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In 4th grade, after a school-wide vision screening
administered between milk break and math, I learned I needed glasses. Badly. This was news to me, I guess because you don't know what you don't know, but when the eye doctor finally slid those pink glasses onto my face a few weeks later and spun his stool out of the way, my whole world crisped into unprecedented clarity.

"Ohhhhhh," I said. "That's what everything looks like."

My parents joked that I'd made it that far not noticing how blurry the outside world was because I always had my nose in a book. I question the veracity of the next part of this story, because it seems odd that an eye doctor would dispense this advice — or at the very least I trust that it was misconstrued — but my parents say he advised I do less reading and more playing. "Get outside and climb a tree," he allegedly said.

Later that day, as the story goes, my parents found me up in a tree in the backyard — reading a book.

Maybe that's why I think of summer as outdoor reading season. These last weeks of May and early weeks of June can be so exquisite in Wisconsin, the air that magical alchemy of lingering cool pressure and gentle warming, not yet unbearably humid or thick with mosquitoes. And the green, everywhere green; lush new growth returning to life before the weeds rise up in rebellion.

I still think there's no sweeter sight than a book framed by a tree canopy, viewed swinging from a hammock. I don't remember the last time I climbed a tree, but my youngest daughter and I have been going up to Brigham County Park with our camping hammocks and our novels. We give each tree a hug as we wrap the straps around, then settle into our respective nests, sweetly swaying. Lately, in these scenarios, I end up reading the same paragraph over and over because I'm so distracted by the glorious hiss and shush of the leaves above, and how life cycles back on itself year after year, and how swiftly we go from being fourth graders to parents of fourth graders to parents whose kids are going forth into the big, wide world, and how even when you can see with 20-20 vision (or hindsight), there's so much ahead you can't ever see coming. This is the last summer my daughter and I will be able to do this whenever we want — she's graduating in a week and leaving for college at the end of August, and everything is changing the way it always does, except for everything that stays the same, like a good book on a sweet and mild summer day, glasses on, a lifetime of stories left to unfold.

Maggie Ginsberg is a senior editor at Madison Magazine and author of the novel, "Still True," which is the honorable mention selection for the 2022 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and a 2023 Midwest Book Awards honoree. She curates this monthly newsletter for Madison Magazine. Reach her at mginsberg@madisonmagazine.com.
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Coming to newsstands
Our June issue stories will publish online one-at-a-time over the next month, but you can read them all now as they were intended to be experienced in our print edition (use the buttons below to subscribe or pick up a copy on newsstands this week). Our June issue brings you features on working farm dogs, a storied Monona property, an inclusive woodworker, a blue-collar screenwriter, a hydroponic strawberry farm, hot spots for lunch, an essay on two boyhood heroes, a tentative side-eye at Frank Lloyd Wright's legacy, and more.
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June cover story
There’s something to be said about checking off quintessential Madison bucket list activities — cheese curds at The Old Fashioned, a game day at Camp Randall and strolling through the Dane County Farmers’ Market, for example — but we also set out to uncover some of the city’s lesser-known facets. We’ve added context, offered a few tips and even provided some specific directions. Use this guide to navigate the city in a way that’ll have people asking you for recommendations, because you have the inside scoop.
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Favorites from past issues
Last month in our May issue, I spoke with researchers and practitioners who are studying the potential therapeutic benefits of psychoactive substances (psilocybin, MDMA and ketamine) for people living with treatment-resistant depression, anxiety and PTSD. Through that process, I was introduced to Jodee Dushack, a woman who felt compelled to tell her story of knowing exactly what it feels like "When Nothing Else Works."
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For the last 150 years, a valuable set of stereoscopic photos could only be viewed as they’d originally been intended — tiny, and through a handheld contraption known as a stereoviewer. Now those photos have been blown up and converted into large-scale 3D images resulting in a special exhibition unlike any other.
Doug Moe's Madison
New from the Doug Moe's Madison web-exclusive blog this month: Longtime State Street retailer Janice Durand, founder of The Puzzlebox and Little Luxuries, opens up about success and failure in new "Magic Hour" book; and Doug's take on the decades-long search for Madison's best burger. Does such a thing even exist?
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New book releases, author events and other local literary news
  • Bestselling author, Booker prize finalist and UW alumnus Brandon Taylor's new novel, "The Late Americans," came out on May 23 from Riverhead. Taylor will appear at A Room of One's Own bookstore on June 8.
  • Madison-based South Asian-American author Priti Srivastava's final book in The Chai House series, "Nagini Anarchy," is now available.
  • Poet and Green Bay Press-Gazette watchdog reporter Natalie Eilbert's third poetry collection, "Overland," is out this month from Copper Canyon Press.
  • Big Pharma thriller "The Killer Speech," the second in Wisconsinite Kevin Kluesner's three-book series from Level Best Books, is now available.
  • Indie YA and Women's Fiction author J. Mercer's latest, "In One Life and Out the Other," is out this month.
  • In case you missed it: "Wisconsin Waters: The Ancient History of Lakes, Rivers and Waterfalls" by Scott Spoolman, published last year by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, is a great guide as you're getting out on the water this season.
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Q&A with Hanna Halperin
In her prizewinning debut novel, "Something Wild," former Madison resident Hanna Halperin examined the complexities of intimate partner violence with a rare nuance. Similarly, in her second novel, "I Could Live Here Forever" (published by Viking in April), a theme that could be treated clumsily or stereotypically — heroin addiction — is approached with that same soulful care for its characters. Even as we're tempted to judge Charlie Nelson for the ways he can't quit his drug, Halperin helps us consider why Leah Kempler can't quit Charlie, and whether the lure, rewards and punishments of codependent relationships are really all that different from substance use disorder. In the process, we're made to feel empathy for both characters — and maybe even for ourselves, which is what the best fiction does.
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