Uh, what did you choose, and can you read it for us?

First, I just wanna say I love this tradition.

I think every show that interviews authors should do this.

Uh, what I chose is a poem called "Silly Little City I Live and Love In" by my late colleague, Susan Fear, who's an absolute legend in Wisconsin, certainly in Milwaukee, a poet who's quite a force.

And so I'm just gonna share this poem, uh, which is on a plaque that we had engraved and hangs now at UWM.

"Silly Little City I Live and Love In".

"Silly little city with your harp streetlamps, blizzards, and vigil light stars, with your toot-toot streetlights, and 30-below wind chills, band shells and polkas, and steamy smoky lakes' pink waves, with your huge orange moons rising from the lake, with your huge red suns rising from the lake, with your sad jumpers falling into the lake, and your socialist watershed and Oriental Theater minarets, and Sunday morning Quaker meetings surrounded by church bells and taverns, with everyday George Washington walking down Wisconsin Avenue, with your ice fishing clinics and beard blessings, with your seven deadly sins parades, with your alewives parades and cladophora wings and streets named after sausages, Knock, with Francis Bacon's blue face on the side of your art museum and Joseph Cornell's Celestial Navigation by Birds, Gallery 18 inside your museum, with your statues of Goethe and Burns, Olmsted parks and bakery winds, silly little city that erases me, I keep fastening your lake winds to the page."

If someone in Wisconsin wanted to seriously pursue writing, maybe even publishing their own work, but didn't feel compelled to leave the state, what advice would you give them?