Voices from the Heart of the Land: Rural Stories that Inspire Community

Author’s Note

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND 188 AUTHOR’S NOTE Ichose to gather the voices of Arena Township for several reasons. First, the township continues to be predominantly rural and significantly less affected than many areas in Wisconsin by the encroachments of urban sprawl, the second-home market, and the tourist industry. In the southern two-thirds of Wisconsin, “rural” has traditionally meant “farming,” and so the great majority of my voices are from farm families. I often had the opportunity to visit with descendants of the families that had taken part in the European settlement period in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Second, my family and I live and farm in Wyoming Township, immediately west of Arena Township.As such,I had developed long friendships and working relationships with several of the elders and was familiar with the wonderful reputations of some of the other residents. In short, the people of Arena Township and their sense of community inspired me, and I believed their collective story was important to share with the world.These good neighbors were patient enough to sit down with me and record their narratives long before I had anything solid to offer in return. RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY 189 It was my hope from the outset of the project that if I could interview the Arena folks who knew me well, and if I could make the interview experience enjoyable and meaningful , then they might assist me to meet their friends and neighbors. It was my hope that they would bestow a confidence that my work was sincere and would be used toward an honest and meaningful purpose. As it turned out, this is indeed the way things turned out, and I found myself welcomed into the homes of otherwise complete strangers who openly and honestly were willing and grateful to share their stories. Sometimes my Arena friends would accompany me to interview someone I was meeting for the first time, and for this gracious assistance and belief in me I am most grateful. I started each interview by letting the narrator know my purpose: I wanted to write a book about community, the land, character, and the values that they hold dear. I asked each to simply tell their stories of growing up, working, raising a family, and being a part of their community. Most first interviews lasted about an hour and-a-half, with a range of recorded material of about 45 minutes to nearly two hours.I let each narrator know that I would take the material home, listen to it, transcribe it on paper, and send it back to them to read. I told them I would set up a second interview once they had a chance to review their narration, and we could go over the document together to add any additional material and make any corrections or deletions they requested. Once this process was complete, I asked each narrator to sign a release form that acknowledged they were giving me permission to use the material they had offered in my book; I provided each with a copy of the release form and their edited narrative. It should be noted that I could not type when I started this project. It was my plan to hire professional transcription assistance for the entire project, but I soon realized that VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND 190 this would be an expensive proposition. So I began to learn to type and ended up doing almost all of the transcription and editing of the 34 cassette tapes myself, working the play-forward-rewind-pause buttons on the cassette tape with my left hand and typing a sentence at a time. About a year after I had completed the transcription work and the first draft of the book manuscript, I heard someone talking about a “transcription machine.” I inquired as to what it is and only then realized that I could have done the transcription work in a fraction of the time — if only I had known that there was a machine already invented that would have allowed me to manipulate the cassette player with my knees so that my fingers didn’t ever have to leave the keyboard! Once the transcriptions were completed, I began the long, slow task of choosing and grouping the material around topics and themes I thought...