Ever wondered what professors are doing when they aren’t teaching classes or grading papers? In the case of justice and peace professor Mike Klein and English professor Heather Bouwman, that mystery has been solved.

Klein and Bouwman are just two of many St. Thomas professors who have published books, but unlike most other professors, they don’t limit themselves to just academia. Klein recently published a coloring book depicting scenes from the North Shore of Lake Superior and Bouwman published a historical fantasy book for young adults.

Both professors chose to try creative writing or drawing as a way to distract themselves from their heavy loads of academic work.

“I really wanted to try my hand at writing a story,” Bouwman said. “I wanted something that felt really different than the intense scholarship that I was doing at the time.”

Bouwman began writing stories in graduate school while simultaneously working on her dissertation, a 300-page critical analysis of early writing by English settlers.

Klein, a Justice and Peace professor, began working on his coloring book in order to take a break from the stress of current events.

“I do a lot of writing, and between the politics of our day and the state of our democracy, I needed a distraction,” Klein said.

Bouwman teaches a wide variety of English classes, including early American literature, core classes, creative writing and writing for children. She got her doctorate degree in English from the University of Illinois-Urbana with a specialty in early American literature.

This emphasis on history shows through in her books, which incorporate elements of fantasy along with history and include references to immigration.

“As I was writing, there were a lot of highly publicized refugee situations happening in the world,” Bouwman said. “I’ve always been interested in immigrant literature.”
Bouwman published her first book, “The Remarkable & Very True Story of Lucy & Snowcap,” in 2008, and her second, “A Crack in the Sea,” in 2017.

“They’re both historical fantasy,” Bouwman said. “They’re set in the same world, but they’re not sequels, they’re separate books.”

Klein also drew from his interests outside of academia to inspire his book. He has deep ties to the North Shore, and began drawing photographs and memories of the North Shore during January Term as a way to relax.

“My wife and daughter both looked at it and said it kind of looks like those coloring books we’ve been getting,” Klein said. “The more I drew, the more they said, ‘Why don’t you make a coloring book?’ and I did.”

Klein didn’t start out in the Justice and Peace department, originally graduating from St. Thomas with majors in studio arts and theology. He then worked in Catholic parishes and St. Thomas Campus Ministry.

Through Campus Ministry, Klein started taking students on Vision trips, and when some of the trips developed into classes he enjoyed teaching so much that he got his masters and doctorate degrees in education.

He continues to practice art whenever he can, mainly through mural projects around the community. This summer, he finished a 3,000-square-foot mural at Saint Mark’s Catholic church, which lies just a few blocks from St. Thomas.

His next project is still art but is no coloring book.

“I’m working right now with the Pillsbury United Communities for a project called ‘Guns in the Hands of Artists,’ where they’ve taken guns off the street of Minneapolis,” Klein said. “Now myself and 39 other artists are making sculptures out of those guns to talk about the role of guns in our culture.”

Solveig Rennan can be reached at renn6664@stthomas.edu