Irene I. Luethge This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. www.savpress.com

   www.savpress.com/interviewdeta - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/16/2006   Last Visited: 3/29/2007

   Irene Luethge
   
   IRENE LUETHGE PROVES SHE HAS THE ‘WRITE STUFF'
   ...
   When Irene Luethge retired several years ago from a very illustrious career teaching and practicing sociology, she went right back to work at what she fondly calls her "retirement career."
   
   Luethge, a Sheboygan native, has spent her retirement years pursuing a writing career. And apparently Luethge has "the write stuff," since her articles and poetry have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines including the Milwaukee Sentinel, The Doll Reader Magazine and the Wisconsin Poets Calendar. She has also received several awards for her writing.
   
   But perhaps her most prestigious accomplishment to date is the publication in 2000 of "Potpourri from Kettle Land," a memoir inspired by her family's beloved homestead, "Windymare," in rural Manitowoc County.
   ...
   To this list we now add a voice from Wisconsin's beautiful Kettle Moraine: Irene I. Luethge, in touch and in tune to the beat of the earth."
   
   Luethge's love of the land and its history was one of the reasons she chose to go to college at the University of Pennsylvania. "The history of Philadelphia appealed to me and going to a place on the East Coast that is full of history appealed to me," Luethge said.
   
   While at the University of Pennsylvania, she also got interested in writing. She had many other interests as well. "I got very involved," she said. She went on to get a master's degree and her Ph.D in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and held several positions both practicing and teaching sociology in various locales on the East Coast.
   
   Throughout her life, Luethge said she has had an insatiable curiosity about a variety of things. That curiosity led her to explore such various things as Pennsylvania Dutch culture, watercolor painting and rug hooking using plant dyes to dye the wool.
   
   Eventually, family matters called her back to Wisconsin, where she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The love of the family land at Windymare also called. "I did a lot of commuting from Madison. I decided that that was where I was going to retire," Luethge said.
   
   Upon retirement, she also decided she was going to pursue a writing career, a career that actually evolved from annual Christmas letters she had written to family and friends. "My Christmas letters weren't the kind that said ‘I went here and there and so and so and so came to visit me.' But rather I wrote about Windymare and its various seasons and my experiences as I wandered around the grounds," Luethge said. "I wrote those Christmas letters for so many years and my friends said to me, ‘You should have those published.'"
   
   Luethge felt the Christmas letters needed a bit of reworking in order to have them published.
   ...
   One of my awards was a year's membership in the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association (WRWA)," Luethge said.
   
   Through her association with WRWA, Luethge discovered the Sheboygan Co. Writer's Club and started attending their monthly meetings. "I went to some of their meetings and I was hooked."
   
   Luethge credits the members of the local writer's club with encouraging her to submit a memoir she had written concerning the 1976 ice storm. She submitted the piece to the Milwaukee Sentinel and had it accepted. "That was really my first acceptance ... Everyone kept encouraging me."
   
   Luethge would read her re-written Christmas letters to the club each month. Eventually she had the finished product for her memoir that would become "Potpourri from Kettle Land." But the publishers didn't exactly break down her door.
   ...
   I have ideas," Luethge said.