Patrick Moran is the featured reader for the Dickinson Poetry Series on Wednesday, January 8, 7 pm at the UU Fellowship.

As a boy growing up in Green Bay, a trip to Door County was always something of a journey. Moran’s early memories embrace his father’s creative endeavors and “mermaids” spotted in the water near the public beach in Fish Creek. As an under graduate at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay his memories highlight dancing to the wee hours of the morning at the Omnibus, beautifully silent snow encrusted winters, and the generosity of drivers whenever hitchhiking to Door County.

Later as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Moran and his wife, the painter Bethann Moran-Handzlik, would drive up to Door County in April and May so she could paint the apple orchards that seemed to be just beginning to leaf out and explode with the colors of spring. Thanks to his wife’s skills as an artist, those paintings possessed a magical quality that felt so uniquely a part of the place that he only has to look at them to be instantly taken back to those wonderful memories.

Now as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater with four collections of poetry, Moran looks forward to his return to Door County.  While his poems don’t necessarily evoke specific images of the place itself, he thinks that his history has informed and shaped his imagination. It has provided Moran with a rich sense of what is possible and a fondness for a landscape that is unlike any other in the state of Wisconsin.