Greg Venne

A descendant of Catholic French Canadians, Greg Venne can draw a somewhat similar family tree to that of his fictional family, the Prevetts of Twin Pines, Wisconsin. With an older brother, his great grandfather walked from eastern Canada to Racine Wisconsin some 12 years after the end of the Civil War. Eventually his grandfather married and settled in Tomahawk, Wisconsin near the banks of the Wisconsin River. Literally, A block away from the Catholic Church, and figuratively, right at the foot of the altar, they raised eight children.

Venne sat at the feet of a host of Great Aunts who never married. He listened to his father and to his mother describe hard times. “One time all my mother had in our little shack was five kids and a bag of beans.” Venne’s mother held her hands no more that six inches apart, making a frame for the lone bag of beans. With tedious detail, Venne recalls funeral after funeral, all punctuated by the smell and the sound of the Funeral Mass.

With a label used generations before, Venne himself would be described as “fallen away.” Most all his writing chafes against that rub. When the “fallen” gather at a party and begin the individual stories, Venne explains he is more apt to remain silent and listen.

Going to college resulted from a stroke of luck when a new union contract allowed Venne’s father to lend him $300 a year. The rest Venne made working in a grocery store. From the stock room to the classroom came easy in 1970. Teachers of that era assimilated to the social upheaval with sincere aspirations and high energy.

To fill out the last decade of his teaching career, Venne directed the Writing Center for the University of Wisconsin, Marathon Campus. Between student conferences, he filled notebooks with verbal sketches, a few short stories, and rambling notes on novels-to-be.

Venne argues he is not obsessed with not being Catholic any longer. In the long process of leaving a faith, however, he became intrigued with the many moral issues. Consequently, the Prevetts are entangled in their human desires, their natural goodness, and creeds in abundance.