This fiction book is about a veteran journalist who tires of the hype and spin of modern media and decides to seek something truthful in the wilds of Tasmania. Two chapters also are set in the Driftless area of Wisconsin. Available via www.iUniverse.com, www.amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. Or: Order here.
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Westby House Victorian Inn
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Valley Stewardship Network
Our Mission:
Valley Stewardship Network encourages, promotes and helps create opportunities for pro-active stewardship efforts in the Kickapoo River Watershed through education and awareness efforts and by promoting community pride, positive land use, compatible development and communication and coordination among groups in the watershed.
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Welcome to the Kickapoo Valley Reserve:
A Unique Project from All Vantage Points
The Kickapoo Valley Reserve is an 8,569 acre tract of land located between the villages of La Farge and Ontario in southwestern Wisconsin. Its history, resources, administration, and recreational diversity make it unique - a place like no other.
We invite you to come see for yourself the many wonders of the Kickapoo Valley Reserve. Here sandstone outcroppings tower over the Kickapoo River as you paddle its quiet waters, and native plants and animals abound in all seasons.
Whether you'd like to join us for a scheduled interpretive hike, adventure into the back country on your own, or simply stop and admire the beauty, the Kickapoo Valley Reserve welcomes you! Click here for more.
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Featured Photos
For a gallery of photos from the 2010 Syttende Mai festival and parade in Westby, click here.
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For galleries of photos from a story on the Babson family donation to the Mississippi Valley Conservancy and other various times and places in the Driftless Area, click here. For archives of stories done about the area, go to the Message Board of this web site and scroll down.
Driftless Images
In Pixels and Prose
Welcome to Driftless Images, a site that morphed out of the Driftless Writers Blog. into Driftless and now to its present format .The site still serves as a forum for folks who love the creativity and challenge of using the language in written form.
It doesn't matter whether you are a student, hobby writer or a pro -- or whether you write prose or poems -- you can post your work here. Just use the Driftless Writers Blog Message Board below.
You won't be paid for your writing. Any obscene or libelous/slanderous posts will be removed by the publisher. But, if you can live with those rules, you can use this as a forum to see your work in "print" in cyberspace.
Driftless Images also is the home for The Driftless Area Creative Maps Project, an attempt by this writer/photographer -- Gregg Hoffmann -- to document one of the unique areas of the world in images and words -- thus pixels and prose.
Over the next few years, I plan on writing about the people, places and things that make the Driftless area unique. Some of the stories I have done already are on the Message Board.
The Driftless Area is a relative well-kept secret in the southwest corner of Wisconsin, southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa and northwest Illinois. Its karst geology makes it unique, gives it beauty and also makes it an environmentally fragile area.
We'll document that as well as the characters who inhabit the area and some of the communities and places that give it further identity. We'll also try to capture some of the beauty of the area in online photos. You also can give us your opinion, or write about your favorite place or person too by using the Driftless Writers Blog message board below.
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Post your writing by clicking below
You can write your piece right on the blog, but it usually is better to copy and paste it into the site from your own computer. All works on this site are copyright protected and cannot be used again without permission from the authors.
Gregg Hoffmann also posts his Almost Weekly Blog on issues, in this section. Feel free to post notices and opinions about community issues.
Driftless Writers Blog
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For Sale: Field Of Dreams
The Field of Dreams movie site outside Dyersville, Iowa, has been put up for sale. For more details, go to Midwest Diamond Report and its Archives/Blog section via the link near the bottom of this page. For a photo gallery of the site, click here.
Women Active In Sustainability
Women are playing a more active role than ever in sustainable agriculture and the sustainability field overall, in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Several of those women gathered at the Organic Valley Country Fair recently in a forum called “Planting fresh seeds: How women are transforming sustainability."
“The USDA reported a 30 percent increase in women-owned farms,” said Lisa Kivirist, a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow who headed the forum. “Many of these women are in their 40s and 50s, and farming as a second career. They often have roots in agriculture and are returning to them.”
Not all have the roots in farming though. For example, Kivirist and her husband, John Ivanko, were involved in advertising in Chicago and decided they wanted to make a change.
Kivirist runs a farm with her husband, south of Monroe. They also run the Inn Serendipity Bed and Breakfast on the farm. It is completely powered by renewable energy and recently was named one of the “Top Ten Eco-Destinations in North America.”
The inn is named, in part, because of what Kivirist refers to as the “serendipitous diversification” that has been a key to her progress in building a sustainable business and lifestyle. When things have happened, she has adapted. “For example, when our laundry kept getting blown off the line, we said, ‘it’s windy here’ and decided to put in wind power,” she Kivirist said.
Sustainable agriculture is a natural for women in several ways, Kivirist said. Women across the U.S. are the main food purchasers. Globally, women raise more than 80 percent of the food, while owning in many countries less than 1 percent of the land.
For more, click here.
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