Cities such as Paris, Prague and New York have been immortalized by writers and the stories set there. Should Milwaukee be known as a writer’s town, too? Thanks to its affordability, book stores, and public and private commitment to the arts, it hosts an increasing number of talented writers.
“I don’t know why more people don’t think of Milwaukee as a literary capital,” says Liam Callanan, a novelist and UW-Milwaukee English professor. “One of the reasons Hemingway went to Paris in the ’20s was because it was cheap and an arts-focused capital of culture,” Callanan notes. “Milwaukee is chock full of artists, with a commitment to arts so evident they built a monument to it with the Calatrava. And Milwaukee is definitely affordable.”
The town’s writers include Shorewood resident Lauren Fox, praised by The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani as “an immensely gifted writer” for her debut novel, Still Life with Husband. C.J. Hribal, a Marquette University English professor whose most recent novel is The Company Car, has won prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. The work of Benjamin Percy, another professor at Marquette, was featured in the 2006 volume of Best American Short Stories. Bill Gagliani’s novel Wolf’s Trap was nominated for a Stoker Award. Milwaukee transplant Shauna Singh Baldwin’s first novel, What the Body Remembers, beat out Salman Rushdie and others for the Commonwealth Prize for Canada and the Caribbean; her second novel, The Tiger Claw, was short-listed for the Giller Prize. The list goes on.
The Wisconsin Book Festival, long a Madison-exclusive event, launched a Milwaukee component to enthusiastic response. And when the Shepherd Express and Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops co-sponsored a short story writing contest, they were flooded with submissions, despite a $10 entry fee.
“I told my staff 25 entries would be a pretty good turnout,” says Shepherd Publisher Louis Fortis. “We had 234, and a lot of the stories were great.”
