Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 82, number 4, summer, 1999

              Making a Fire Within: The Writing of a Civil War Narrative from Wisconsin
Kerry A. Trask
T7 IRE Within, my book about the Civil J. War experiences of some soldiers and civilians of Manitowoc, was published in 1995. Ever since then, people have been coming up to me at funerals, stopping me in the aisles of grocery stores, and ap¬ proaching me after presentations I've made to talk with me about it. In the course of our brief conversations, they will often mention an ancestor of theirs who was among the many men ofWlsconsin who fought in that war and is their personal link with that most traumatic of national experiences. Then, al¬ most invariably, they will ask how long it took me to write the book. They never ask me why I wrote it or how I wrote it, perhaps assuming such questions to be too intrusive; but they are unabashedly curious to know how long I labored to bring forth my mod¬ est-sized volume.
I always enjoy these encounters, and I appreciate people taking the initiative to make them happen. They are reassuring. So much ofwhat academic historians do is done practically in secret, for we have a strong tendency to keep among ourselves the hon's share ofwhat we think and write. As a colleague of mine once observed, writ¬ ing an article for a scholarly journal is like throwing a very small stone into a very deep well: you have to wait a long time and listen really hard just to hear it hit the water, and
when it does it makes almost no splash at all. But when people stop to talk about Fire Within I know then I've hit a part of the reading public I most eagerly wished to reach, and that the book has stirred up something within them, perhaps some¬ thing deep within.
I also find affirmation in their curiosity about time. Time, t^f cc^iurse, is some ofthe most basic stuff historians work with and wonder about. It is also the one ingredient of life about which we, with our all-in-a- hurry, present-minded, mass culture, are the most impatient But when I tell people that just the writing took me four sum¬ mers—the same as it took the soldiers to fight the Civil War—they seem somehow pleased, as if that in itself adds value and va¬ lidity to the work. Their body language and tone of voice imply an admiration for such an extended effort and the perseverance it demands. They even seem reassured by the thought that some of us are willing to take on such projects.
In doing the work, time was certainly a major concern for me—there never being enough of it and everything always taking far more of it than I ever imagined itwould. Of course, the temporal aspects of the events I was dealing with were important— but it was much more a question of place that initially set me off in the direction that
Copyright © 1999 by the State Historical Society of Wi.sconsin All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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