Leaving home all over again

The following is my final column for the Reedsburg Independent, published in the paper dated February 28, 2013. To the left is my very first column. 

By the time you read this, I will be gone. Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but it’s true; my last day at the Reedsburg Independent was Tuesday, February 26, after spending four and a half years working here.

My tenure has spanned an incredible time in Reedsburg’s history. Three weeks after I graduated from college and started at the Indy as an intern, the city was overcome when the Baraboo River jumped its banks and inundated the downtown area with water. I was at my parents’ house at the time on North Webb Avenue, and we watched the water creep up through the backyard toward the house as it had many times before. This time was different; the water also crept down North Webb Avenue and eventually surrounded the house. My parents were lucky as their’s was not included in the 20 homes and businesses condemned following the flood.

Reedsburg’s landscape has changed since then but its resolve hasn’t. The city has transformed in ways I never could have imagined growing up here. As a reporter, I watched as an empty corner of Nishan Park blossomed into a beautiful Veterans Memorial with the hardwork and dedication of dozens of community groups. I watched the downtown area transform with new businesses, new apartments, and new ideas. And I’ve had the privilege of watching my parents achieve their dream of starting up and running their own business, Jimmy’s To-Go, on North Webb Avenue.  

The past nearly five years has been an incredible time in my own history as well. Not long after I started at the Indy, I went on a blind date with my college roommate’s older brother, John, and we were married four years later in a beautiful ceremony in the Assembly Chambers of the Wisconsin State Capitol, the dome of which I see every morning from the bedroom in the house we now own.

So many events are contained in that one run-on sentence, so many things I never thought I would do. I never pictured myself as a homeowner or one-half of a marriage, two things I’ve become in the last year. For that matter, I never thought I would go to college; I’ve been a writer since I first put pencil to paper at age five, and at first I questioned whether writers needed college. My first mentor, Brian Pittman, a teacher at Reedsburg Area High School, convinced me they did, changing the trajectory of my life forever.

In college, knowing that people who are good readers tend to be good writers, I pursued and earned an English degree. At the time, I thought I would never return to Wisconsin, but three and a half years of living in Iowa convinced me otherwise.
After spending a year in high school writing for the Student Voice, I thought I would never again work for a newspaper. Deadlines were stifling, but in college, I learned to thrive on them. After graduation, I jumped at the opportunity to intern at my hometown newspaper. Four and a half years later, I’m still pushing to meet another deadline.

It is an understatement to say working at the Indy has given me a totally different perspective on my hometown. Despite having spent 16 years living here before leaving for college, I had no idea that so much was going on here. Artists, actors, elected representatives, farmers, business owners, movers and shakers, musicians, teachers, pillars of the community, local folks, parents, kids, students, hundreds of people over the last four and a half years have invited me into their lives, their goings-on, and let me tell their stories. I’ve enjoyed seeing how the wheels turn in Reedsburg and getting to know so many people with a passion for this community.

Now I’m feel like I’m leaving home all over again. I am sad to leave the Reedsburg Independent office and my coworkers Jeff, Carla, Karen and Dale. Collectively they have taught me that no person is an island; without the support of one another, we all will fail. They have led by example and demonstrated what it means to be dedicated, and their service to the Reedsburg area is unparalleled. But they do it all without bravado because as friends and neighbors to our readers, their investment in the community is more than just selling ads, writing stories, or answering the telephone. They are helping make Reedsburg a better place to live.

I could not have stumbled upon a better mentor than Jeff Seering. I have very early memories of seeing him at school events, and I can’t say that I knew specifically who he was, just that he was “that guy with the camera who is always at everything.” Now having been on the other side of the page, I can tell you that Jeff really is that guy who is always at everything, more than most of our readers could ever know or wholly appreciate. He has taught me everything I know about a job that I love, and by example, he has taught me so much about what it means to be a good person. When I walked into this office for the first time in May 2008, I had no journalism experience except for my high school newspaper and a stint at a magazine in college. I’ve still never taken a journalism class, but Jeff has always treated my ideas and contributions with respect. No longer being the beneficiary of his wisdom and guidance has been the hardest part of leaving this job.

I’ve decided to take a full-time position at MadCat, a store I’ve worked at part-time for over three years. We’re locally owned and operate three locations in Madison, and we are famous for our wealth of knowledge on pet nutrition and behavior. I am extremely proud of the work we do in the rescue community, and I look forward to dedicating more of my time to the relentless service we give to Madisonians and their pets. I am sad to leave the Indy and Reedsburg, but I am excited for the future and the new opportunities it holds.

Thoughts on Instagram

Scooter, a photo by meagan.wedgewood on Flickr.

I was sampling photography podcasts recently when one of them (can’t remember which one, sorry) made a very good point: if the inventors of square format cameras like the Diana or the Holga could see the technology we have today, like DSLRs, digital photography, and cameras attached to telephones that fit in our pockets, they would be spinning in their graves to know the biggest fad right now is Instagram. The point of all advances in photographic history, they argued, was that inventors were desperately trying to recreate the image they saw before them, in essence, provide the most accurate copy of a real-life scene possible. It’s the very meaning of the word capture - they were trying to take the scene before them, photograph it, and preserve it on film forever. Everything hipsters like about Instagram - the square format, the retro processing effects, those were features of camera from the 1960s and 1970s because that was the technology. That was the best that photographers could do with what they had. The podcast argued it would blow minds to know that we have so much technology now, the ability to faithfully recreate in a photograph a scene before us, and yet we choose to recreate the effect of cameras from 40-50 years ago.

Does that make your head spin? It’s something I like thinking about. It’s like a trend to write chiseling on stone tablets instead of using a computer, as I am now. Maybe not that extreme, but you get my drift.

It’s not something I personally focus on, but I wonder sometimes what makes a Flickr image get more views than others. This is how my thoughts on Instagram started. In skimming through my photostream, photos taken with my DSLR usually average somewhere in 40-50 views, and there are some anomalies, like my dunk tank picture that’s currently at 336 views. Can’t understand that one. But the Instagram photos I’ve posted are in the single digits. I’m no Flickr expert by far. I love posting my photos in a place online that actually makes them look good, and I love making contacts and stalking their work once in awhile, making comments, seeing what they’re working on, getting ideas. I love the community aspect of the site, especially being able to follow Madison photographers. I am by no means dedicated to getting more hits or comments or even making an effort to get more eyes on my photographs, but I do wonder - what makes a person look at that little thumbnail, click for a bigger view, and be counted?

The people I follow on Flickr are far more talented than I am, and for the most part they follow me back and leave nice comments once in awhile. Do they automatically dismiss the Instagram photos? It’s not like getting those effects takes any kind of skill; anyone can spend $100 on a Diana kit at your local Urban Outfitters. Anyone can download Instagram or Hipstamatic or any of the dozens of photo editing and sharing apps out there. I suppose it takes some intuition to decide which filter to use, and of course, composition should always be taken into consideration. But in the vast majority of cases, it’s not like those effects were achieve in post-processing, whether in a dark room or even Photoshop. It could easily be assumed that it does not take a whole lot of skill to produce a neat looking photograph in Instagram. What I’m asking is, is this a good or a bad thing?

I’m interested in becoming better at this art, but my progress is sort of floating along, taking a picture here and there, looking at other people’s work and learning more about my camera. I’m not very serious, and I’m not very social, so as a result, I don’t talk to a whole lot of other photographers. I think it would be easy to assume that a highly skilled person who has spent a lot of time learning their craft might turn down their nose at a new fad like Instagram. But who knows?

Not one of us is born with a camera in our hand. Not all of us take classes or study or learn anything more about our cameras other than the PSD button (Push Here Dummy). I probably would never have picked up a DSLR if it wasn’t for my job, and I probably would never have learned more about my DSLR if I wasn’t interested in being better at my job. My point - we all come into this hobby, art, profession, wherever you’re at - we all come into photography in different ways.

And that’s how I see Instagram. I assume that the vast majority of Instagrammers will take photos, share on Facebook, and move on to the next big thing as it comes along. But maybe there are a small few who will start with Instagram and want to learn more.

But even if they don’t - is that a bad thing either? If a photographer or any other kind of artist isn’t learning or progressing, is that a bad thing? If the ultimate goal of all photographers, of all artists, is to produce great work, at the end of the day the only thing that matters is the image we come up with. Right? Or is it something more?

I had no idea when I started this that a few simple thoughts on Instagram would turn into a soul-searching, philosophical rumination on my own work and my own progression, so I digress. But it’s something I wonder about - is it enough to pick up a camera once in awhile, take a few photos I’m happy with, post them to my website and blog and be done with it? Is it enough to interact with other photographers through a few digital comments once every couple of weeks? I am constantly thinking about that question - is it enough? I have been told more than once that I worry too much. But I feel that without knowing yourself, there can be no self-reflection, and without self-reflection, there can be no progress.

United

United, a photo by meagan.wedgewood on Flickr.

Last June, This American Life had a story on the situation here in Wisconsin, focusing mainly on the contentious state senator recalls. The reporter, Ben Calhoun, said something that I thought rang particularly true:

"Wisconsin is a big rural state, but it is not conservative; its politics are in the middle, leaning a little toward the left. Organized labor has a long history in the state, and Wisconsin has gone Democratic in every presidential election since Reagan. Bottom line - it's moderate - polite and civil and moderate. That right there is really the break that Scott Walker has made. His plan, whether you love it or you hate it, was a big move away from the middle. He's pulled a pretty moderate state dramatically toward an extreme, and done something they don't do in Wisconsin - he's picked a fight. And he's forced a lot of people who don't like to fight to choose sides anyway."

After my husband and I voted, heading up to the Capitol Square seemed like the natural thing to do as we were only a few blocks away. We reached it right as the polls were closing.

I haven't spent a lot of time at the Capitol during political events since I hung out with the protestors in February 2011. On that day, it felt like everyone was there for one purpose; though there were thousands of people in the Capitol, they were moving together as one unit, all part of the same vehicle using their momentum to head toward the same destination.

On Election Night, the scene was muddled, contradictory, like a cell without a nucleus. There were singers and people with signs, of course. I saw a lot of people I recognized as students and journalists. But there were others who looked and behaved like they were there from out of town, just there for the show. I saw contentious arguments. I watched as an angry Recall supporter jumped in front of a local news camera, interrupting the reporter who was probably on his 18th hour of being awake and just trying to do his job. It was a stark and shocking contrast from the feeling a year and a half ago, to say the least.

Most of all I could feel the moment when the crowd deflated, when it the air changed from hopeful optimism that the initial results were only from a few small rural precincts to the realization that this was happening. This was really happening. It was like air being let out of a balloon as people quieted down, peeled off, and drifted away.

 No matter how you feel about the political situation, hopefully there's some empathy with the people who were disappointed that night, people who had worked hard for change only to be brought solidly back to square one in just one day.

"What happens now?" I kept asking my husband on our walk home that night. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a steep cliff, knowing that as a population we were going to have to move forward somehow but not sure how or to where we were going. I felt proud of my state, of all the people, Democratic and Republican, who had worked hard and fought for what they believed in, no matter what that was. But at the same time, I felt sad for everyone, not just the "losers," but everyone, as Ben Calhoun pointed out, who had to pick a side, who had the comfortable grey area pulled out from under them. In the past year and a half, my Wisconsin has become unrecognizable with blistering letters to the editor, people screaming at each other, people dumping beer on lawmaker's heads or tearing up recall petitions. Wisconsin has been and has felt divided, and as much as I love this state, that's not the Wisconsin I want to live in.

The photo above is misleading. I love the image of the bright Capitol building in the background, the center of our state government, bright and shining like the City on the Hill. The Overpass Light Brigade set up on the lawn, their signs declaring "The People United." The photo is idyllic, hopeful. But I can't help but feel less united as a state than ever before.

More photos from Election Night can be seen over on my Flickr.

Inked

I have several quotes taped to my computer at home, all of them centering around the same theme:

"Never confuse movement with action." -- Hemingway
"It's not like you don't have a choice because you do - you can either type or kill yourself." -- Anne Lamott
"Write first, edit later." -- (Probably Seth Godin)

and finally

"Inspiration is for amateurs." -- Chuck Close

It's easy to find excuses not to write. Cats nosing their way onto my lap, a house that desperately needs to be cleaned, the potato soup that's calling my name from the kitchen cabinet. I'm out of coffee, I need to go to the bathroom, my phone is ringing somewhere in the other room. And all of those are just within the last five minutes. Not even to mention the digital distractions of Facebook, Twitter, local news sites, emails from six years ago I thought Google had deleted when I deleted them but now I'm glad I found them because they're infinitely fascinating. Then I decide I can't write if I'm hungry, and I for sure can't write without a third cup of coffee, so I head to the kitchen, where I'm interrupted by a cat, then another cat, then my soup exploding all over the microwave that of course needs to be cleaned RIGHT NOW otherwise said soup will cement itself for all eternity. (Seriously, all of this just happened to me.) As I'm cleaning that, I notice how dirty the kitchen floor is, the living room floor, the counters, the sink full of dishes, all the cat toys everywhere, and by then it's too late.

Four hours later, the house is clean but the page is blank. I crack open a cold one, run a bubble bath, congratulate myself on the clean house and promise I'll do better tomorrow on the whole writing thing. That's how it goes, right?

The hardest thing to communicate to my interns at the Indy is that writing is not some magical thing that beret-ed and bearded people do in coffee shops between crosswords. Writing is work, hard work, most often accomplished without a stroke of genius and most often accomplished by inserting butt into chair and staying there for a few hours, churning out crap work, typing when you don't feel like it. "I get to my best work in the fourth paragraph," I told my last intern, Brian, and I swear his eyes got wider. Good thing I didn't mention that sometimes it's the fourth page. "But I know that 95% of people will quit if they don't churn out a brilliant first line or a brilliant first paragraph, and if I can push through those first three paragraphs, I'll be better than that 95% of people who quit."

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case." -- Chuck Close

My editor, Jeff, often says to me on sunshiney Thursday afternoons at the office, "I don't feel like working today." But you know what? No matter how many times he's said that, I can't recall a one that he's actually gotten up and left, no matter how tempting it might seem when looking out the window.

Writing crap is never a waste of time, although it might feel like it when the house is a mess and you haven't yet brushed your teeth today. If you want to write, you have to write crap to get to the good stuff. No writing exercise is a substitute for your neurons waking up, yawning and stretching, packing a Thermos and briefcase and heading out onto those little neural pathways in your brain that make our actions into habits. You can't write if you don't practice, and you can't practice if you don't write. This is the hardest thing for writers to overcome.

I got my tattoo in a shitty, hole-in-the-wall tattoo place off Canal Street in New Orleans. I waited two hours for a tat that took 10 minutes, and I didn't feel like explaining myself to anyone sitting around me or to the tattoo jerks who kept repeating the same four words over and over again, with an emphasis on "amateurs." The meaning isn't immediately obvious, I guess. I get it. But I needed the phrase on more than a Post-It note stuck to my monitor. I need to be able to see it when I'm getting distracted, when I feel like I'm going in the wrong direction, when the thought creeps into my head that I could be doing other, more constructive things right now. I needed it five years ago when I was struggling to write my thesis, amassing research that went nowhere, afraid on those late late nights that my thoughts and opinions had no meaning to anyone but me. I still feel that way on a daily basis. No one is forcing me to keep going. But I know I have something to say, and my tattoo reminds me that the only way I'm going to get to say it is if I sit down and get to work.

WWI Gear

WWI Gear, a photo by meagan.porter on Flickr.

I am a notorious hater of museums, unless they involve dinosaur bones, then I'm all in. We went to dozens of them in New York, and now with in-laws who live in Washington D.C., there never seems to be a shortage of them to visit. I've probably been to every famous American museum you could think of by default, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful, it's just the idea of walking around and looking at stuff isn't really in my top ten. And don't even get me started on art.

I'm a tactile person. I have to physically handle things to be able to experience them. If I can't turn something over in my hands, hold it closer to my face to examine it, smell it, look at it from different angles, it might as well be a picture on a TV screen to me. It's not real until I can touch it, experience it. And museums, with all their artifacts behind glass and guarded, don't seem real to me.

The new exhibit at the Pioneer Log Village in Reedsburg is not like that. I visited recently with my intern Brian to do a preview article on the hard work volunteers have put into the exhibit, which was about to premiere the next weekend at Reedsburg's Loyalty Day. Maybe it was the fact that the Barb, the Historical Society President, didn't mind opening the cases for us so I could get a better photo without reflecting off the glass. Maybe it was because it was just the three of us, with no other guests elbowing in on our experience. Or maybe it was because these were all items connected to my home town, to people I knew, histories for which I had some kind of reference, not just facts and dates on a page like in history class.

Sure, there are some items behind glass. But there are many items in the new exhibit (and the Village itself) that you can actually touch, like old military uniforms donated by local residents. Barb knew the story behind almost every item, could reference who donated it and where it came from. And I was blown away by how many items there were, different items the volunteers had been rescuing from dark and cobwebby boxes over the course of a few months.

Brian and I spent longer than we probably should have at the exhibit. We were supposed to be working on a story, taking photos, talking to Barb and gathering information. We shouldn't have stayed there longer than a half hour or so to avoid imposing on her time and ours. But I just couldn't help it. Every time I turned around, there was something more to look at, something I hadn't seen before, something my photographer brain wanted to capture from every conceivable angle. To say that the exhibit is well put together is an understatement; not only is it extremely professional but it encourages the kind of exploration (read: time-wasting) that kept pulling me back in that day. And who could ask for a better host than Barb, who volunteers so much of her free-time revitalizing the Log Village and gave us so much information and access that day that I just couldn't tear myself away.

The exhibit is only a small part of the larger Reedsburg Historical Society Log Village. The grounds are beautiful, and each cabin and building is full of artifacts from Reedsburg and the surrounding area. I spent a great afternoon there with my dad a few years ago, exploring each of the buildings. The site is one of Wisconsin's hidden gems and well-worth the trip if you ever have the chance.

Vacancy

Vacancy, a photo by meagan.porter on Flickr.

Someone once told me that oil paint never dries, and though I'm not a fan of art, it's one of those weird facts that's always stuck with me. I saw a lot of Van Gogh when I lived in New York, and I was fascinated by the realization that his paintings are actually three dimensional, swoops and peaks and valleys of oil paint, all still drying, all in a state of flux for hundreds of years and for hundreds of years to come. I thought about that as I was working on this photo; the next time I see this sign, it will have decayed a little more, and a little more the next time; until someone removes and discards it or it finally crumbles into the banks of the Wisconsin River, it will always be a work in regress, slowly undoing itself.

I've long been fascinated by anything falling into disrepair, the patinas of metal, the peeling of paint. I wonder about the backstory; for someone minorly obsessed with maintenance and "taking care of things," it is amazing to me when anything is neglected for so long, so long that it is actually showing its neglect, and how sometimes that neglect can produce beautiful results.

The morning I finally stopped to capture this, the fog was rolling off the Wisconsin River in an early March that hasn't quite yet figured out who it is or what it's doing with itself season-wise. The sign jutted out of the trees and fog, menacing, like a prop in a haunted house. And unlike the past three years I've passed by this sign, I stopped immediately, knowing it was now or never as soon that mess of trees would start to bud out with green. The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of my car was a much newer, much nicer "No Trespassing" sign that I made sure to stay on the right side of. And swarms, swarms of little black bugs circling each other.

Photos of signs are difficult to make interesting, especially when you have a sign that's interesting all by itself. I've taken quite a few of them and have my favorites, but every one is a new challenge. For this one in particular, I knew I couldn't take a straight-on photo from my five foot tall perspective and call it a day. I wanted to capture that fog, that desolation, some of the road in the background. And I knew I wanted the photo to be filled with that tree, like those brambles go on forever. It wasn't until I got closer that I realized the "NO" in "NO VACANCY" was scratched out, and that became my focus.

Those trees have started to bud out now with the warm weather and the photo above just wouldn't be the same. I had a small window of time until Mother Nature ruined my shot until October or so, and I'm glad I took it.

Cook Shanty

Cook Shanty, a photo by meagan.porter on Flickr.

Took an unsuccessful trip out to the Dells earlier this week as part of my long-term project, Strange Landscapes. I drove around for a long while and the photo above ended up being the only shot I took during the hour or so I was there. The sky was that steely, early Wisconsin spring grey; I kept looking at it through my office window all day thinking it was going to make a perfect backdrop for my photo excursion. But when I got there I drove around without inspiration, and the light faded, and I left.

I think a cloud was hanging over me while I was there. I kept thinking about the body that was pulled from the river a couple weeks ago. I'm sure it was not the first and unfortunately not the last. The body had yet to be identified and as I was driving around, I kept wondering how long it must have been in the water for it to have become so hard to recognize. A gloom settled over me, and it made it difficult to be receptive to inspiration, no matter how hard I thought I was looking.

Structural things in the Dells don't really change. I still knew my way around even though it had been a year or so since I'd spent any time there. Most of the time the roads won't move on you. What struck me was how different things on either side of the road looked wherever I went. Several scenes I photographed just last year were no longer there, such as Storybook Gardens (the no trespassing signs are still there but the rest is just a scorched piece of earth) and Riverview Park (surrounded by a fake castle wall, I have heard this is set to become some kind of zoo). The Dells is constantly changing, resetting the stage for the next show, and who can say whether this is a good or bad thing.

I've never eaten at Paul Bunyan's though I've heard a lot about it and known several people who've worked there at one time or another. I turned onto Highway 13 from Cty H and was immediately assailed by several signs encouraging me to "Turn Here! Turn Here! Turn Here!" so I did. To the left was a lot for tour buses; directly ahead was an overgrown mini-golf course and to the right was Paul Bunyan himself, accompanied by a sign that urged me to fill out a job application. The acres of parking lot were completely empty except for me and Paul. I snapped a few quick photos and left.

There are a little more than two months now before the tourist season starts. With daylight saving, I will soon have more daylight to work with so we'll see what happens.