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Myth Making: Door County’s New Poet Laureate

Estella Lauter, Door County’s new Poet Laureate, sees herself as “a facilitator and consultant, not a star. Collaboration is what I’m all about.”

One of the three scholarly works published by Estella Lauter, now Professor Emirita of the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh as well as Door County’s new poet laureate, was entitled Women As Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Arts by Twentieth-Century Women. The collection of essays was inspired by Lauter’s experience beginning in 1972 teaching an interdisciplinary senior seminar at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, a study of women’s search for their place in culture. “Women often turned back to Greek myths,” she explained, “older stories, to see where they fit.”

After her retirement in 2004 Lauter expected that she would continue her work as a scholar, “but almost immediately I was diverted by a poetry workshop at Bjorklunden with Ellen Kort,” she explained. “Within the first year Henry Timm organized a series of events for poetry month at the Sister Bay Library, I met poets, joined the Wallace Group of writers, and went to a poetry retreat at St. Joseph’s.” She found that her focus had shifted to poetry. And in her verse, she added, “I do tend to see the natural world and relationships among people in terms of the mythic stories I know.”

Lauter’s multiple perspective as scholar, teacher and poet made her a good candidate for the position as Door County Poet Laureate. Her book publications include Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re Visions of Jungian Thought, a collection of essays by five scholars. She has two chapbooks of poetry in print, Pressing a Life Together By Hand (2007) and The Essential Rudder: North Channel Poems (2009), and a third, Transfiguration: Re-imagining Remedios Varo that will be issued late this summer. Presently she is at work on a fourth.

Lauter’s poetry has appeared in the Peninsula Pulse, Free Verse, Verse Wisconsin, and Wisconsin People and Ideas; she has won awards from the Pulse, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, Wisconsin Regional Writers Association, and first place through The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation; and she has appeared in poetry exhibitions, the Newport Poetry Trail, The Meadows, and Brew Coffeehouse.

In addition, Lauter is active in the poetry community of Door County, belonging to two ongoing workshops, participating in both the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Door County (UUFDC) sponsored Dickinson Readings and Poetry Sunday, and organizing the Poets’ Retreat at Bjorklunden this past year.

“There are probably ten other people in the county who could do this,” she said of her present two-year stint as poet laureate, adding, “We have the next twenty years mapped out, if we all just live long enough! An embarrassment of riches!”

She insists that her praise of the Peninsula’s poetry community is not hyperbole. She and her husband Chuck Lauter have attended the famed New Jersey Dodge Poetry Festival that features nationally known poets, including Richard Blanco who read at President Barak Obama’s inauguration. After comparing the work of Door County poets with those writing on the national scene, she said, “I am proud of our poets! We have really good work here.”

Of her role as Door County Poet Laureate she notes, “I am not expecting this to be about me but I am putting my energy into getting others to do what they do best.” She sees herself as “a facilitator and consultant, not a star. Collaboration is what I’m all about.” She hopes to energize, “to light some fires!”

While some of her plans are still tentative, she has already begun to make her mark, first by reading an inaugural poem to the Door County Board on March 26. She organized the UUFDC Poetry Sunday on April 28 featuring eleven poets reading their work. On April 30 she read from her work at Novel Ideas Bookstore in Baileys Harbor. And she organized a May 12 – 17 poetry workshop in Door County led by poet Robin Chapman.

She is considering a publishing collective, one that might not only produce books, but “projects that get poetry off the bookshelf, like the Poetry Trail at Newport State Park.” She also hopes to become part of the current Write On, Door County! initiative. And she would like to work with teachers and classes in area schools.

As a professor she taught many students who were pursuing careers in education. “Making connections is one of the things I like to do,” she said, “between research and people.” While she’d enjoy working directly with students, she also feels that serving as a consultant would be satisfying as well.

Other connections that intrigue her are those that involve pairing established older poets with younger emerging writers, or linking writers with visual artists and musicians.

As a way of helping poets share their work more effectively as readers before live audiences, she’d like to facilitate workshops in poetry performance, too.

But at heart she is primarily a poet, inspired by the natural beauty of the woodland in Door County that she and her husband (retired Dean of Students at Lawrence University) bought in 1971, a second home to their two now-adult children, Nick and Kristin. However, she has not completely put aside her professorial mantel. “I’m still asked to do reviews of manuscripts,” she noted, “or published books, but I don’t seek out those things.”

As Door County Poet Laureate Lauter brings with her not only a knowledge of mythmaking, but plans eventually to publish a collection of her poetry, a body of work that will document a thoughtful life well lived.