FIELD NOTES: MEMBER NEWSLETTER

REFLECTIONS

The Driftless region is more than a week into a classic mid-July heat wave. This week, wildfire smoke from Canada and the Boundary Waters of Minnesota rolls in, tinging the rolling hills a hazy blue and making the world outside smell distinctly of wood-fired pizza (there are worse smells, I suppose). The students for Thoreau College’s summer program, the Driftless Field School, have been here a few weeks. Today, I’m going around town with a bandanna over my face to keep the smoke out, picking up ingredients for lunch, which the students will eat after a long morning in the sun, doing labor on the farm.

While I make my way around the familiar streets of Viroqua—although tinged with unfamiliarity, as I’m seeing this place in the peak of midsummer heat for the first time—I’m focused on my task list for the day ahead, but in the back of my mind is the awareness that these coming weeks are the last ones I’ll spend in the Driftless, at least for a while. I came to the Driftless Folk School last August through its residential fellowship program, and I had no idea what I was in for. I barely had a clue what a folk school was, let alone about what it takes to run one. Now, approaching the end of my term, I can hardly name all the ways this experience has nurtured me, made me more curious, and transformed my world into one infinitely more full.

The Folk School is a place of dual truths: we enable and encourage our students to be rooted in place and community, while largely serving people who come to us from other cities and even other states. The students I cooked lunch for this morning will be here a brief six weeks, and hail from all over the country; California, Tennessee, Kentucky. This balance between transience and groundedness is sometimes hard to hold, but we do hold it. Whether you’ve come to the Driftless Folk School for an afternoon, a year, or a lifetime, thanks for joining us.

— Will Young (2025-26 Folk School Fellow)

FROM THE FIELD: COMMUNITY CELEBRATION

It’s a Friday afternoon. About a dozen of us are gathered at Compostella Farm. The sun is blazing down on the recently-mown hayfield; the bales, already adorned with fuzzy, alien-looking mold, are piled haphazardly in the center of the field beside the currant bushes. Despite the merciless heat, we are here with a purpose: to erect a massive circus tent in this field to serve as the centerpiece for the Driftless Folk School’s Community Celebration on Sunday.

Under the guidance of Shawn Lavoie, we get to work. The first step is measuring various distances from the center of where the tent will eventually stand, and marking them on the grass with red spray paint; one wrong measurement, and all our work will be pointless. Then comes the hauling of equipment out of a little trailer across the field: poles, stakes, massive expanses of canvas folded up and stuffed into huge bags. The work team is varied in age and background. There’s Shawn, a teacher (of circus classes, among other subjects) at the Youth Initiative High School in town, who has set this tent up countless times, plus his teenage daughter and young son. Friedo, our farm and labor coordinator, who approaches each day of physical toil in the hot sun with all the boundless energy of a young sheepdog, is already running back and forth, driving stakes into the earth and carrying heavy steel poles. Julie Tomaro, a key coordinator of the Celebration, helps us envision the flow of the space while simultaneously steadying tent poles and unfolding canvas. A crew from the Field School—the summer program at Thoreau College—lend a hand with varying levels of enthusiasm. As the afternoon wanes into evening, the tent eventually begins to take shape, from a haphazard pile of bits and pieces to an impressively large shelter.

And all the while, across the Driftless, countless others are preparing for the Community Celebration in their own homes. Members of the Folk School Circle are baking cookies, making signs, and organizing boxes to be hauled out to the farm on Sunday morning. Musicians are tuning their guitars and writing down their set lists. Instructors are preparing their mini-classes, on herbalism, community singing, mushroom foraging, woodcarving, and more.

If you missed the Community Celebration this year—I won’t lie to you, it was a fantastic time. Sunlight turned the fields and vineyards of the farm golden and warm, while under the tent it was shady and cool; we were even surprised with a brief downpour in the middle of the afternoon, but stayed dry under our shelter. Folks came in and out throughout the afternoon, with many staying from the beginning right up to the very end. Each mini-class drew in a sizable crowd, and from my post under the tent I got to watch clusters of people walking around the edges of the farm, looking at flowers, examining mushroom logs, or gathering in a circle under black walnut trees to sing.

Thanks for being a part of our community. We had a great time celebrating with you and we can’t wait to see you next year!

FACES OF THE FOLK SCHOOL: JACOB HUNDT

Will Young: As the Folk School’s director, you’ve been here since the beginning. Can you tell me about what it was like to be a part of the conversation when it was still mostly a concept?

Jacob Hundt: Well, the founding of things is my comfort zone. So, when things get established, then that’s a new territory. I hope to experience that someday. But to set the scene, a key event in my life was starting Youth Initiative High School. Then I went to an experimental college, to Deep Springs. Even the college I went to in Bulgaria was also kind of a startup, in a weird way. Then I came home, and I really wanted to live here, and I wanted to be a teacher. I was teaching high school, but I really wanted to work with college students. And so, obviously, I decided to start a college. But the first thing that really came along were people, including Dan Pepper, who wanted to start a folk school, which I had never heard of. But the craft and homesteading element was very interesting to me and I liked the mixture of the dynamics there, the vision that was being formed. Creating something with a bunch of interesting people is also my comfort and happy space, right? We had to give a vision, to define our goals, to figure out logistics and where things would happen and how to make a schedule, the nuts and bolts of how to create a nonprofit organization... The other thing about things that I have done is they generally move pretty quickly from concept to some form of action. With the Driftless Folk School is that we met for the first time in January of 2006, and then the first actual classes were in June of 2006. Aside from some minor changes, the form of the Driftless Folk School in that very first installment was almost the same as it is now. One session classes, dispersed in people's homes, with a largely volunteer group of people who are carrying it. I think people like Linda (Conroy) and Nicholas (WazeeGale) were teaching within the first year. 

WY: What was the first class you taught like?

JH: The very first class (at the Folk School) was taught by me and Sofya [Jacob’s wife] together. It was a sourdough bread class, and it happened in the same room where all the meetings had been happening, which was in the kitchen-slash-living room of Dan Pepper and Ruth Kittleson. Sourdough was something I’d learned about at Deep Springs; we had a sourdough class, and we captured sourdough cultures and learned about that. And, this was before sourdough was cool. The pandemic was far in the future. But really the experience of capturing a wild culture and using it to make this amazing kind of bread was so fun. I came home from Deep Springs with the culture, which I still have. I used it there, I baked bread at the cow camp there, in a wooden stove up at 9,000 feet. Then it lived in my mom’s fridge for a few years, while I was living in Europe, but after I moved back here, Sofya couldn’t work at first, so she was baking bread in our apartment oven and I was selling out of Youth Initiative (High School). And then Lars Bergen [Jacob’s cousin] had the idea of starting the Driftless Cafe. It was originally going to be the Driftless Cafe and Sofya’s Sourdough, actually. Then, about a month before the Cafe opened, Sofya got pregnant and the smell of baking bread made her throw up! So during the first few months of the cafe, I was the baker. It was fun, but totally exhausting; the hours were really wacky, but it was very successful. People were crazy about it. But I remember one day, coming out of the cafe after work, bleary eyed, and there was Dan Pepper, and he said, “I hear you’re interested in starting a school!” So that was actually the moment we started talking about the folk school. And the first set of classes were things that the people in the room for those initial conversations knew how to do, and so Sofya and I did a sourdough class. 

WY: What have been some unexpected developments in the evolution of the Folk School, between its initial conception with Dan Pepper, and today?

JH: Well, initially, there was a vision of a campus, or rather a neighborhood in the town of Liberty Pole. The main site would be Dan Pepper’s house, and then down the road was Adrienne Lyndon, another founder of the Folk School. So the idea was to take people down the road in a wagon with draft horses to have lunch; Adrienne would prepare lunch and she would also be doing childcare. All told, that happened maybe two or three times. That vision [of a centralized campus] never quite worked out in a consistent place. We had blacksmithing way out in Hillsboro, and pretty quickly classes were happening all over. There is something distinctive, I think, about the Driftless region, which is decentralized. Everyone has their special place where they’ve built their special thing, and it’s hard to centralize anything. And that's okay. That’s kind of the character here. 

I would also say, it’s amazing to think of what’s happened in the last twenty years in terms of technology. For the first decade or so, I was doing a lot of the management of the website, the booking system, and the publications. We would send out a physically printed catalog once or twice a year, which I would make in Word. That definitely reduced my life expectancy by some amount. Today, that feels so crude, we might as well be carving it in wood. And we didn’t have a great booking system. We’d send out these catalogs, and there would be a place where people could fill out the registration form and send it back in the mail. 

WY: I bet there’s a category of people today who would actually find that really charming.

JH: Now it’s coming around, right? Maybe we can bring it back. Send it off to the Luddites, if we can find their email…

WY: The Folk School celebrates its twenty year anniversary this year. What do you most look forward to in the next twenty years?

JH: I think one of the big moments that changed things was the merger with Thoreau College. I think that’s been a huge success; the folk school now has a much more stable leadership and management structure, it now has this amazing staff, and the Folk School Circle has been a really core part as well. So I’m excited to build on that institutional foundation. In the next couple of years, I would love to see an expanded kids’ program. We’re already working on building that. And, the development of a campus site for certain activities that we aren’t able to do very well right now. I think it would also be great to have a dedicated program coordinator. There’s literally a dozen ideas I’m carrying around, or that come up in the Folk School Circle, for things we could do if someone just had some time.

READ: Edible Madison Feature | Driftless Folk School Turns Twenty

WY: I’d like to turn to the wider world of folk education. I know you make it a priority to stay connected and in dialogue with the growing folk school movement, both in America and abroad. For the layperson reader, can you talk a little bit about that?

JH: It’s a very diverse category, things that get called a folk school. The movement traces its roots to Denmark in the 1800s, where it continues to be an important cultural institution, what they call their folk high schools. What a folk high school is in Denmark, and also in other Scandinavian countries, looks a lot more like Thoreau College rather than the Driftless Folk School—which makes our project unique and interesting, in that we’re doing both versions of a “folk school.” But in Scandinavia, folk schools are residential programs, largely meant as a transitional experience for young adults. Sometimes it includes craft, sometimes outdoor education, sometimes sports, theater, music, philosophy, but fundamentally, it’s young people, living together and becoming adults. So that is a global movement, and we’re a part of that. It’s also present in Japan, in Korea, as well as other parts of the world. In North America, for a complex set of historical reasons, folk schools started to focus on regional crafts, particularly in Appalachia to begin with, and then to a degree it expanded to encompass Scandinavian-based craft and culture in the Midwest. I think it was that people were looking for their roots in American culture. Folk schools became associated with folk music and folk arts. So that is now its own movement; several dozen institutions, in some way, are calling themselves folk schools or consciously relating to folk education of this kind. And there are other craft schools, where people teach fine woodworking or glasswork or things like that. The Folk School Alliance and the Folk Education Association of America have made a clear emphasis: what brings folk schools together is an emphasis on building relationships and building community. So insofar as they’re doing all these things—craft, nature skills, homesteading skills—they are doing it to the end of building community between people. And that’s a distinction from just teaching people fine arts, which is great, but it’s a different thing. And that is the overarching quality: All of these programs, including the Danish folk high schools, the North American folk schools, they are all about building relationships among people. 

NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

Upcoming Classes

• Chicken Butchering, with Jacob Hundt - Saturday, August 1

• Summer Mushroom Foraging (La Crosse), with Andi Reisdorf - Saturday, August 1

• Summer Mushroom Foraging (Viroqua), with Andi Reisdorf - Saturday, August 8

• Easy Fermented Beverages, with Laura Poe Mathes - Sunday, August 16

• Tanning with Tannins Two Day Workshop, with Nicholas WazeeGale - Saturday and Sunday, August 22-23

• Long-stitch Bookbinding: the Medieval Paperback, with Anneka Baird - Friday, August 28 (AM)

• Coptic Bookbinding: the Original Codex, with Anneka Baird - Friday, August 28 (PM)

• Hammered Copper Bowls with Stone Tools, with Martha Buche - Saturday, September 12

• Understanding Electricity and Basic Home Wiring, with Jon Passi - Saturday, September 19

• Intro to Oxen, with Anneka Baird - Friday, September 25

• Fall Mushroom Foraging (Viroqua), with Andi Reisdorf - Saturday, September 26

• Fall Mushroom Foraging (La Crosse), with Andi Reisdorf - Saturday, October 3

• Introduction to Relief Woodcarving, with Kevin Ewing - Saturday, October 3

• Understanding Electric Vehicles, with Jon Passi and Al Buss - Saturday, October 3

Upcoming Events

• Driftless Spoon Gathering - Friday, September 11th through Sunday, September 13th

Thoreau College

• Applications are now open for the Fall 2026 Metamorphosis Gap Semester and Spring 2027 Gap Semester!

Did you miss the other issues of our Field Notes Newsletters? Check them out here!