KINGSTON, Wis. — On the second Tuesday of every month, if the boiler at the Mill Pond Library holds out and nobody calls in sick, six or seven people push together the tables in the children’s reading nook and talk about writing. They are not a book club. They are a writers’ group, and they have been meeting here for eleven years, ever since the local community college canceled its continuing education creative writing course and left a dozen retirees, a dairy farmer’s wife, and a part-time church organist without a place to read their work aloud.

The group has no budget. The library director, Elaine Schroeder, buys coffee out of her own pocket and prints handouts on the same aging laser printer that spits out overdue notices. Last year, the library’s total programming budget for adults was $1,200. That covered a Medicare information session, a birdwatching talk, and the writers’ group. Nothing was left for a visiting author, a self-publishing workshop, or even a subscription to a literary magazine. When a patron asked Schroeder for help coming up with a title for a memoir she was finishing, Schroeder sat down with her at a public computer and walked her through a free online book title ideas that fit the project, because the library couldn’t afford to bring in an editor or a writing coach.

That moment, repeated in small libraries across Wisconsin, is what this story is about. Not the big-city branches with their 3D printers and their grant-funded makerspaces, but the 380 small and rural public libraries that serve townships, villages, and unincorporated crossroads where the library is the last free, public-facing creative resource left. When state funding formulas don’t keep pace with demand, it’s the writers’ groups, the local history projects, and the self-publishing workshops that disappear first. And when they go, something else goes with them: the belief that your story, the one about the farm auction or the factory closing or the year you spent caring for your mother, is worth telling at all.

The Numbers Behind the Shelves

Wisconsin’s public libraries are funded through a patchwork of county reimbursements, municipal appropriations, and state aids that haven’t seen a meaningful increase in over a decade. The Department of Public Instruction’s most recent data shows that total state funding for public library systems was $17.2 million in 2025, essentially flat since 2013 when adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of everything—books, databases, internet bandwidth, staff—has climbed. Libraries have responded by cutting where cuts are least visible: adult programming, community outreach, and the kind of open-ended creative support that doesn’t fit neatly into a grant application.

At the Mill Pond Library, circulation data tells part of the story. In 2024, the library checked out 14,200 items, down from 16,800 in 2019. But that decline masks a shift: the number of patrons using the library’s public computers for writing projects, genealogy research, and self-publishing tasks rose 22 percent over the same period. People aren’t checking out fewer books because they’ve stopped reading. They’re coming to the library to write—and finding fewer resources to help them do it.

“We get a lot of people who’ve written a family history or a book of poems and they want to know how to get it printed,” Schroeder told me. “I can show them how to format a Word document, but I’m not an editor. I’m not a publisher. I’m one person with a master’s degree in library science and a part-time assistant who works twelve hours a week.”

The Writers’ Group That Wouldn’t Quit

The Mill Pond writers’ group started in 2014, after the community college in nearby Beaver Dam dropped its non-credit writing course. The course had cost $89 per person and drew about a dozen students each semester. When it ended, a retired English teacher named Margaret Halverson asked Schroeder if she could use the library’s meeting room for a free, informal group. Schroeder said yes, and Halverson put up a flyer at the post office and the gas station.

Eleven years later, Halverson is 78 and still leading the group, though she missed three meetings last winter after a hip replacement. The group’s membership has fluctuated between four and nine people. Current regulars include a former factory worker from Markesan who is writing a novel about the 1970s farm crisis, a woman in her sixties compiling her grandmother’s recipes and stories, and a younger man who drives from Montello to workshop his science fiction manuscript. None of them has an agent. None has published traditionally. Two have self-published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, and both credit the group with giving them the confidence to hit “upload.”

“I wouldn’t have finished my book without this group,” said Diane Kasten, the former factory worker. “I didn’t know anything about point of view or pacing. Margaret taught me that. And Elaine let us keep meeting even when the library had to close early because of the snow.”

Kasten’s novel, The Last Load, has sold 47 copies, mostly to friends and family. She doesn’t care about the sales. “I wrote it for my kids,” she said. “So they’d know what it was like.”

What the Budget Actually Buys

To understand what’s at stake, it helps to look at the line items. The Mill Pond Library’s total operating budget for 2025 is $98,000. Of that, $62,000 goes to salaries and benefits for Schroeder and her part-time assistant. Another $12,000 covers utilities, insurance, and maintenance on a building that dates to 1923. That leaves $24,000 for everything else: books, DVDs, digital subscriptions, programming, supplies, and the unexpected expenses—a broken water heater in January, a roof leak in April—that eat into the margins.

The library belongs to the South Central Library System, which provides shared databases, interlibrary loan delivery, and some tech support. But the system’s funding is also flat, and its priorities have shifted toward digital equity initiatives—broadband hotspots, telehealth privacy booths—that, while valuable, don’t fund a writers’ workshop or a local history digitization project.

“The state talks a lot about supporting rural communities, but the money doesn’t follow the talk,” said John Thompson, director of the Wisconsin Library Association. “When a small library loses its adult programming, it loses a piece of its identity. It becomes a place where people pick up holds and use the Wi-Fi, not a place where they create something.”

The Tools Patrons Turn To

When professional editorial help is out of reach—and in rural Wisconsin, it almost always is—patrons turn to what’s free and available online. Schroeder keeps a list of bookmarked sites on the library’s public computers: grammar checkers, formatting guides, and a handful of title generators. The most popular, she said, is a free tool that lets users input their genre, tone, and core conflict and returns a list of possible titles. “People get stuck on the title,” Schroeder said. “They’ve written the whole thing and they can’t name it. That tool gives them a starting point.”

One such resource, Reedsy’s Book Title Generator, offers genre-specific suggestions and explains what each title conveys. It’s the kind of thing a professional editor might do in a one-on-one consultation, but for a patron in Kingston, it’s the difference between a finished manuscript sitting in a drawer and a book with a name on the cover. Schroeder has shown it to at least a dozen patrons in the past two years, including a man writing a Civil War novel and a woman compiling her late husband’s letters from Vietnam.

These tools raise questions, of course. The Authors Guild, in its AI Best Practices for Authors, cautions writers to understand the ethical and legal boundaries of using AI-assisted tools, noting that many large language models have been trained on pirated works. But for a retired farmer in Green Lake County who just wants to title his memoir, the debate over AI training data feels abstract. He’s not trying to replace a human editor. He’s trying to find one in the first place.

The Local History That Might Not Get Saved

The writers’ group isn’t the only creative project hanging by a thread. In 2022, Schroeder applied for a $2,500 grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council to digitize a collection of oral histories recorded by a local historian in the 1980s. The historian, now deceased, had interviewed dairy farmers, cheesemakers, and the last surviving employees of the Kingston grain elevator. The tapes were stored in a cardboard box in the library’s basement, slowly degrading.

Schroeder got the grant. She hired a part-time intern from UW-Madison’s iSchool to digitize the recordings and create metadata. The project took six months and produced a searchable online archive that now lives on the library’s website. But the grant was one-time money. There’s no funding to continue the project, to record new interviews, or to transcribe the existing ones. The archive is there, but it’s static—a snapshot of a community that keeps changing.

“We have people coming in who want to tell their own stories now,” Schroeder said. “Farmers who are selling their herds. People who worked at the canning factory before it closed. I don’t have the equipment or the time to record them properly. I give them a list of questions and tell them to use their phones.”

What Other States Are Doing

Wisconsin isn’t alone in underfunding rural library programming, but some states have found ways to direct resources toward creative and cultural work. Minnesota’s Legacy Amendment, passed in 2008, dedicates a portion of sales tax revenue to arts and cultural heritage, including library programs. In 2024, Minnesota distributed $3.2 million in Legacy funds to libraries for local history projects, writers’ workshops, and community art initiatives. A library in a town the size of Kingston could apply for up to $10,000 a year.

Wisconsin has no equivalent dedicated funding stream. The state’s library aids are distributed through a formula based on county population and local funding effort, which means that a small, low-income community like Kingston receives less than a wealthy suburb with a larger tax base. The result is a system that rewards communities that already have resources and leaves the rest to scrape by.

“We’re not asking for a handout,” Schroeder said. “We’re asking for a formula that recognizes that a library in a town of 1,200 people is doing different work than a library in a city of 50,000. We’re the only place in town where you can come in, sit down, and write. That’s worth something.”

The Patron Who Published Anyway

Last fall, a man in his seventies named Harold Brekke walked into the Mill Pond Library carrying a spiral-bound manuscript. He had written a novel about a Norwegian immigrant family settling in Dane County in the 1850s, based loosely on his own ancestors. He wanted to know how to get it published.

Schroeder showed him the basics of Kindle Direct Publishing: how to format the manuscript, how to design a cover using Amazon’s free tools, how to set a price. She helped him brainstorm book title ideas using the online generator, and he settled on The Land They Left. He uploaded the book in December. By March, he had sold 23 copies and given away a dozen more to family members.

“I don’t care if I never sell another one,” Brekke told me. “I wrote it for my grandkids. Now they’ll know where they came from. And I couldn’t have done it without Elaine.”

Brekke’s story is the best-case scenario. But for every Harold Brekke, there are patrons who walk in with a manuscript and walk out discouraged because the library can’t offer more than a sympathetic ear and a list of websites. Schroeder keeps a folder of resources—print-on-demand services, freelance editor directories, writing contest listings—but she knows that most of her patrons can’t afford to pay an editor $500 for a manuscript review. The free tools are all they have.

The Policy Gap

The Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee is currently reviewing the 2026-27 state budget, which includes a proposed 2 percent increase in library system aids. If approved, that would bring total state funding to roughly $17.5 million—still below 2013 levels in real dollars. The Wisconsin Library Association is pushing for a 5 percent increase, which would add about $860,000 statewide. Even that, Thompson said, would only begin to address the backlog of unmet needs.

“We’re not talking about luxuries,” Thompson said. “We’re talking about the ability of a library to offer a writing workshop, to digitize a local history collection, to keep the doors open on Saturdays. These are the things that make a library a library.”

In the meantime, libraries like Mill Pond are doing what they’ve always done: making do. Schroeder has applied for three grants this year, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities that would fund a series of writing workshops for veterans. She won’t know until August whether she got it. If she doesn’t, the writers’ group will keep meeting, the coffee will keep flowing, and the laser printer will keep spitting out handouts, one page at a time.

What’s Lost When the Workshop Disappears

It’s easy to look at a writers’ group in a small-town library and see a nice thing, a pleasant amenity, a feel-good story. But that misses the point. When a library can’t afford to support creative work, it stops being a place where people make things and becomes a place where they consume things. The distinction matters.

Margaret Halverson, the retired English teacher who started the Mill Pond group, put it this way: “Writing is how we figure out what we think. If people don’t have a place to do that together, they do it alone, or they don’t do it at all. And then those stories just disappear.”

She paused, looking around the children’s reading nook with its worn carpet and its hand-drawn sign that says “Writers’ Group—All Welcome.”

“I’m 78,” she said. “I’m not going to be doing this forever. Somebody needs to take it over. But who’s going to do it if there’s no money to pay them, no budget to support them, and no recognition that it matters?”

It’s a question that hangs over the Mill Pond Library and hundreds of others like it across Wisconsin. The answer, for now, is a handful of volunteers, a part-time librarian, and a free online title generator that helps a retired farmer name his book. It’s not enough. But it’s what they have.