Dream History Tour of Riverwest with Mathias Svalina

As part of his visit to Milwaukee Mathias Svalina will lead a dream history tour of Riverwest. This walking tour will begin at Woodland Pattern.

With the dream history tour, Svalina will guide folks through the neighborhood surrounding Woodland Pattern, pointing out places where things that never happened happened, and elucidating a few of the city’s imaginary histories. Modeled on normal city-history walking tours, but taking into account the political reductionism and erasures often found in civic history’s uses of the past, the dream-history tour mixes facts from history, surrealist invention, and outright silliness, encouraging participants to view their city with new forms of wonder and mythos.

Mathias Svalina is the author of eight books, most recently Thank You Terror, published by Big Lucks Books. His first short story collection, Comedy, will be published later in 2024. Svalina was a founding editor of Octopus Books and has led writing workshops in universities, libraries, community spaces, and in prisons. Since 2014 he has run a dream delivery service, traveling around the country to write and deliver dreams to subscribers. With the Dream Delivery Service he has worked with the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, the Poetry Foundation, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition, Hyperallergic, and the BBC World News.

Host or Publisher Woodland Pattern Book Center