Father, daughter team up to pen book

Farmers offer insight on 'Simple Miracles' to tackle everyday life
By: 
Lee Pulaski
City Editor

There are tons of self-help and inspirational books out there, but there’s a new one that’s more down to earth — specifically the soil in Oconto Falls.

“Simple Miracles: 52 lessons to transform your life and rewrite your future” looks at setting goals, showing respect, forgiving, overcoming securities and believing in yourself. The book is written by father-daughter duo Hank Wagner and Laura Wagner Raatz, who operate Wagner Farms as a family and also manage the Wagner Leadership Training program.

Wagner has previously published a book based on the time he spent on a mission trip in Africa, but “Simple Miracles” not only gave him the opportunity to share some of the things he’s learned in life as a farmer, it gave him the opportunity to bring in his daughter and provide perspectives from two different age groups.

“I wanted to have that experience,” Raatz said about being an author. “It’s kind of been on my bucket list to author a book, and I guess what better way to do it than write alongside my dad.”

The book is broken down into 52 chapters, each one written by either Wagner or Raatz. They offer insights into everyday life, showing the miracles within, and each chapter ends with call-to-action questions that motivate people to reflect and take steps to change their lives.

Wagner’s motivation for the book was to reach out and touch as many lives as possible.

“I’m a dairy farmer, and I love everything about farming and feeding the world, but my personal goal is to help the lives of others,” Wagner said. “I set that specific goal a number of years ago to have a positive influence on a minimum of 100,000 people in my lifetime. The way to do that is you have to reach out and touch people’s lives.”

Wagner said it was important to him and Raatz to divide the book into 52 chapters to allow readers the option of taking on issues one at a time, once a week during the course of a year and tackle what they are dissatisfied with. They felt it was important to have a shining light during a time period where everyone is uneasy due to the coronavirus pandemic and other issues causing people to worry and fear.

“We felt that our world could use something positive, and people are always looking for improvement, for things to be better in their lives,” Wagner said.

People seek to either change their circumstances, according to Wagner, or to change the people around them. “Simple Miracles” helps to accomplish both of those, he said.

“We don’t realize that the best way to do that — maybe the only way to do that — is to change ourselves first,” Wagner said. “Each one of these chapters gives people the idea to think into that particular subject and decide if they want to take any steps to change something.”

Raatz loves that the book is showing two different perspectives on life. While Wagner is older with more life experience, she has experienced different things in life to be an expert in her own right.

“I don’t think one is better than the other,” Raatz said. “It’s just a whole different view on a specific topic. Maybe some of the topics my dad goes into are more related to something that somebody would experience later in life but still relate to somebody my age, and the same for my chapters. Some of the chapters I speak on are about bullying or the influence people around you have in your life. Those chapters are spoken by me from experience at a younger age.”

Wagner noted that, even though the goal was to have readers go through one chapter a week, he and Raatz have done too good a job and heard that many readers can’t stop at one chapter.

“They say they can’t do it. They can’t put the book down,” Wagner said. “It’s encouraging. It’s a book you can highlight or put a bookmark in or jump ahead to a topic that’s relevant in your life right now and then go back and read another one later.”

For Wagner, he’s excited to show that people in the agriculture industry can conquer the writing world, as well.

“Dairy farmers are not supposed to be authors,” Wagner said. “That’s what the perception of most people is. I wanted to write a book because I wanted to influence more lives.”

Raatz said she was excited to finally be a published author.

“I think for us, to establish that credibility of, we are just farmers and that’s what we do for a living, but we’re passionate about having a positive influence on the lives of other people.”

Originally, Raatz and Wagner had compiled more than 52 chapters, so that resulted in cutting out certain things. However, it has inspired the pair to look at doing other books based on the “Simple Miracles” theme. Wagner said there are potentially three or four more books in the works, including “Simple Miracles for Youth.”


lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com


AT A GLANCE

WHAT: “Simple Miracles: 52 lessons to transform your life and rewrite your future”

WHO: Hank Wagner and Laura Wagner Raatz

PAGES: 290

PRICE: $17.99 paperback, $8.99 Kindle. Available on Amazon.