Meet Elise Zelechowski, your fellow American

Get to know your rural neighbors, one weekly story at a time.

Issue 04 · November 12, 2026 · 7-minute read

Elise Zelechowski and her husband, Tony. Photo credit: Drew Shonka

Elise Zelechowski spent her life in Chicago as an environmental activist and social entrepreneur. Then, with two young kids and the pandemic rearranging work, she moved to Readstown, Wisconsin (pop: 381, as of 2025), where she and her husband make delicious ciders and wines, naturally and organically, at Las Mujeres.

I am honored to have Elise as our first MFA interview. Elise and I have had the pleasure of working together on advocacy projects in Wisconsin and I always learn so much from her. In fact, people like Elise inspired me to start this project — I want to give others the opportunity to meet Americans like her.

Elise’s own words appear in italics.

Elise Zelechowski did not plan to become a farmer. She had no grand plans of leaving Chicago. Her identity was deeply tied to the city — she had been deeply involved in Chicago city and civic life as an environmental activist, social entrepreneur, policymaker and along with her husband, co-owner of a restaurant. So, it came as a surprise even to the people closest to her that she made the decision to move to rural southwestern Wisconsin.

Elise says: We didn’t know that we were putting roots down when we first came here. We didn’t come into this with a grand plan. We were looking to just get some spaciousness. And reconnect with parts of ourselves that we had been separated from. That somatic experience of how we felt in this place was the foundation for our decision. And then as we started to get to know the people from coming up here, spending a lot of time just falling in love with the people and growing falling in love with the possibilities, it just made it more like the pieces started to come together.

We found this land that had been so lovingly stewarded by many families over the years and it presented itself for the kind of work that we had just only started daydreaming about really, which was farming fruit, grapes and apples, to make wines and ciders in a style that we really believe in. With Las Mujeres, we have produced a product that people really love and created a space for people to come together, to see the connection between what they’re drinking and how it was made, how the fruit was grown, and what the land looks like.

Photo Credit: Brendan Davis

Elise says: When I first moved here, the silence was deafening. I was so used to the soundscape of the city being the background track to my life. But, once I got over the shock, I became so much more tuned into myself and all that’s around me. Now, when I go back to Chicago, my senses are in overdrive – the smells, the people, the sounds, … I can see and experience so much in the span of an hour. It’s amazing, but after a few days, I am itching to get back to the quiet. It grounds me.

Elise still moves between both places. Her family and farm are in Wisconsin; and she has a lot of family in Chicago, as well as dear friends and many of her customers. These days she identifies most as a Wisconsin farmer but she appreciates how she can operate in different environments.

Elise lives in Vernon County, part of a hotly contested Congressional District, WI-03, that captured national attention. Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District covers most of the Driftless Area in southwestern and western Wisconsin. It is a true mixed district, containing the cities of Eau Claire, La Crosse, and Stevens Point, the exurbs of the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area, and vast swaths of rural land. The district is 57% rural (source).

This election season she received a steady stream of postcards, calls and texts daily. Despite the bitterness of the campaigns, what she hears from neighbors is simpler than the ads:

•  Affordability. People are unhappy with the rising gas, groceries and medical care costs. They’re concerned about making ends meet and the loss of critical services that they depend on. They’re worried about holding on to their farms and their rural way of life.

•  Decency: Her neighbors expect people to act with decency, and they’re fed up with the antics of elected officials.

In last week’s Midterms, this district flipped to the Democrats with Rebecca Cooke’s win over hard-line Republican, Derrick Van Orden. The district moved 14 points to the left compared to the 2024 presidential election.

Image source: explorelacrosse.com

The Driftless is a hilly landscape that spans southwest Wisconsin, northwest Illinois, northeast Iowa and southeast Minnesota. It’s incredibly unique because the glaciers went around this area when ice covered this part of North America during the Last Glacial Period. Thus, this area has no glacial drift (silt, rock, gravel left behind by glaciers), giving this area the name: ‘Driftless’.

Image source: explorelacrosse.com

When people think of Midwest farmland, they usually think of flat fields that go on forever, but the Driftless landscape is different: steep hills, forested ridges, deeply carved river valleys, spring-fed waterfalls and cold-water trout streams. It marks the transitional boundary of the Midwest, where the land shifts from forests to savannas (or plains).

Image source: hillsborowi.com

This region has especially good conditions for growing crops and grazing livestock. In recent years it has become well-known for its organic produce, dairy, beef, and other food products.

Elise says: We landed in a very special place. This part of Wisconsin has a really active community, a population of both progressives and conservatives, who are all united by love of place and a deep desire to protect this place. That’s where a lot of interesting alliances are forming between conservative, progressive, libertarians around issues of land use, water pollution, and conservation.

What unites people is that they want to be able to eat food from their land; they want to be able to drink the water from their wells; they want to live without the constant humming of technology and electricity.

That has produced cross-party and cross-county alliances against frac sand mines, data center proposals and high-voltage transmission lines. Some of these fights pit rural folks against urban environmentalists, who are urging rural residents to “take one for the team” and accept massive infrastructure development in the name of cleaner energy. These are big fights and rural organizers are stretched thin, doing this work on the margins of their days after work and farming.

We’ll be taking a deeper look at the divisive topic of transmission lines and energy access in a future issue.

Elise learned to bridge divides and hold space for various perspectives in her previous work, as a leader in city government, facilitating stakeholder dialogues to inform policy change and in a corporate role at a global software consultancy.

Elise says: I think what this work requires is being able to hold everybody’s truth. In my global role, I had to understand and facilitate dialogues between so many diverse perspectives – technologists in China and Ecuador, India and Brazil and 14 other countries where we had offices. To do that, I had to be curious and open to people and hold the line of being intolerant of intolerance.

Elise has taken that practice with her to rural Wisconsin, where she actively employs curiosity to connect with her neighbors, looking to understand what motivates them, what they gravitate to, and what makes them angry.

Elise says: I really love people and I am interested in what motivates them and makes them tick – social structures, how communities are formed and what makes them thrive, and how relationships are built and maintained.

That interest in people has led Elise to thinking about how people define “collective”:

Elise says: Who counts as “us”? Urban progressives often picture a large group of strangers, united by a common issue or activity. Rural life runs on people you know. Not only are rural folks partnering on collective ideas (like land stewardship and water protection), they also practice collective living. Rural living requires that you depend on your neighbor, on your community. Especially with climate change and the way areas like Southwest Wisconsin are being impacted by extreme weather and flooding.

There is immense power in breaking rural and urban boundaries to form bigger tents. Elise’s approach has been: practicing curiosity, getting closer to the land, and trying to make systems visible. It’s imperative that urban people commit to better understanding of the systems that connect urban and rural people and places. Resources are a great place to start – food, energy, water. That work starts with visiting rural communities and being open and curious, and listening. You’d be surprised how much common ground there actually is.

In next week’s issue we will hear more from Elise on the power of visibility in bridging the rural-urban divide.

Thank you for being here.

Nina

KNOW

The Driftless is the part of the Midwest the glaciers skipped, and its unique Karst limestone lets pollution reach groundwater fast.

CONSUME

Check out Las Mujeres’ mission and approach. If you’re in the Midwest, taste their ciders and wines here.

DO

This week, make a plan to visit a rural community. Strike up a conversation and be curious.

Upgrade to Become a Founding Fellow American for $70 a year and get the full This Week in Rural America: the best rural reporting from local newsrooms and national outlets, read and annotated for you, so you never have to hunt for the stories that rarely reach an urban feed.

ICE in Kansas: Impacts on the Midterms and American beef supply

Meatingplace, Nov 9, 2026

A prominent producer connected the Kansas Midterm results to expansive ICE raids in the state. Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association, posted a video linking the election results to ICE activity that led to more than 100 arrests. These arrests prompted National Beef to partially delay shifts at its processing facility in Liberal, Kansas. Teagarden said that the ICE actions and arrests “sent a shockwave across our industry that disrupted beef processing…making beef prices go up.” We all feel the direct impacts of these heartbreaking and cruel raids. These workers put food on our tables. They are important members of our communities. And, if ICE raids disrupt their work, our wallets are directly impacted at the grocery store.