New Book Reflects on Luther and Decorah
In November, interim provost and professor of physics Jeff Wilkerson published 23 Woodcock in 22 Years: Reflections on Hunting, the Night Sky, and Our Place in the Universe with the University of Iowa Press. The book revolves around his time in Luther classrooms and on Decorah public lands, so we asked him to tell us about writing it.Â

Physics professor Jeff Wilkerson's new book is, in part, a reflection on Luther College and Decorah, Iowa.
The day I was teaching physics for the very first time in graduate school, I had what I refer to as a lightbulb-over-the-head moment. I realized that if I could build my life around replicating that experience with students, I would have won the lottery. Naively, I thought place didn’t matter, so long as I could work shoulder-to-shoulder with students in the classroom and the laboratory.
Fortune smiled on me when that moment in the classroom—melded with a desire to find a location close to dark skies and with a planetarium—landed me at Luther, a special place situated in a special space.
Nearly 28 years later, I can see that, to borrow from John Denver, I was born in the summer of my thirty-third year, coming home to a place I’d never been. And not to try upstaging Lou Gehrig, but I am truly the luckiest person on the face of the earth for having had the chance to carve out a career, to build a life, at Luther and in the paradise that surrounds the college.
Now, my good fortune continues with the publication of my book. The metronome that keeps time in the story is the opportunity to go afield each autumn to bag a woodcock, a migratory upland bird, for a special holiday meal. The entire book, and thus this woodcock hunting spine, grew from a single short story I wrote for the Ruffed Grouse and American Woodcock Society. After writing that story, I awoke each day with a compulsion to write, and more stories began to appear, as did, perhaps, a thread weaving the stories into a tapestry about time and place, grounding and evolution, in the forests and fields of northeast Iowa and in the classroom and research lab.
At some point in the writing, I asked my wife, professor of religion Kristin Swanson, “Is this a book?” Apparently it was and, after decades of collaborative work in the lab with physics students, I got the reward of working with talented art students, Ava Shively ’24, who produced the cover art, and L’Engle Charis-Carlson ’26, who provided sketches for the text.