Wisconsin Life

>> Well, I'm a Badger originally. I was born in Richland Center. And like a lot of people from Wisconsin, my family moved away but I found a way to crawl back. By the way, I think that would be an amazing series for you all to do is all the people who've returned to Wisconsin. Because there are a lot of us. And why? Why did we do that? So I came back here. My husband does prairie restoration. I live down by Janesville. I live on a little farm. And there was an opportunity to be artist in residence here at the U-dub and I had some curiosity about how drawing and writing could be used for purposes other than making a neat picture or writing a creative story. But to try to fill that longing that most people have to make something. And I needed an opportunity to work with students longer than I had had prior, which is usually workshops that would last a weekend or a week. So I taught for one semester, and I was hooked. I mean, hooked. And then I was able to teach a following semester about hemispheric differences of the brain, and you know, creative work. And then after that, I was offered a position. So my hire was a very usual hire for the U-dub 'cause it's a join hire between the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the art department. I'm kinda-- Nobody knows what I am exactly. I don't even know what I am. I always think I'm like a pigmy goat from the petting zoo that runs through the room and everyone feels refreshed after I run through. I mean, I don't know what I am exactly. My official title, I didn't pick it, my official title is I'm Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Creativity. My husband calls me Professor Long Title, 'cause it is kind of Professor Long Title. But I'm mainly interested in how this stuff works in people of all ages, from the littlest littlest, you know. I'm looking to understand what this thing that we call the arts, which actually existed before the word 'the arts'. This urge that people have, and you can see it with kids in particular, to make pictures, to tell stories, to make sculptures, to do everything that we call the arts. A three-year-old does all of it. And not only does a three-year-old do all of it, anyone who is attached to that three-year-old will also do all those things. So you can have like, you know, a really grumpy grandpa who's not that much fun, but if he's really crazy about his grandson suddenly you'll see him drawing with him, telling stories, dancing, doing all this stuff. So I'm thinking that this thing we call the arts is the original language, and I think it's the language that language is based on. It's how we teach people, it's how we learn. And I think it has a biological function, I think it has something to do with our health. And I'm also really curious about people who've given up a long time ago on drawing, why they still want to? Why do they-- Ask anybody, do you wish you could draw? It's like, yeah! Do you wish you could sing? Yeah! Do you wish you could, you know, like make sculptures or do this stuff? Yes. And I say, why? And would you-- Say I was going to give you that power, but the rule was, you can never profit from it. Would you take that power? Most people'd be, yeah! So what are they-- Why do people want to do it? And it seem to never die, that urge. Also, the sadness that people have about not being able to, and the terror. I'll be up at lectures upstairs and there'll be these scientists, I mean, you know, bacteriologists and physicists and all these people, and they're do these white board drawings where there are like these complicated formulas, and they suddenly have to draw a person. You just see them like totally flip out. I'm like, dude! You just like wrote this formula for how a contagion works. Just draw! It's real easy. And I give 'em very simple drawing instructions and it's basically based on what kids do. Big head, little body, arms. It's better than Stickman if you can just put one little shape in the middle, and then you're off and running. Stickman will just-- They can't do anything. But if you just put a shape for a body you'll get somewhere. Yeah, like how old do you have to be to make a bad drawing. I think it's an interesting question, because if it's a four-year-old nobody says, that's a bad drawing, right? If it's a 40-year-old, that same drawing, is that a bad drawing? You know, for me there aren't any bad drawings. There just aren't. It's not like there aren't any bad drawings, there are drawings that get on my nerves. But it's really interesting that if the criteria of a good drawing is how much does it look like the thing that you're trying to draw, one way you can get right out of that is to be a cartoonist. 'Cause if it's a cartoon, it never has to look like the thing. I mean, it has to sorta like like the thing you're trying to draw. But in cartooning it's actually a liability to do really, really representational drawing. No, and also what if it turns out, and there actually have been some fascinating studies. What if it turns out it really does have a powerful health-giving effect that you can measure, that's biological. There's was a study that was done at George Washington University where they studied three groups of people who did-- They had a control group who didn't do anything. Then another group that sang for, it was over a period of three years. They sang and they had a teacher who knew how to teach them to sing. Another same thing, a control group and a group that wrote together. And then another one, control group and a group that drew together. This was over the course of three years. The average age of the people in the study was 80. So one of the things that the researcher who started the study he said what he thought he might find was that there would be like some general well being that came from it. What he didn't expect to find was there would actually be-- Well, there were 30 fewer doctor visits over on average over the course of those three years. People fell less. They fell down less. Whether they were drawing, writing or their eyes didn't degenerate as rapidly as the people who were in the control group. They found all these health benefits that were completely unexpected from doing these things that we think of as decoration or frosting. And so I think that if that can be shown that doing these activities actually brings you physical health, then it becomes a whole other game. Then people might be interested. If they're going to walk with their little pedometers. You know if it turns out that drawing a picture in the morning and just throwing it away, you don't have to keep it, can actually help you that-- I think that would be interesting. I am so lucky. I get to work with-- So for instance on just this day, on the day of Saturday Science, I work with kids and their parents because even though it's drawing jam for kids I'm really interested in what the parents are doing and how they're interacting. And I see my students. This afternoon I teach a writing class that's open to the community and it's a free writing class. I teach it the first Saturday of every month. So I work with who knows who shows up then. A lot of times it's educators. That's when I first started teaching, I taught a lot educators. But you have to register through the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery and I never know who's going show up. So that's a wide range. Then I work with freshman to PhD students at the University. So I get to-it's like every person I could find to work I'm interested in working with them. Because it's common to all of us. I'm especially interested in, yeah, really interested kids. And this one thing that we're doing of taking my PhD students who are about to write their dissertations and are getting all you know tense about it. We're working with kids as co-researchers. So even in this experiment that we did today, wondering about wondering, you can you run into questions that do this thing the way that I explain it is it's like when somebody asks a question that's a good question. Like that's a good question. How it makes you feel. I'm interested in what's happening to the body when you're going "oh yeah" like the one student who was out there, a volunteer said-- I asked her what she wondered about. And she said the thing about she knew the universe was expanding but she wondered what it was expanding into? That was a good question, you know. Or how do-- There's a drawing up there. It's a four-and-a-half year old. How do we hear, smell and see? Or wondering about-- I love asking little kids because little kids-- Adults often laugh at a four year old when they talk about, a four-year-old talks about when I was little. And we go haha. But the fact of the matter is that person's been on earth for four years okay. There was a time when they were way littler and they can remember it. And so I love asking little kids what they think babies wonder about. So this thing of babies wondering how to walk. Or I think they wonder about how they're gonna talk. And also people don't expect kids to have such dynamic vocabularies. Sometimes they'll be-- I mean I had a five-year-old today explain to me what a hypothesis was. A hypothesis is a prediction. And her whole thing was wanting to conduct an experiment about wondering. And she connected the babies-- her experiment would be why do babies wonder about-- wondering about how they're going to learn how to walk. And why is there so much traffic? And she was connecting those. And she was going to an experiment. And her language was unbelievable. I mean you wouldn't believe it unless you were actually writing it down. Molly, I think. Was that Molly? Five? >> I remember that, and I remember her mom, too, drawing the traffic. >> Yeah, yeah, and so what you saw there so here's a mom and a kid interacting. I'm interacting with them. These two ideas like babies walking in traffic, a lot of traffic. They are connected somehow in a way that it's not direct but it feels nice in your head. Feels good. So that's the stuff like who gets to do that? Like who gets to do that as their job, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that that's one thing that I'm very curious about studying. So there's three things that seem to always happen when people participate in this. One is they realize, they often will remark how long it's been since they've just drawn a picture or something like this. And they always-- They seem kinda sad. They talk about how time gets really strange. Like time just speeds by. It has a whole different velocity. I always compared it to the time when we're falling in love. You know when you're with somebody that you're falling in love with how the time just goes

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It doesn't respond normally, or that you don't respond normally to the time. And then the last one is this feeling really, really good afterwards. And it's a good-- It's a feeling of well-being. It's not like a feeling good in the mind. Like I physically feel good after doing this. So I'm curious about that step and the cool part is as a cartoonist and a writer I don't have the capacity to study that in a deep, deep academic way or a scientific way. But I have students who can. And that is what this appointment has brought me. It's like the stuff I've always wanted to study but I don't have the capacity. It's like oh you get students who are really brilliant who can do that for you. >> And they seem to really dig it. >> Yeah, yeah they do. You know it's interesting. They're so many of these students who are doing-- So it's curriculum and instruction. So it's philosophy of education. They do a whole bunch of work about working with kids but they never get to work with kids. And also this thing with when you're in graduate studies you get more and more and more into just one corner of your field. That's not how stuff really works. I mean even if you're studying something very intently it is always still part of the world somehow. So one of the things that we're really, or I'm interested in the lab is to get people to be able to write academic papers without them being so jargon-y. I think they can still be rigorous and accurate and important without having to-- Because I don't, I think what we're reading when we're reading academic papers is reading somebody all up in their head. And so when they're asked, when my students are asked to-- It's really fun we have these writing sessions so everybody's from a different discipline you know mathematician and gender and women's studies and theory of education and media studies. So they'll be writing about their own research and we read out loud. I don't let them do any preamble so there's no explanation of what they've read. And somehow it always seems to inform what you're working on. So that's something I'm really interested in is like experimenting with this so that when the time comes to write that dissertation they don't feel alone and they don't feel like, you know. It has to be all up in their head. Well-- >> Before you started working for the university. >> Yeah. Well, I was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin and I've been a Badger, hard core Badger my whole life, even though I grew up in Seattle. And I started out as a cartoonist. I had a comic strip that ran in weekly papers for 30 years. So it ran in the Isthmus here, that was one of my papers. And I also write a lot of books. I think my 21st book is coming out in two weeks. So I make a lot of books. But the main thing for me was I met a teacher when I was in college, Marilyn Frasca, who asked me one question, What is an image? That was the question. I was 19, and I that I had no idea that that question would shape my entire life. So you know in a quick way to talk about what an image is it's anything that's contained in this thing we call the arts. Or if you see a little kid that is attached to an object like a bunny or a blanket, I always think of that as the first artwork 'cause it really is a blanket. It also contains something about whether that kid's going to be able to sleep or not that night. How? How did the kid put that in there so much so that-- I gave a convocation speech for some freshman, and I know that all these freshmen are coming to the U-dub, I know some of them are bringing their blankies. I mean they'll come up and tell me after I gave a talk. They'll say, well I still have that. And I said you'll probably have it for the rest of your life if you don't lose it. I've had like-- I remember this old woman after I gave a talk. She had a little Sucrets can. You know it was like this little old tin can, tin box and she opened it to show what was left of her blankie. So you know it's kinda wild. This is pre-verbal. Kids do this before they can speak they're able to create a character. So I'm I've just been interested, and I'd say that contains an image, so have been interested in this question, what is an image? And my teacher was, I was so lucky because she told me that once I understood that I'd find that whether I was making a painting or writing a story or writing a play, I had a play that ran in New York for a really long time. She said, it's identical. The feeling is identical. Once you understand that, what's at the core. And so for me I do I have-- I was a commentator for NPR. I mean, I've done all these like wild things but they felt exactly the same. And so now I realized that I could get to the point where I could show people how to do that. I can show'em how. It's very exciting 'cause-- I always wanted to be a teacher I never thought I could. And then it just sorta happened because I'm chasing this one little question, what is an image? I really love working with, again any age group, but I was very interested in working with older people, with seniors. And I think it was a genealogy group in Janesville that I was working with. And so I talked to them about how we tell the story of our lives. And when people tell the story of their lives it usually sounds like an obituary. You know, you start with where you were born and what happened and then you died. But I can also ask people to tell the story of their lives with cars. Ten different cars. We started talking to this group and this one woman in my-- I gave them the word "kitchens." This one elderly woman in my writing class told the story of her life using the word kitchens just with countertops. And she was in her 90s. So in the beginning there weren't countertops in kitchens. You know, that's why you had side boards. You had these other things. And she just talked about each additional thing. How she got a bigger and bigger and bigger countertop. And the way she ended it is now she has the longest countertop of anyone she knows. And like everyone who comes into her kitchen is jealous. Like I would have never thought. Telling the story of your life with countertops, you know. So that's the other thing I get from working with people is stuff I would just never have thought of. Like the discussion between the father and a son about zombies, and do zombies wear pants? And so the way the son said it is, "Do zombies wear pants?" And the father said, yes. Are zombies concerned with their state of undress? And they're beautiful. Those two things are so beautiful. Are zombies concerned with their state of undress? And then another kid actually drew-- I didn't have an illustration for that so he helped me draw it and we did it together and put pants on zombie, and then he says they're not pants. It's just that the zombie's half purple. Looks like pants in the drawing, but they're not pants. Just makes me feel so good, I don't know why. Yeah. It's funny 'cause one of the little girls-- You know, kids are very self conscious about being laughed at. There's a four-year-old and when I came down and looked at her she had this round sort of drawing with different colors. I said, tell me about your drawing. She goes, this is the whole world. It's the whole world. I said, alright. And and she was goes it's not finished yet. So her mom says, what else does the world need? Her daughter goes, red. And like, I started laughing. And the kid goes, what? And I said, well, I'm not laughing 'cause it's funny. I'm laughing 'cause it's beautiful. And we talked about the difference between laughing at somebody because they said something funny or that feeling when you see something beautiful that just makes you laugh. What else does the world need? Red.

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>> Oh, how terrific is that? So you do this with kids once a month? >> The first the first Saturday of every month. The whole building down here turns into this big science station. It's usually packed. And so kids are free to go from place to place to place and there's no formal start. I mean it starts it starts at

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00 and it ends at noon. But it's just, as you saw, it's just come as come as they do. Sometimes there's nobody. And sometimes it's just packed. >> Do you always ask this wonder question? >> It's a different question every month. Usually I align it with whatever the main question is or what the topic is. So one time, one month the topic was weather. So our question-- We always have a question. So our question was, what is a storm? And have you ever been caught in a storm? And the older kids told the most interesting stories about the first time they were in a storm by themselves. 'Cause that's like a big deal, you know. And then we've asked, if you had to picture spring as a goddess or a monster or some kinda creature, what would it look like? What's school going to look like in a hundred years? That was one. If animals played sports, what kinds of sports would they play and who would referee? This is when you get like sweet little girl, five-years-old, in pink, you know. Most pink little girl in the world and she draws this picture. There's a audience and then there's some rabbits. And I said, okay tell me about your drawing. And she goes, well, the rabbits are, they're competing to see how many times they can jump but the audience, they're wolves and they're thinking about eating the rabbits. And I'm like, see I knew it. I'm like, I knew these it! I knew these girls are just as wild as anyone else. I said, so they're having two different experiences. She said, yeah. I just didn't see it coming at all, man.

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>> She didn't do a follow-up, did she? >> No. >> Schools made of wolves. >> She would have. Sometimes parents are so appalled too. They're just scared by their kids doing something like that 'cause they want, you know-- It's so in-inner-interesting watching the parents and kids interact. >> I heard you telling one of the parents something about how Picasso had tried imitating the style of kids? >> Yeah. Picasso talks about, you know, there's a famous quote of his that by the time he was, you know, twenty he could he could render like Rafael but it took him his whole life time to learn how to draw like a child. And at the time that Picasso and Matisse and all these other guys, Paul Clay, there was a lot of interest in children's drawings and the drawing's of people of the insane. People who were schizophrenics but what-- And people started to collect those things. But what made Picasso different was he wasn't so much interested in the drawing. He was interested in how kids drew and how they move their hands. So when I heard that I found a video of Picasso drawing and I found a video of a 6-year-old drawing. And they were-- And it turned out that they just the shapes matched beautifully. I and I just inter cut them. And it was amazing. I mean it makes you gasp when you watch them inter cut because he really did figure out how to move this way. And it's so identical to how kids move. And then how at about adolescence or a little bit before that you'll watch that change. There will be no-- You'll watch it go from the super confident movement to being really scared. And the trick is that's where most people stop. And those are the people that I like the most, people that have no drawing experience because they're drawing, their child drawing is still preserved. They just stopped right there. And so they think they can't draw and if I can just get them to stand what they're doing they're drawings are beautiful. >> And once these drawing are done and you've taken the notes on what the kids have said, what happens to them? >> Well, we preserve them. We keep them in the lab. And we actually use them in our research, so for instance say that I have a question. So often times when my students and I are sitting down to work, we'll think of a question that pertains to our research. So one that I had was, how do I convince people to draw for no other reason than just the drawing? And I have a brilliant student, Ebony Flowers, who's working with me. She's the academic person and she'll say, okay, now write that on an index card, your question. And we have these notebooks full of kids' drawings and she says, just flip through until you find a picture that matches that question. And it always works. There's always some drawing that when you put that question next to it gives you some insight. So we use them for that. We also use them to have-- We ask students to copy them because then you find out how hard it is to copy a kid's drawing, and the reason is because you've lost that gesture that they have. So to try to draw a line that's as free as a kid's line on purpose is really tough. And so we've only been doing this a year, and what I'm really happy about is we have enough material now to actually suggest a class. That's my class called Drawbridge. Where we're working with PhD students and little kids as co-researchers. 'Cause now I have enough to support this idea that it might be valuable. So we're still experimenting. But it's really fun.

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It's really fun.