Aryn Henning Nichols

Decorah music educators Nicole and Matt Cody see firsthand how music can act like a glue, binding a community together in harmony – both figurative and literal.

The two met in 2009 at Decorah Community Schools, where they both work – Matt as associate director of bands for grades five through 12, and Nicole as the high school orchestra teacher. They were married in 2012 and now have two children, Caroline (age 8) and Sullivan (age 3), plus a Weimaraner named Greta. 

Matt and Nicole’s partnership in life and in music has also brought an extraordinary gift to the larger Decorah community: the Oneota Valley Community Orchestra (OVCO). Matt founded the orchestra in 2014 and is its music director; Nicole, who is the orchestra’s principal second violin, has been a key resource enabling her husband to realize his original vision and much more, creating a vibrant and inclusive community of music lovers and learners.

Creating the Magic of Orchestra

Made up entirely of volunteers, the 60-member OVCO offers three to four concerts each season. Over the past 10 years, Matt has led the group in performing symphonies, concertos, even a full opera (Amahl and the Night Visitors) and the Mozart Requiem (with community singing group the Decorah Chorale).  

Matt hatched the idea of starting a Decorah-based community orchestra while he was working on his master’s in conducting at Colorado State University. He really wanted to conduct an orchestra, and a professor suggested that a community orchestra could be an option for gaining experience. 

Nicole remembers when he floated the idea to her. It happened on the long drive back to Decorah from his final summer residency in Fort Collins. A couple comfortable with some good-natured ribbing, she laughed in disbelief. Nicole plays violin in the symphony orchestras of Waterloo-Cedar Falls and La Crosse, but it sounded a little ridiculous to her that a town as small as Decorah could have enough musicians to fill an orchestra. 

Still, Matt forged ahead. He posted on social media that he was interested in starting an orchestra, and collected contact information from those who were interested. Within three weeks he had enough people signed up. Matt was amazed, he says, and even more amazed when they started rehearsing and he heard what everyone could do. 

From the beginning until now, the orchestra’s members have ranged from seasoned professionals, to college music majors who went on to other careers, to adult beginners, to college and high school students. 

“The longevity of the orchestra is impressive – the contributions of everybody, from beginners to professionals to students,” Nicole says. “I think that’s so cool.” 

She tells the story of Sue Drilling, a now-retired Luther College administrator who played piano, organ, and guitar, and picked up the violin in 2010. One of her teachers, a former student of Nicole’s, told her about the orchestra. 

“I thought there’s no way I could play orchestral music, but Matt invited me to try it out,” says Sue. “I loved it! The first concert was a mountaintop experience for me.” 

Benjamin Kratchmer, the orchestra’s principal violist and a once-upon-a-time music major, expressed the thrill of orchestral music-making on an episode of Inspire(d)’s podcast, Rhymes with Decorah, that featured OVCO. “Getting to play symphonic literature that I never thought I’d get to do again, and collaborating with dozens of different people across the time and space of a stage, that is a magic that nothing else in my life has ever quite captured. And I get to do that season after season,” he says.

Craig Hultgren retired to Decorah after 33 years of playing with the Alabama Symphony. He joined the OVCO in 2015. Currently the principal cello and president of the orchestra’s board of directors, Craig sees the great value of what Matt and Nicole bring to the community. “They are community leaders,” he says. “To have OVCO in a town of 8,000 people is a remarkable feat. They’ve brought together the best crop of musicians in an area where music is greatly appreciated. And Matt makes it a fun place to come and play and get better. I’m so proud of the work he’s brought the orchestra through.” 

Integrating All Ages Around Music

Nicole and Matt see a virtuous cycle in the high school and community music programs they lead. 

“Having a strong high school music program is an incredibly important part of having a strong school district, because the continuity of students learning together throughout their school years is unique to music programs,” says Nicole. “Orchestra, band, and choir is home away from home for many of these kids. It’s a place that’s welcoming to all students.” 

At the same time, the Codys see that today’s high school students experience so many pressures in their lives that they often think of quitting music, even though they love it. 

“That’s why community support is important,” Nicole says. Not only the fantastic Decorah Music Boosters, to whom the Codys give a huge amount of credit for their support; but also the adults of the community who continue to play their instruments and sing with passion and gusto as they pursue other careers. 

Nicole says that the high school students who attend or play in OVCO concerts are amazed when they see their soccer coach, their doctor, and other community members playing. “When students see non-music professionals in music groups, it encourages them to know they can be in another career and still play music,” Matt says. 

Matt and Nicole have fostered young musicians of all kinds going out into the world to build vibrant communities. Some play with their parents in the OVCO, like violinist Erik Sessions and violist Sara Peterson and their daughter, violinist Meg Sessions, a 2024 Luther graduate. Others return to take center stage, like Decorah High School and OVCO alumna, Carina Yee. In February, she played the Tschaikovsky violin concerto with her hometown orchestra, OVCO, after studying at some of the best music conservatories of the US – the Eastman School of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music. 

“Matt and Nicole are pillars of the musical community in Decorah,” affirms Craig Hultgren. “And OVCO is a gem for our community.” 

Laura Barlament

Laura Barlament is one of the non-musical professionals who love to play their instruments. She’s the executive director of strategic marketing and communications for Luther College, and plays flute and piccolo in many OVCO concerts. 

Paula the Cow thinks it’s high time the Hollywood sign moooooves on over.

The 25-foot-tall cow mural exudes charm and more than a dash of whimsy, and has been welcoming folks to downtown Waukon, Iowa, since artist Val Miller painted her in 2008. 

Paula may not be flashy, but she’s fun, and she’s handled the tests of time beautifully. The same could be said of Paula’s creator, Val, who has been painting cow art (and more) through her business, Steel Cow, for two decades.

The artist has been “obsessed” (her word) with cows since the age of 17. Though she was raised in rural Waukon, home to many cows, it was a family trip to Switzerland that instilled the deep appreciation of the creatures. She was riding on the back of a Harley motorcycle when she first heard the jingle of cow bells through the Alps. “We stopped for a picnic in a meadow, and several giant and gentle Brown Swiss cows came up to us there,” recalls Val, the trip photographer. “They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen, and from that day forward, almost all of the photos I took were of cows!”

The fascination wasn’t fleeting. When Val began her studio art major at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, she started painting cows. That was in 1998, and she hasn’t stopped since (even during her later studies at the University of Iowa to earn a bachelor’s degree in marketing). Today, her original works of cows – each, like Paula, bearing an equally original name – grace the walls of homes, shops, galleries, barns, and street corners across the United States and beyond.

“Twenty years ago, almost no one put pictures of cows on their walls – at least not mainstream, non-farm people anyway,” says Val. “It was fun to paint something that most other image makers overlooked, and I have really liked bringing attention to this amazing animal.”

Over the years, she expanded her subject palette to include an array of other animals, including pigs, chicken, sheep, goats, and various wildlife. “I pick which animal I want to paint next, make an appointment to go find that animal at a farm somewhere, go meet the animal, and take lots of mental notes and photos,” says Val. “Then I bring the photos back to look at, pick the one that speaks to me, make a pencil drawing on my canvas, and start painting.” The unique names come later. “I always give my paintings of animals new names and alter egos, even if they have their own names in real life,” she continues. “And I never name them until the painting is finished and I can see what fits.”

The process may not be quick, but it has worked well for Val, who operates out of a brick-and-mortar studio that she and her husband, Josh, a sculptor and cabinetmaker whom she met at Bradley, opened on Allamakee Street. Back then, they worked downstairs in the gorgeous gallery and studio spaces, and lived upstairs in an apartment largely designed by Josh. 

The beginning wasn’t easy – “We started Steel Cow scared, before we were ready, at a time when many people said to our faces we shouldn’t start something until we had more experience or we had money in the bank,” she admits – but the couple’s talent, tenacity, grit, and resilience have long since made them a fixture of the small Iowa town. And Val is grateful for that. “I’m so humbled by how our community has embraced us over the years,” she says. “Perhaps the biggest success is knowing that we are home, that we have always been home, that the people who live here are so wonderful, and that we didn’t have to move away to have our dream come true.”

The couple’s resilience and the community’s support clicked into overdrive in April 2021 and again in February 2022, when two successive fires at the studio building (built in the 1920s by Val’s ancestors) threatened to destroy the dream Val and Josh worked so hard to build for one another and their three active sons, Edison, Harrison, and Ellison. Luckily, the family had moved from their downtown apartment to an acreage outside of Waukon in 2018, so they still had a place to lay their heads after long hours working through the damage. The first fire broke out on the main floor of their building and took a solid eight months to “get back to normal.” The second consumed two buildings next door and left theirs with heavy water, smoke, and structural damage that took even longer to repair. “We didn’t know for over a year if our building was even going to be able to stand the test of time or would have to be torn down as the structural stability of our outside wall was in question,” she says. “…It was hard.”

And while it would have been easy (and understandable) for Val to live in a victim mentality, she refused. “Navigating the fires and multiple years in a row of their physical, financial, and momentum losses – and not letting the extra work or negativity sink into my happiness and sense of self – is what I would consider a great success on a personal level,” she says.

As she was coping with those unexpected setbacks, Val dove deeper into a passion she and her family had discovered quite unexpectedly in 2020: flowers, both growing and painting them. That summer, as businesses were forced to adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic, she decided to take a break from painting to plant flowers and open a self-serve flower cart. Val soon felt far less lonely and far less frustrated, feelings that had been building before the pandemic even started. “While the world was falling apart with Covid and most everyone around me was…getting mad at everyone and everything, I was getting better, loads better, every day,” she says. “I largely ignored what was going on in the outside world around me and listened to podcasts and trainings on mindset while I was out in the garden.”

Flowers became a new obsession – especially pink peonies, which she calls “the perfect flower.”

“When I look at them, I see so much beauty that I never feel sad,” Val explains. “They are fluffy and comfortable. They are exciting and unpredictable. They start off so small and then get so gigantic. The petals look like they are dancing.”

How could she not be inspired by these flowers? She took and studied photos of peonies and other flowers and delved into various resources on how to grow and cut them. And, eventually, she began to paint them in 2024. “I took photos of flowers daily for about three summers, but I resisted painting them because I thought they would take up so much time,” she says. “Ultimately, though, I realized I’m a painter and I should actually paint them.”

The happiness she finds from flowers, along with the mindset work she did in recent years, inspired Val to start an online painting club, “Garden Art Therapy,” in which she helps beginners create garden-themed paintings. “I realized that I have a lot to share and to teach and that I wanted to guide others to use painting as a way of stress relief,” Val says. “Painting is how I make sense of the world.” 

And as if growing (and painting!) flowers, painting farm animals, running a business, and raising three boys weren’t enough, Val and Josh have launched yet another endeavor: a lavender farm. Why lavender? “I love it and all the products you can make from it,” Val says. 

The couple has more than 1,000 lavender plants (in addition to cut flowers and wildflowers) growing on their 11 acres outside Waukon and are working on a building to house a future lavender farm shop. They’re not ready to open the farm up to visitors just yet, but folks can watch steelcowlavenderfarm.com for updates.

In the meantime, Val continues to find happiness and fulfillment in her life’s work by following what she loves. 

“Being an artist is really the only thing I have ever wanted to do,” she says. “And I am thankful to be living my dream – I have more dreams now, dreams I’m working on side by side with that first one, and I am finding fulfillment in working towards something new.”

Sara Friedl-Putnam

Sara Friedl-Putnam remembers first viewing Val Miller’s artwork decades ago at a joint show held in Waukon, Iowa, with the late photographer Larsh Bristol, one of Val’s earliest supporters. She has since bought several of Val’s pieces for herself and for her family, including a “Maddie” cow portrait that hangs in her home. 

Learn More

Val Miller’s artwork can be purchased online at steelcow.com and at Agora Arts in Decorah, Iowa. While the “Garden Art Therapy” club is currently closed to new members, it will open up again at different times throughout the year. Information can be found on Steel Cow’s social media (Facebook & Instagram) and at steelcowlavenderfarm.com. 

See Val’s studio in person during the 27th Annual Northeast Iowa Artists’ Studio Tour, October 11, 12, and 13, 2024. Find details at www.iowaarttour.com. 

8 THINGS ABOUT HOW WE ROLL & WHAT WE BELIEVE IN

By Val Miller (edited for length – see the full text here)

1. Family is at the Top
We choose family as our top priority and continue to do so.
2. We are Playful
We don’t take life too seriously – it’s TOO SHORT. We are finding out what makes us happy and doing more of that.
3. Memories are Powerful
Memories have the ability to transport us to places we have been and to people we have been with. Which is a lovely thing.
4. Local Blooms are Amazing
They have completely knocked our socks off – be careful – they may knock yours off too!
5. Flowers are a Powerful Way to Connect Us All
We connect with the sun, rain, soil and nature when we grow flowers. When we share them, we connect with people.
6. Art Should be Part of Everyday Living and It’s for Everyone 
We NEED to feel inspired and awed – and art does this.
7. We are Good at What We Do
Basically – WE CARE. We have a combined 40 years of art experience and two art degrees between the two of us and have shipped tens of thousands of prints all over the country and world.
8. You’re Never too Old (or Young) to Learn Something New or Remember Something you Once Knew
Time is a funny thing and most of us have preconceived notions about what we should or shouldn’t be doing at various stages of our lives. I have awakened so many things just by trying something NEW.

Fall 2024 Inspire(d)!

Welcome to the 78th issue of Inspire(d) Magazine! We’ve been making this publication for 17 years, y’all! That’s bananas. It’s been a joy – and yes, an inspiration – to bring positive news to our region all these years.

But just like any business, it’s taken a lot of resilience to keep at it, and there have definitely been times we’ve needed a little encouragement. Thus, we’ve made an issue dedicated to encouraging you all to find hope and resilience, so you can keep working toward all you believe in. 

Our cover was created by well-known local artist Val Miller. She and her husband, Josh, moved to Val’s hometown of Waukon, Iowa, and created Steel Cow two decades ago. We have been inspired by this fellow married couple over and over again as they navigate the ups and downs of life, art, and entrepreneurship. And we have admired their resilience and willingness to keep standing back up and working toward their dreams. 

Our dreams are what gives us hope. Mental health writer Olivia Lynn Schnur asks us, “What is your reason for waking up in the morning?” as she helps us discover our “why” – what gives us hope and pushes us to be resilient.

Our daughter, Roxie, always gives us hope. We asked her to write another Future Focused essay before she heads into sixth grade this year. This one is about what inspiration means to her. It felt right to have her perspective in this fall anniversary issue especially, as this publication has been a family affair from the very beginning. 

You can see some highlights of the Inspire(d) timeline in a fun retrospective I put together – and then, if you’re willing, we’d love for you to take our survey (survey now closed!) so we can learn more about you all and what you’re looking to read in future Inspire(d)s.

We will always keep featuring community builders in the region, though, because creating a community where others feel a sense of connection and belonging is one of the most important things we can do in this life. We’ve got a great line-up this issue.

Back-to-school time makes it feel extra fitting to feature Decorah music educators and community builders Matt & Nicole Cody. They not only lead local students in musical endeavors, they have also created a space for community members to engage their musical passions through the Oneota Valley Community Orchestra. 

Dave Dudek in Chatfield, Minnesota, has been cutting hair and keeping up with community conversations for many years in his business, Dave’s Barbershop.

Paul Reardon loves how bikes bring people together. While he lives in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he’s launching a new gravel ride across the river in Hokah, Minnesota. The Old Fashioned Gravel ride is sure to be some old-fashioned fun.

We have also been inspired by Laree Schouweiler’s work that combines community and movement at Driftless Yoga Center. You can learn more about her evolving path through entrepreneurship in this issue’s Sum of Your Business.

And we cap it all off with a warm, fuzzy piece about Socktoberfest at Fox River Mills in Osage, Iowa. Writer Renee Brincks chatted with Decorah’s Erin Ryan to learn the best ways to sock-up, er…stock-up…on socks this season…and experience an out-of-the-ordinary fall outing that could just become a family favorite.

The days might be getting shorter this season, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get brighter. Here’s to finding that light, and that hope.

Thanks for reading, friends. We appreciate you.

Looking forward,

Aryn Henning Nichols

Listen to our fall Spotify playlist while you read!

In this issue, you’ll find:

Resilience: We Must Keep Standing Up. Artist Val Miller & Steel Cow • Community Builders – Matt & Nicole Cody – Dave Dudek – Paul Rearson • Paper Project: Fill-In Thank You Cards • Infographic: Resilience • Mental Health: Finding Hope When You’re Hopeless • Future Focused – On Inspiration • Sum of Your Business: Laree Schouweiler / Driftless Yoga Center • Fox River Socktoberfest • Probit: Marlene Fenstermann & More! Happy 17th Birthday, Inspire(d)! Read the whole thing online here!