MWPH BOOKS

BIO NOTE: KARL GARTUNG

Karl Gartung was born in Liberal, Kansas in 1947. He received a B.A. from Hastings College, in Nebraska, in 1969. He married artist Anne Kingsbury f in 1970.

In 1976 he was hired to run a small press bookstore (Boox, Inc.) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Gartung says this was the beginning of his serious apprenticeship to contemporary literature. In 1970 he was a co-founder, with Karl Young and Anne Kingsbury, of Woodland Pattern Book Center. At Woodland Pattern he has been involved in the planning and presentation of hundreds of poetry readings, music performances, art and book exhibits. He felt that these activities were as centrally artistic as writing or publishing could have been. This was (and is) really his education. Keenly aware of his late start, he would say "we can’t share what we know, so we must share what we are learning." He came to realize that something like Woodland Pattern was an improbable and tenuous possibility, depending as it did on luck, energy and ardent management by Anne. When some desired activity was impossible to accomplish on a very tight budget, he would console himself, thinking that if it were not for good management, it would be impossible to sustain Woodland Pattern as an alternative.

To that end, in order to provide regular benefits and the income necessary to see the Book Center through inevitable funding droughts, he took a day job as a truck driver at what has become UPS Cartage Services. He calls this his deal with the devil. He thought it would leave time and energy for writing and book center work, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. An hourly worker can, when all is said and done, be considered a disposable form of property. After several layoffs, Gartung helped organize his workplace into the Teamsters Union in 1993, and has served as a union steward from the ratification of the first contract to the present. This necessary though difficult work became a major distraction in his life as a writer, though it finally ensured his job and the jobs of his fellow drivers and restored some dignity. He credits the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a venerable organization for union reform, with much of the credit for this success. Representing others on the job became a new and satisfying field of work, leading inevitably to more writing.

BIO-NOTE: TOM MONTAG (2)

An Iowan by birth, from Wisconsin by choice, and middlewestern to his core, poet and essayist Tom Montag wonders how, in the face of the farmer's silence, any farm-boy ever comes to speech, much less to poetry. Montag's sensibility was marked early on by the directness of experience in his farm childhood and by the longing which comes of watching the far horizon.

Montag is the author of Curlew: Home (2001), a memoir about growing up on that Iowa farm, as well as Kissing Poetry's Sister (2002), essays about writing and being a writer. Among his more than twenty books and chapbooks of poetry are Middle Ground (1982), The Sweet Bite of Morning (2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (2004). With Peter Pizzino, Montag recently co-authored Peter's Story: Growing Up in Milwaukee's Third Ward during the 1920s & 1930s (2007).

Montag's Curlew: Home memoir contains vivid prose about his Iowa farm childhood during the 1950s, interspersed with a journal of the trip he made back to his hometown in October, 2000. While Curlew: Home tells his story and that of his family, Montag says it also represents the lives of many other middlewestern farm people who have no one to speak for them. Donna Seaman at Booklist magazine called it a "companionable and reverent memoir" and said "Montag's prose is thoughtful and unhurried, opening out into moments of beauty and wry humor, echoing in its quiet rhythms and low-key observations the gentle roll of the rich midwestern landscape he loves.... He celebrates the country's most overlooked and underestimated region and movingly portrays his hardworking and loving parents." Curlew: Home was read on Iowa Public Radio in 2002.

Of the poems in The Big Book of Ben Zen, Montag has observed that "this Ben fellow teaches us to see in new ways and to consider possibilities we hadn't counted upon. Ben would be a little monk with an ancient wisdom who wanders the modern world and says things that sound like poems." In an interview at slow reads he noted that "the middlewestern farmer and the Buddhist monk would find much to talk of and I think each would understand the other's silences."

Denise Hill of newpages.com wrote of the poems in The Sweet Bite of Morning: "I was able to visualize a literal blossoming, as the poems moved from observations of snow shifting across roadways and fields, to the warmth of spring, the emergence of new life, and on to the intense clear blue sky heat of summer. Montag provides an incredible journey across time and season that any true Midwesterner can actually feel in their skin.... Montag's strength in this work is his brevity and concise use of language, with a special ability to create strong and lasting images through his choice of details."

Writing of Kissing Poetry's Sister, Jessica Powers at newpages.com noted: "Tom Montag has a gentle style.... You get the sense as you read this that here is a wise man - not a perfect man, but a good man - and he is letting us into his house and his life for a few moments each day so we can experience the richness that is his.... I look forward to reading whatever Montag writes in the future."

Montag's current long-term prose project, Vagabond In the Middle, is an exploration of what makes us middlewestern. Of this investigation Montag says: "Who are we and what are the middlewestern emblems common across our area, I want to ask. Landscape, environment, people, and history all factor into the definition of the middlewest, all shape what we've become. In coming to understanding, I expect to mix interview and personal experience, history and geology, essay and journal entry and meditation. I'll walk, I'll drive, I'll listen, I'll read, I'll listen some more, I'll watch. Always I will be looking for the true stories that tell us what is it that makes us who we are. I will burrow into the life of several middlewestern communities to find the stuff each is made of; I will record that, then compare the communities to determine what they hold in common, what they keep as difference. There will necessarily be a peeling back of the surface sheen of the landscape to see what pulses beneath."

In the 1970s, Montag edited and published Margins: A Review of Little Magazines and Small Press Books. Along with Mary Montag, he edited and published the Wisconsin Poets Calendar for 1982, 1983, and 1984.

Montag was one of two runners-up for Wisconsin Poet Laureate in 2004. His poem "Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain" has been permanently incorporated into the design of the Midwest Express Convention Center in Milwaukee. The author is a member of the Board of Directors at the Wisconsin Center for the Book.

Montag is regularly a Visiting Writer at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, teaching Creative Nonfiction to students in the school's writing major.

Montag retired from a career in the printing industry in 2002. He and Mary, his wife of more than thirty years, have lived in Fairwater, Wisconsin, since 1976. The couple has two daughters, Jenifer and Jessica, of whom they are immensely proud.

BIO-NOTE: PETER PIZZINO & TOM MONTAG

For many years, Peter Pizzino - who still lives in the Milwaukee area - operated Baywood Tailors in Shorewood and Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, establishing a reputation as a fine tailor and employing some hundreds of people in custom sewing and alterations. He closed his store and retired for health reasons in 1999.

Tom Montag is a Wisconsin poet and essayist and the author of a memoir about growing up on an Iowa farm, Curlew: Home (2001), a collection of poems called The Big Book of Ben Zen (2004), the recently released collection of essays, The Idea of the Local (2007), and several other books.

Peter's Story is Pizzino's first publication and Montag's first collaboration of this sort. The authors' partnership was established in late 2003, and came to fruition after four years of working together on the true story of Pizzino's early years.

BIO-NOTE: MARK VINZ

Mark Vinz was born in Rugby, North Dakota, grew up in Minneapolis and the Kansas City area, attended the Universities of Kansas and New Mexico, and since 1968 has taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he also served as the first coordinator of the university's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and he is the author of six chapbook collections of poems as well as the full length collections Climbing the Stairs, Mixed Blessings, Late Night Calls (prose poems), Minnesota Gothic, and Affinities (the last two in collaboration with photographer Wayne Gudmundson). He edited the poetry journal Dacotah Territory during the 70s and since then has been editor for Dacotah Territory Press, which has published a number of short collections by writers in the region. He is also the co-editor of several anthologies, including Common Ground: A Gathering of Poems on Rural Life; Beyond Borders: New Writing from Manitoba, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, and the Dakotas; Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest; Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest; The Party Train: An Anthology of North American Prose Poetry; and The Talking of Hands: Unpublished Writing by New Rivers Press Authors.

A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, he has also won the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices competition, Milkweed Editions’ "Seeing Double" competition, six Pen Syndicated Fiction awards, and three Minnesota Book Awards. In the spring of 2005, Larry Woiwode named him an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota.

BIO-NOTE: PHIL HEY

Phil Hey has been writing and teaching at Briar Cliff University since 1969, and he is now a professor in the English/Writing Department. He received a B.A. in English at Monmouth College in 1964 and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1966. He also studied creative writing under Gwendolyn Brooks at the University of Wisconsin. In 1992 he won Briar Cliff's Duff Award for the Pursuit of Excellence, and in 1998 he was given the Literacy Award for college English teachers by the Iowa Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts.

Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, Phil is the author of six collections of poetry including In Plain Sight, Reorganizing the Stars, Plain Label Poems, A Change of Clothes, Ballads & Songs. His poem "Route 39 south of Pittsville" won a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine. He has also received a dozen commissions for poems, most recently from the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque.

As an editor, Phil has co-edited the Iowa Poets series with Zachary Pearce of Pterodactyl Press, including Michael Carey's The Noise the Earth Makes , Ann Struthers' Stoneboat, and James Hearst's posthumous A Country Man. He also edits for Celestial Light Press and The Briar Cliff Review, Briar Cliff's national prize-winning magazine of writing and art. He assisted Michael Carey in the editing of Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets (Loess Hills Books).

BIO-NOTE: TOM MONTAG

Tom Montag of Fairwater, Wisconsin, is a middlewestern poet and essayist who has published numerous books of prose and poetry since 1972. His most recent work includes: Curlew: Home (memoir, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (essays about writing and being a writer, 2002), The Sweet Bite of Morning (poems, 2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (poems, 2004). Middle Ground (1982) serves as his collected earlier poems. The Sweet Bite of Morning is from Montag's on-going project, "Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook." Montag is preparing two more collections of essays for publication, The Idea of the Local and Personal Papers and he continues to work at his long-term exploration of the middlewest, "Vagabond In the Middle." He has taught courses in Advanced Composition and Creative Nonfiction for Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Along with Paul Zimmer, he was a featured writer at Lakeland's Great Lakes Writers Program on November, 2004. In February, 2005, he was a Tom McGrath Visiting Writer at Minnesota State University in Moorhead. In October, 2005, Montag delivered a presentation about his Vagabond project at the Marshall Festival - Celebration of Rural Writers and Rural Writing in Marshall, Minnesota. He will be reading at the Beloit Public Library on April 22 and at the University of Wisconsin-Stout on April 27. He will also read at the Wisconsin Writer's Conference in Baraboo this June and will make a presentation there on "Lorine's Toolbox: A Working Poet Examines Niedecker's Poetics." In September he will present "Writing Poetry Successfully: 99 Propositions" for the annual convention of the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association. Christine Townsend's interview with Montag, conducted in October, 2003, can be read here; Peter Stephens interview with him in July, 2004, can be read here.