Screenshot
Our Spring and Summer Teaching Press interns have been hard at work on our newest project, Home Again and Again: Recollections, Stories, Guideposts, by Dr. Ann Gentry Recine and Louis Recine.
In Home Again and Again: Recollections, Stories, Guideposts, Dr. Ann Recine invites readers into her chaotic life-well-lived to explore the concept of “home” and how it’s shaped her into the accomplished woman she is today. Continue reading
Did you know northeast Wisconsin was once one of the preeminent business communities in the United States?
It’s true. In the 1980s and 90s, companies like Krueger International, Fort Howard Paper Company, Schneider National and Schreiber Foods were leaders in innovation, creative solutions and cutting-edge technology, unlike anyone else in the U.S. In this re-issue of The Golden Age of Brown County Enterprise, author Phil Hauck outlines these historic and successful business strategies through interviews with local industry leaders, showcasing the incredible success of businesses whose names are part of the bedrock of the community.
Phil Hauck was a former writer for the Wall Street Journal who spent thirty years facilitating CEO Groups for The Executive Committee and its successor, Vistage, as well as a Senior Marketing/Sales Executive group.
The Teaching Press was saddened to learn of Phil’s passing in late 2023, and we’re proud to be reissuing his book. In keeping with the family’s wishes, proceeds will support student learning at The Teaching Press— a small and innovative Green Bay business in its own right, for which Phil Hauck raised funding, awareness, and support.
This unique collection of oral histories and photographs captures the storytellers, storytelling, folktales, and personal journeys of the earliest Hmong residents in Northeastern Wisconsin.
Click here to order.
“A shadow in the dark corner of the room moved. Slowly a woman walked toward us. Tears streamed down her face. She pointed toward me and spoke to May Lee in Hmong. This is what she said.
‘Please give me the words to speak my grief.’”
When Sandra Shackelford, an artist and documentarian, heard these words while working for Northeast Wisconsin Technical College’s High Risk Family Support Program, she knew she was about to begin a decades-long project to preserve the words of the Hmong people living in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Forced to flee from their homes in Laos to escape a secret holocaust, the Hmong people have found refuge in America for the past fifty years. This compendium presents readers with gripping and compelling perspectives told first-hand and reveals the hardships faced by this forgotten community. Many voyaged through jungles without much food, water, or shelter. Many lost family members along the way, some even had to be left behind to protect those running.
Transcribed from Hmong into English, these raw testimonies will tell the stories of the grief Hmong refugees faced when first arriving in America and the courage they had to persevere through it.
A Portrait of Grief and Courage: Hmong Oral Histories and Folktales, documented by Sandra Shackelford, translated by Mai Lee Lor, transcribed by Ma Lee Lor. Published by Mimi & Rupert Books, an imprint of The Teaching Press at UW-Green Bay, a student-managed publisher and printing house. With a preface by Pao Lor, author of Modern Jungles: A Hmong Refugee’s Childhood Story of Survival. 181 pages. For more information, contact the Press Director.
You are invited to explore the world of unintended consequences of producing carbonless paper and its underlying chemistry of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) on the health of the Fox River and Lower Green Bay. Using an interactive timeline, this book by author Greg Neuschafer offers an overview of 70-years of PCBs impacting the river, from initial chemistry development through discovery of its toxicity, to societal mobilization, to the dozens of complex court cases, to government and contractor intervention including actual physical cleanup, and finally environmental recovery. Each page of this timeline and resource book folds out, and features QR codes (scannable with a smart phone) that direct you to selected original references in the electronic searchable library to begin your journey.
This book is on sale now. Email The Teaching Press to purchase your copies!
Learn more about how our team created this book here.
Sandra Shackelford in 2023.
Sandra Shackelford has long been a proponent of racial justice. When her art professor chastised a student due to his race, she boycotted the university. When Emmett Till was lynched, she was among the crowds calling for justice. When Shackelford’s newspaper and recreation center were burned down by the KKK, she moved from the frontlines, but she did not stop fighting.
She moved to Green Bay and joined a program to learn about Hmong refugees and their transition to life in America. Again, she found grim and harrowing stories of isolation and destitution. But she also found glimmers of hope, people who fought and struggled to create better lives for themselves and their children.
Sandra Shackelford in 1991.
Sandra Shackelford has compiled the stories of these Hmong refugees in her book, A Portrait of Grief and Courage: Hmong Oral Histories and Folktales. These are the stories as told by the refugees, detailing their previous lives in Southeast Asia, as well as their new lives in America, as seen in drawings, photographs, and observations by Sandra herself.
Interviewer’s note: Sandra’s written responses have been edited to include further details and quotes that she provided during our verbal interview. Interviewer’s notes have been marked in brackets. All other words, while occasionally adjusted for flow, are Sandra’s own.
Sandra Shackelford, 1991.
You’ve been fighting for civil rights for decades — a battle that continues even now. What drew you, a white woman from Green Bay, Wisconsin, toward amplifying marginalized voices?
I was a junior in the Academy, an all-girl high school in Green Bay. I was popular. I was invited to so many dances and proms I ran out of space filling up my many dance cards. What I wasn’t was your standard “smart.” I hadn’t been able to read until the seventh grade. [Interviewer’s note: At the behest of her trained ballerina and cosmetologist mother, Sandra’s early education lay primarily in the performing arts — dancing and singing — for which she received both acclaim and the disapproval of the nuns at her Catholic school.] Later on in my educational sojourn, I had a surprise.
That’s when my Latin teacher called me aside after class. I expected to be reprimanded for something.
Instead, she said this: “Sandra, you’re not very bright, but you’ve got a nice personality. I know a place that could use a girl like you.”
My life changed forever. Continue reading
The Teaching Press had 21 students working as interns and staff in Fall 2023. We’re featuring their work in small batches—the same way we print books at the Press!
Olivia Meyer became the Project Manager on A Portrait of Grief and Courage: Hmong Oral Histories and Folktales, in early 2023, when the manuscript was still part of a collection Sandra Shackelford was arranging to donating to the UW-Green Bay Cofrin Library Archives. She met with the author, guided the project through its full year of workflow, collaborated on the book’s “Introduction,” and wrote the biographies of translator May Lee Lor and transcriber Ma Lee Lor.
Kat Halfman has been the Chief Copyeditor of this title since early 2023. She created the most ambitious style guide The Teaching Press has encountered, standardizing spelling of numerous individuals’ names and dozens of place names from multiple spellings from multiple translations; researching the use editorial conventions in oral histories; and leading two semesters’ staffs through multiple rounds of copyediting.
Who gets to work with all of these amazing interns? Meet the Press Director!
Dr. Rebecca Meacham founded The Teaching Press in 2018 and, with the Press’s first interns, launched the first book, The Village and The Vagabond by Tim Weyenberg, in 2019. Since then, she’s worked with over 100 interns on a wide range of stories of our region, created two imprints, and engaged the Press in community outreach events and collaborations. An author of three books of prose, she is a professor of English, Writing, and Humanities, and founder and Chair of the Writing and Applied Arts B.F.A. program.
How does our Press hand-craft an ambitious book of fold-out —or foldie-outtie—pages? Learn more from Production Team insider Brady Hurst!
There is nothing that our team fears more than failing to deliver. So, once our Lower Fox River PCB Clean Up Timeline book hit our production line, we all knew that we would have our work cut out for us. Thankfully, with the bright minds at our printing press, our staff quickly formed a method to create what we now deem as “Foldie-Outtie” books. Here, we share our secrets.
Launching in December 2023, A Portrait of Grief and Courage documents the lives of Hmong refugees in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the 1980s and 1990s.
Forced to flee from their homes to escape The Secret War in Laos, many Hmong fled to Thailand as refugees, then to the U.S. The first Hmong families arrived in the US in 1975, and thousands soon followed.
Amid the challenges and triumphs of a new life, oral storytelling initially thrived, providing cultural salvation, safety, and a sense of belonging for Hmong refugees. However, over time, its role, value, and relevance diminished.
Now, in this unique collection of oral histories, documentary artist Sandra Shackelford— along with collaborator and interpreter May Lee Lor and translator and transcriber Ma Lee Lor— captures the storytellers, storytelling, folktales, and harrowing journeys of these early Hmong residents in Northeastern Wisconsin. In 1991, when a woman in a freezing apartment implored the author to “give me the words to tell my grief,” Shackelford listened. Readers, too, will be moved by the stories in this haunting, yet hopeful, book.
A Portrait of Grief and Courage: Hmong Oral Histories and Folktales, by Sandra Shackelford, with translations by May Lee Lor and transcriptions by Ma Lee Lor, is now on sale. Click this link for purchase and pick up information.
© 2024 The Teaching Press
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
