with chickens, turkeys, rabbits, and pigs as well as vegetables in her downtrodden Oakland neighborhood. Carpenter—with her with her angular glasses, crafty clothes, and loopy comments—gave the impression that if she weren’t a writer and urban farmer, she’d be your favorite kooky art teacher.

Next up was novelist Michelle Wildgen, whose new book But Not For Long has a foodie hook as well. The book covers a few days in the life of friends living in a sustainable foods co-op in Madison during a black-out. Though it's a work of fiction, its descriptions of life and cheesemaking rang true to the Wisconsin crowd, resulting in knowing nods and smiles as Wildgen read a scene about a visit to a cheesemaker’s cheese cave. Wildgen read with assurance, her warm, friendly voice perfectly inhabiting the scene.

Phil Hanrahan on Favre
Thursday evening was interesting timing for a reading from a book called Life After Favre—Wisconsin fans were still feeling numb from the iconic Minnesota Viking quarterback’s whiplashing of his former Green Bay Packers on the mortifying national stage of Monday Night Football. But if you showed up in the main room at the Orpheum looking to vent vicariously through Milwaukee-raised author Phil Hanrahan, you were in the wrong place--delightfully so. Hanrahan is agnostic on the question of whether management or the player is to blame for our abandonment issues, and the book Hanrahan produced while spending the 2008 season--year 1 A.F.--with the Packers is richer and more complex than its requisite green-and-gold cover might imply.

Yes, the crowd heard about Skeeter and Hooter, alpha Packer fans at Ruby’s Roadhouse in Bloomer, Wisconsin, a watering hole 80 miles from the Minnesota border where football loyalties are split and “Minny jokes” fly from the Packer end of the bar: “What’s the difference between a cheesehead and a dickhead? The St. Croix River.” But Hanrahan, who was educated at Middlebury, Duke, and Oxford and once taught at Marquette, went on to a passage that uses Plato’s essential concept of thymos--spirited resistance in the face of disrespect--to explain Brett Favre’s emotions and motivations in leaving Green Bay. This being Madison, an audience member put up an arm to opine that Favre has lately appeared to be battling inner conflict over his departure and thus may be evolving into more a Homeric than Platonic figure, more out of Greek poetry than philosophy. Hanrahan nodded and parried briefly with the questioner, apologizing for “letting my inner egghead out of its cage.” No apology necessary: When it comes to the still-burgeoning hype surrounding Favre, we can use every egghead we can get.

Still more Wisconsin-bred goodness
Lorrie Moore and Michael Perry differ in their approach to the written word--Moore is a much-admired author of literary fiction, while Perry writes sparkling memoirs about salt-of-the-earth folks like truck drivers and chicken farmers. But they share the ability to tap its poetic qualities at just the right moment. When this happens, words are wings, whisking you from one emotional plane to the next.

It was fitting, then, that Moore and Perry's Thursday-night appearance at the Orpheum was peppered with tales about birds, airplanes, and other things with wings.

A flannel-clad Perry surprised the packed theater with two original poems, including "Grand Canyon With Believers," which poked fun at creationists, then did an about-face with the the double-sided observation, "That bird, just a bird, is nonetheless your brother."

Within the course of the vignette that followed, an epic battle with a zit segued into a book tour run-in with John Edwards at an airport.

"The contrast between our respective perkiness was astounding," he read with a smirk before launching into an airplane-themed excerpt from his new book, Coop.

After lamenting about having caught an airplane-borne virus during the first leg of her book tour, Moore shared an excerpt from her new novel, A Gate At The Stairs, in which Tassie, a college student in Madison-esque town, humorously observes Wisconsin's flora, fauna and roadkill as she travels down the highway with her farmer father.

Though Moore, a native of upstate New York, often writes stories featuring East Coasters who feel like aliens in the earnest, bucolic Midwest, she inhabited the skin of a Wisconsinite convincingly, narrating Tassie's memory of a flock of songbirds with a morose twist: "Oriented toward the moon, [they] mistook a red-lit cell phone tower for their destination and we watched as they all shredded themselves in the tower's steel supports."

Even this sort of death is preferable to the one your soul dies on book tour, Moore hinted, at least if you're "Dan Brown roadkill," as literary fiction writers are accustomed to finding themselves. But hey, it's a pretty glamorous kind of roadkill to be.