Exploring Nature, History and Writing: A Conversation with Milwaukee Author Martha Bergland

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Photo by Jim Uhrinak

Martha Bergland

Martha Bergland

Martha Bergland has authored two novels and two biographies, among other published writings. A Farm Under a Lake and Idle Curiosity were well-received fiction. The former went on to be published in England, Germany and Sweden. The Bird Man of Koshkonong: The Life of Naturalist Thure Kumlien, was named by the Wisconsin Library Association as Best Work of Nonfictionfor 2021 and the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Board of Curators Book of Merit for that year. She also co-wrote, with Paul G. Hayes, Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham, Early Chronicler of Plants, Rocks, Rivers and All Things Wisconsin, which won the Milwaukee County Historical Society’s Gambrinus Prize.

Bergland has lived in a Glendale home surrounded by woods for nearly 40 years. I conversed with her recently upon her work and influences, and the relevance of collective history and touchstone places. 

You have written both fiction and nonfiction books about people who interact deeply with the natural world. When did you begin relating to nature? 

The nature I first knew as a child was on the farm in central Illinois where I grew up, much of it pointed out by our dad. Because we lived on such flat land with so much sky, the nature that meant most to me was small things like bugs and butterflies in my dad’s hand—things he brought to our attention and then told us their names. It was important to Dad that we call things by their right names. Though he didn’t use Latin names, he seemed to know a lot of common names of plants and butterflies and birds. And he didn’t let us be squeamish about touching or handling things. 

Once, when I was five or six, I went barefooted into our very dark front yard to visit—I guess—my favorite soft maple tree. I remember standing with my hand on the tree’s rough bark and my bare feet on its roots. But the roots began to slowly move. I remember thinking that I must be standing on a snake or snakes, but that the snakes felt warm and not slimy. It wasn’t a horrible thing to be standing on snakes. But I didn’t stand there long! I ran into the house and told Dad what happened. He said they must have been bull snakes, and that they wouldn’t hurt me. Dad was always calm and observant and didn’t like us to overreact to mice or infestations of boxelder bugs, for instance. Nature was inside that old farmhouse with us. It wasn’t just outside.

But our whole family out on that farm also craved “scenery”—the more recognizably beautiful aspects of the natural world—wonderful trees, streams, lakes, hills, wildflowers and birds. At home, “nature” was in fence rows, along drainage ditches, at the edge of the yard or field. We wanted grander stuff than crows and corn stalks and bull snakes. When we traveled to New England and Louisiana to see our grandparents, we visited parks on the road. I liked seeing Louisiana pines and New England ponds and woods. 

What other influences do you recall?

Also important to me were the books we read as children about the natural world, and the lives of naturalists. We had a beautifully illustrated book by British author Neave Parker, called The Tall Green House. It’s about a great white oak in an English field, and all the plants and animals that live in and around it. I still have that book. Dad loved it too, and read it to us over and over, pointing out the little hidden creatures. 

When I was older, there were other books in our home that I read, by writers like Roy Chapman Andrews and Paul de Kruiff, about searches—for snow leopards and the Northwest Passage and vaccines and cures for diseases. And The Willow Whistle, by Cornelia Meigs, about a girl whose family settled on the prairie and the Indian people they came to know. Many of these books were from my father’s generation. 

My mother was artistic, smart and very observant, and an aspiring painter. She made sure we had a new set of the World Book Encyclopedia. And my dad was educated in the methods of science, having earned a degree in psychology from Princeton. And there was a wonderful orange set of biographies in the little one-room library in Weldon, Illinois—many about scientists. Some featured women. That might have had something to do, remotely, with my wanting to write biography.

When did you start imagining that you might become a writer? What and who encouraged you to pursue that path?

The most important influence on my wanting to write was that every night one or the other of my parents read to us before we went to bed. I’m the oldest of five. Mom read us wonderful children’s books she thought we needed and that were appropriate. One was a very beautiful little children’s book about fall color in trees. Dad read things he loved from his childhood—A Child’s Garden of Verses, Jabberwocky and Swiss Family Robinson, among them. He had a lovely speaking voice and was later a reader in our church. Dad had an ear for language and took delight in rhymes and funny stuff, in making music with the spoken word. 

The sound of the English language was important to both my parents. My Southern mother delighted in the stories told by her Louisiana kinfolks and in peculiar “country” expressions. She collected and used colorful talk—from the farm around us and from her youth. My sister, Brita Bergland, who is a poet, says the same thing: that Mom and Dad reading aloud to us so much and so well is the most important reason she is a writer. Not that anyone thought about any of us becoming writers, but what our parents shared with us early on was their love for, and delight in, the English language.

When I was about 12, I wrote a silly poem and read it aloud to my little brothers, who asked me to read it again. The seed was germinating. I didn’t think about being a writer—I had no idea what writers did or how they lived—but I thought about playing with words. It just evolved. And then I had very fine teachers at my high school, St. Mary’s Academy in Nauvoo, Illinois. The teachers and other girls encouraged my writing. Along with other girls there who read poetry and novels, I just wanted to mess around with the beauties of the English language. It gave me so much pleasure. 

One of my first decent poems in my twenties essentially expressed Dad’s calm words as he once pointed out to my little brother the air sac and heart of a trout, which one of my brothers had caught in a Vermont pond.

You taught writing at the college level, including at Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) for more than 20 years. How did teaching affect your writing and vice versa?

I loved going to work. I think I had the best job in the state because the students had such interesting though, in many cases, difficult lives. The faculty I worked with were the best. And the class-and-step system, and union representation, meant we could focus on our classes and not worry about our status or pay. Also, through Local 212, I applied for and received two sabbaticals for time off to finish novels.

I often read to my students. I asked students to read their own writing aloud in small groups. And learning to become a stronger and better teacher gave me nerve and confidence as a writer.

You’ve written books about two of Wisconsin’s most significant early naturalists. How and why did you choose to spend years researching and writing about each of them?

Many of my experiences and interests came together to “make me” write those two biographies. Since childhood, everything I know has shown me that stories of lives are vastly important. What could be more valuable for any human being than to know many, many life stories—of “important” people as well as everyone else. It’s what interested me as an English major. As a writing teacher it’s what I tried to get students to tell. It’s what I did as a short story writer and novelist and writer of essays. I don’t think I’ve ever been good at thinking about anything but life stories. Narrative and description—that’s pretty much it for my skill set. I am completely incompetent at writing arguments and summaries. I can analyze a text only if there’s a human voice in it, and a sequence. I love old letters in ink on musty paper. I have a cache of family documents I have “practiced” on for many years—extracting family stories from old letters and other documents and typing them up to send to far-flung family.

The trail that led me to write about Increase Lapham began with an article I read about him—written by Paul Hayes—in the Milwaukee Public Museum’s magazine, Lore. I clipped the article and made a file folder for Increase, because I wanted to know more about him. A few years later, when Bruce Murphy was editor of Milwaukee Magazine, he asked me to write a historical article. Right away, before we got off the phone, I said I would do an article on Lapham. I used his wonderful 1850 letters to his wife, when he was surveying at Aztalan—the prehistoric Indian village in Lake Mills, Wisconsin--to tell a bit of his story. When the article was finished, I knew I wasn’t finished with Lapham. I loved the man and his letters. Later, I knew I needed Paul Hayes in order to complete a book. I wouldn’t have been able to finish it without him as a co-author. I began the book in 2009 and it was published in 2014.

I loved learning about Wisconsin in the 1840s and ‘50s, and I loved writing about a naturalist—though that’s too small a category for Increase Lapham. Then I went looking for another early Wisconsin naturalist. I got his name by chance from the late Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). At her birthday celebration at Woodland Pattern in 2015, poets Tom Montag and Karl Gartung discussed one of her poems that I didn’t know—about a naturalist called Thure Kumlien (pronounced TOO-ray, koom-LEAN). I went home and read the poem and googled him. All that weekend, I sat in a corner of the couch reading and researching this guy I’d never heard of two days before. By the end of that weekend, I knew he was mine. 

It’s nuts, but even more than Lapham, I knew Kumlien was for me. A lot of people could have written biographies of Lapham. But Thure Kumlien was lying quietly dead--waiting for me. Not only because of his being a Swede and my name and great-grandfather being Swedish. My father, like Kumlien, was an educated, upper-class young man who happily married “beneath him,” and he and my mother moved far from their homes to farm in the Midwest. Like Thure and Christina. The similarities to my parents’ histories didn’t occur to me until about six months into the project. It made me dizzy when I realized it.

Both Increase Lapham and Thure Kumlien appreciated the Indian mounds that were still widespread in the 1800s. What do you think led each to be more respectful of these legacies than others of their era? 

I can’t really answer that question, but I can guess. Both Lapham and Kumlien had seen and heard about burial mounds before they respectively arrived in Wisconsin. Lapham had lived in Portsmouth, Ohio, and other places in that state with great sites of mounds. But many people had seen the mounds and had not valued them. Lapham knew from his wide reading, and probably from reading the first book on the mounds (written by Squire and Davis and published by the Smithsonian), as much as any white man in Wisconsin knew about those mounds. 

When Lapham arrived in Milwaukee in 1836 and saw the mounds in the path of proposed streets he was surveying, he must have felt a complex set of emotions. He recognized the ancient sites that even he had only a dim knowledge of their meaning, yet he was the guy hired to lay out the grid of a city right on top of these ancient sites. That’s what Byron Kilbourn brought him here to do—that, and to survey for a proposed canal. So, one response to the anguish Lapham must have felt at participating in destruction of the mounds was to write his greatest work, Antiquities of Wisconsin. He was more respectful of the mounds than most white settlers and entrepreneurs because he was more educated about Indian mounds—and so much else—than were most people. And his Quaker parents brought him up to be respectful of all people. He knew that they were burial mounds and, like most sensitive people on the planet, he knew to respect those places, those memorials. 

Lapham was in a terrible spot when he arrived and saw all the mounds. He was 25 years old and working for Byron Kilbourn, who was hell bent on building a city and getting rich. He was hired to survey the streets in a grid and that grid cut through many mounds. Lapham did what he was hired to do but he also surveyed the mounds and recorded what he was helping to destroy. He went on to record mounds all over the southern and eastern parts of Wisconsin and wrote his great work in 1850—in part, I am speculating, because of that early experience in Milwaukee when he had to watch the mounds destroyed for streets and buildings.

What about Kumlien?

Kumlien, who came from Sweden in 1843, knew of the great burial mounds near Uppsala. Though he didn’t write about this, he must have recognized the mounds as burial sites. He built his family’s cabin on 40 acres along an Indian trail above Lake Koshkonong. Just north of this farm was a forty-acre parcel owned by a friend. There were 27 mounds on that site. When his friend died in an accident, Kumlien bought that parcel and he and his descendants and subsequent owners all preserved those mounds to this day. 

There is a mindset that doesn’t care about the history of the mounds. But there are also people who understand and value the lives of those who’ve gone before.

Both Lapham and Kumlien were well-educated men—very differently educated—but their educations taught them to value far more than the “almighty dollar.” They placed value on the past, what the past meant to the living, what could be learned from the past.

How might knowing more about early chronicles of our natural world help us relate to our world today?

If we don’t preserve pieces of the past, our world will become, in effect, strip malls, subdivisions, developments and roadways. And those generally last only about 40 years before they are torn down and something else replaces them. Human life and animal and plant life will go extinct in the built environment. The past goes extinct. Think of how hard it is to even imagine a freeway exit just weeks after that exit and the entire lay of the land are hauled away and altered forever. Think of this happening over and over and over. If we can’t look at pieces of the world we live in and see remnants of the past—its trees and rivers, its birds and bugs and mammals, its plant communities and its ceremonial and sacred sites—we have cut ourselves off from our history and our real-life sources of connection. 

Especially now in this fast-changing, often frightening world, we need to see ourselves in a context that existed for hundreds or thousands of years. More than ever, we need to be able to stand on, say, the bank of the Milwaukee River at the Kletzsch Park dam, with a hand on a tree that was young at the time of Increase Lapham. We need to be able to stand on the original river bluff of what was called Indian Prairie and look around and see where the early people’s ceremonial mounds were, their burial mounds, the garden beds, the spring outlet. This is not “other people’s history.” This is our history, the story of all of us, our human story. 

As we learn about the people who were here on the Milwaukee River, say 300 to 400 years ago, we learn what resourceful people they were and we learn that they used those resources wisely. Within about 20 miles of the Kletzsch Park dam, they fished for salmon and sturgeon. They harvested, processed and stored wild rice. They gathered bark for their lodges. They had garden beds. They harvested and processed acorns and so much more. Until 1850 there were remnants of their ceremonial and burial mounds where Kletzsch Park is today. Increase Lapham surveyed them.

We need to imagine, in an educated way, how to live now and into the future. For thousands of years people have made their best way forward by understanding the ways of the people who’ve gone before them. It’s a sense of the physical interconnectedness of all forms of life that is so important—because we are losing it so fast. We are only aware of our electronic connections. Yet we are still people who can cultivate the imagination to understand the history of the land around us and a happy future for the land and for us on it. My husband, naturalist Jim Uhrinak, has a wonderful way of saying this. He talks about having enough knowledge of a place as it is so that he can step onto it and enter into its past. That ability, like Jim’s and that of other naturalists—to imagine the past and the future while rooted in the knowledge of the now—is what will see us through.