Gary Kuhlmann
Writer and Editor
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Gary Kuhlmann
Please click through this mini portfolio to check out a small sampling of my work. More examples are available on request. (Some samples below were published only in print. I would be happy to send you copies of any of my published work.)
Arts and humanities
Web site content for Red Ant, Inc., project: The New Deal Art of McKinley County, New Mexico, October 2007
Introduction: Artists began coming to New Mexico in the late 19th century. They came from around the United States, drawn by dazzling New Mexico deserts, the hospitality of town and village life, and the Indian and Hispanic cultures that had shaped the imaginative landscape of New Mexico for centuries. For an artist, New Mexico offered a rich mix, and between art and odd jobs, they made a living for a few decades—until there was no more work. Read more... (Note: For this web project, I also wrote and edited copy for other sections, including the pages under the History tab.)
Iowa Alumni Magazine, June 2001
Feature article, Getting Away From It All: The story behind our summer romance with journeys down the great American highway
Have you started planning your summer vacation? For many of us, those words summon powerful memories of piling into the family sedan and putting the geography of the United States into motion, of rolling on to definite destinations and the promise of unusual delights.
But probably none of us has covered this rich territory as extensively as Susan Birrell, UI professor of health, leisure, and sport studies. When Birrell starts her classroom discussion with a slide show of favorite tourist spots, it's no ordinary reminiscence of summers gone by. In a classroom a couple of floors above the Field House swimming pool, Birrell and her students explore the modern American vacation as a topic whose surface shimmers with complex cultural and social meanings. To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
Spectator, The University of Iowa, Fall 2006
Feature article, Building Art: New structure enhances teaching and creating
Seeing the new Art Building West go up, people say, has been like watching a piece of art take shape. The rusty steel plates slotted together for the exterior walls remind them of an outdoor sculpture--not surprising, given that one of the building's inspirations is Pablo Picasso's 1912 sculpture, Guitar.
Note: To read the entire story, please contact me for a copy.
Spectator, The University of Iowa, Spring 2007
In So Many Words: Writers find community and tradition at Iowa
If you were to say the University of Iowa campus is brimming with so much literary tradition that it spills into the streets of Iowa City, you would be right, metaphorically. But you also would be right, literally. Note: To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
Iowa Alumni Magazine, June 2000
Feature article, First Impressions: In a haven called Iowa, a group of pioneers created a vibrant place for the study of an archaic art form, and the territory they opened is where printmaking continues to thrive...
It's a bitter winter morning when I head to the University of Iowa's Art Building. Grass along the riverbank is as brown as pale coffee, and the sky appears formless behind the V's of skeletal trees. I want the Iowa River to look blue, but it's gray. None of this bothers me too much. Sometimes you can look at the ugliness of the world and see beauty, I've decided, and I owe my fresh outlook to the printmaking department.
The night before, I ran across a sentence in Virgina Myers' 1993 book, Creating Original Prints with Hot Stamped Foil and the Iowa Foil Printer, that made me pause. Past a tangle of technical instructions, the UI professor of art and art history uncurls this little aphorism: A creative mind never wastes anything.
Iowa Alumni Magazine, April 2001
The Perfect Fit
Margaret Wenk has learned to settle for nothing less than the idea she has in mind. To connect audiences with the mystery of the stage, she identifies fabric with the perfect color, the perfect pattern, the perfect texture or "hand." The ideal costume resonates with everything she admires about the performing arts: the interaction between sound and shape and movement, the synthesis of music with line and color.
"Quite simply, too, I enjoy a good story," says the UI set and costume designer for scuh opera theater and dance galas as The Magic Flute, Suor Angelica/Giamni Schicchi, Carmen, New Beginnings, and Fast Foward.
Wenk fell hard for theater when she signed on to work behind the scenes for her high school's production of My Fair Lady. When she learned from a director that real people make real livings form this make-believe stuff, Wenk determined to pursue her infatuation through a fine arts degree in theater design from Carnegie-Mellon University. Note: To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
Illumine, The University of Iowa, Fall 2002
Feature article, Nickelodeons, Thrill Rides, and Midway Delights
There are dozens of women hiking up their skirts and wiggling around inside Lauren Rabinovitz’s computer. Read more (this is a PDF)…
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Environmental concerns
Spectator, The University of Iowa, Summer 2006
Feature article, Right of Passage: Hydraulics experts help salmon coexist with Pacific Northwest dams
The stained-glass Chinook salmon that catches sunbeams in Larry Weber's office window was handcrafted in the small northern Minnesota town of Ely, but it's more than a reminder of a favorite vacation spot. It also represents the abiding respect for nature that drives Weber in his daily work.
"I enjoy the outdoors," says Weber from his office overlooking the Burlington Street dam on the Iowa River. "So I find great satisfaction knowing that our work leaves this building and makes a real difference."
Weber, professor of hydroscience and engineering and director of the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, leads a team of College of Engineering researchers who received $6.7 million last December from Public Utility District No. 2 of Grant County, Wash., to develop safe passages for juvenile salmon through the Priest Rapids Dam on the Columbia River. To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
fyi, March 5, 2007
Feature article, As the world burns, UI researchers take action to fight climate change
When subzero winds whipped across campus this winter, many of us might have had trouble worrying about global warming.
But we shouldn’t let the weather fool us. Even on the coldest day, global warming is real—and we should be worried about it, according to Jerry Schnoor, professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering.
“If we don’t cut back on greenhouse gas emissions by at least 70 percent, our children’s children will see the Earth as it has never looked in 55 million years,” he says.
He’s not alone in saying that. Read more...
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Social issues
Spectator, The University of Iowa, Summer 2004
Feature article, A Passion for Justice: Khmer Rouge survivor inspires kids in the fight against child labor
Boys and girls rise a little taller in their desks. Energy seems to burst in their small frames as they strain for a better look at the things their guest has brought to their classroom this cold February morning. The woman shows them a traditional silk scarf from her native homeland of Cambodia and holds up a photograph of a 12th-century Buddhist temple where gigantic jungle roots have cracked and squeezed walls and prized apart blocks of stone.
"Whenever we've talked about Cambodia, it's been about suffering," Chivy Sok tells the 5th- and 6th-graders at Hoover Elementary in Iowa City. "While we can't ignore the suffering, it helps to appreciate the beauty of this culture." To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
Iowa Alumni Magazine, December 2000
Feature article, To Kill a Man
In their various ways, many serious works of literature and film repeat what Clint Eastwood's gunslinger says in Unforgiven: "It's a terrible thing to kill a man. You take away everything he's got and everything he's going to have." Of course, in the popular suspense novel or movie--that is, in works of entertainment--violent death isn't so terrible. It's merely a useful technique to kick the plot forward and keep the audience hooked until the next thrill comes along.
Even though he knows many of his students have "seen the movie," University of Iowa law professor David Baldus introduces his seminar on capital punishment with a discussion of Sister Helen Prejean's book, Dead Man Walking. To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
Spectator, The University of Iowa, Fall 2005
Feature article, Soldiering On: Returning vets adjust to life on campus
For months after she came home, Carmen Owens couldn't drive down the street without swerving around every piece of trash. It was how the U.S. Army trained her to survive in the streets of Baghdad, where a pile of garbage is just the kind of place insurgents hide what the military calls improvised explosive devices--the roadside bombs that have become the top killer in Iraq. To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
Spectator, The University of Iowa, Winter 2006
Feature article, Rules of Engagement: Faculty and students wed learning and service
Much of her schoolwork this fall required Julia LuBua to examine the social doctines of universalism, Marxism, and egalitarianism. The UI junior read the assigned case studies, but the cited examples--among them, South Africa after apartheid and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union--fell a little outside her everyday experience on a Midwestern campus. Her professor's requirement that she add community service to her school week helped bring the lessons home. To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
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Science
The Scripps Research Institute, September 2007
Press release, Scripps Research Study Reveals Mechanism Behind Nicotine Dependency: Findings Point to Potential New Medications for Smokers Trying to Quit
LA JOLLA, CA--Many more people try to quit smoking than succeed in giving up this nicotine-delivering habit. Now, a group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has identified one neurobiological mechanism that contributes to nicotine dependence, and to the anxiety and craving experienced upon withdrawal. The findings also suggest a new approach to developing drugs that could help smokers quit. To read the release, please ask me for a copy.
fyi, The University of Iowa, Feb. 4, 2005
Feature article, Small Wonder
If Vicki Grassian were to pop open a vial of super-miniature iron oxide particles, the stuff would escape in a puff of dust and spread through the air. Read more...
History
fyi, Jan. 7, 2005
Feature article, Centuries of cartography trace Iowa's path to statehood
H.D. Hoover becomes so excited and enthusiastic when he talks about an exhibition of old maps in the University of Iowa Museum of Art that it’s hard to believe the retired professor did not spend his career teaching and studying geography or world history. Hoover, professor emeritus of education and former director of Iowa Testing Programs at The University of Iowa, is best known for his expertise on standardized tests that measure academic achievement. But if you’re lucky enough to find yourself in private audience with Hoover, ask him about maps and you’ll receive a fascinating lecture, filled with a scholar’s love for detail, about images that delight the eye as they tell us about the world.
Hoover is guest curator of The History of Iowa in the Art of Maps, an exhibition of 35 maps on view in the art museum’s Hoover-Paul Gallery through Jan. 30. Read more...
Iowa Alumni Magazine, August 2001
Feature article, Dispatches
If you look through her personal papers and ask about the shaky signature on her Red Cross enlistment forms, Kathy Ormond will tell you how, 32 years ago, she felt the heft of her pen turn to the weight of an iron ball in her hand. She'll remember the Red Cross recruiter smiling and reiterating a refrain of reassurance, words similar to those Ormond carefully chose when she wrote to her mother on March 29, 1968, a few days before her job interview at Red Cross headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia: "Red Cross people are well taken of, at a safe distance from any action."
Look at Ormond's 1968 passport photo, and you'll see a 21-year-old Red Cross volunteer beaming with confidence. This is the young woman, fresh from Virginia's Mary Washington College and a two-week training course, who walked alone across the sun-blasted tarmac at Travis Air Force Base in California, climbed aboard a dark green Braniff Boeing 707, and found an empty seat amon the rows of 18- and 19-year-old boys clad in Army brown. Her destination was the same as that of everybody else onboard: Tan Son Nuht Airfield, Saigon, Republic of South Vietnam.
Ormond's personal papers, including those from her 15 months as a volunteer during the Vietnam War, are among thousands of memorable yet little known stories that reside on closed shelves in University Libraries' main library. To read the article, please ask me for a copy.
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Community
Web site content for Red Ant, Inc., project: Teach GMCS: Your Gateway to Careers in Gallup-McKinley County (New Mexico), June 2007
Schools: Communities: Crownpoint
Serendipity delivers unexpected pleasures, but the pace of life in this small rural town 55 miles from Gallup gives its residents plenty of time to enjoy them.
South Carolina Dept. of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism, Press Release: Value Vacation, November 2007
Every year more than 30 million people flock to South Carolina and discover memorable vacations in scenic splendor, historical grandeur, and ample opportunities for fun. But they also owe their great getaways to exceptional value found at the pump, in bargain-priced accomodations, and in year-round outdoor-friendly weather. To read the press release, please ask me for a copy.
South Carolina Dept. of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism, Press Release: Military Museums and Historical Sites, November 2007
South Carolina, one of the original 13 American Colonies, is steeped in history. Its numerous battlefield sites and military museums, many of them found in particularly attractive parts of the state, offer an appreciation of South Carolina’s role in America’s wartime heritage, from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm. To read the press release, please ask me for a copy.
