Wisconsin Regional Writers's Association

The Wisconsin Regional Writer

Volume 55, Number 3            Fall 2006
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Ben Logan to receive Robert E. Gard Award For Excellence at Fall Conference
 by Nate Scholze

WRWA is once again privileged to have the Robert E. Gard Foundation making an award presentation at the Fall Writers' Conference. This year's recipient of the Robert E. Gard Award for Excellence is Ben Logan, one of the quintessential Wisconsin Authors who has created that sense of place that Wisconsin is. His Wisconsin classic, The Land Remembers, about growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, is the best selling book ever by a Wisconsin author, with more than 800,000 copies in print.

Ben Logan grew up among the farmland of southwestern Wisconsin during the 1920's and 1930's, traveled as a merchant seaman, and worked many years as a novelist, producer and writer of films and television, and lecturer while living forty miles north of New York City. Yet his roots remained in southwestern Wisconsin. He returned to his childhood farm, Seldom Seen, in the mid-1980s, where he lives and continues his love affair with the land and his neighbors.

In 1975 he published The Land Remembers, the story of his boyhood and home. Since that time Mr. Logan has published The Empty Meadow and Christmas Remembered. His books are filled with the importance of a sense of place and are a constant reminder that there is a universe right in our own back yard.

“The birth of that land, like the birth of the planet, is beyond our comprehension. We can theorize about cosmic dust, planetary collisions, rivers of molten rock, land rising out of the sea to be worn down again by wind and water, but how real is all that compared to the feel of the morning sun on the face, the smell of the seasons changing, the sight of the new green springing from the soil?”

—Ben Logan, The Land Remembers

Presentation of the award will come at the Jade Ring Banquet on Sunday, September 24th. LaMoine MacLaughlin, board member of the Robert E. Gard Foundation, will be hosting the presentation followed by Harvey Stower, former State Legislator and Mayor of Amery, Wisconsin, and past Award recipient, who will make the award presentation. Mr. Logan will then take a few minutes to speak to the audience.
 

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