For two weeks in mid-June, she joined nine other artists dispatched by the Mennonite Central Committee to observe immigration policy as outrage smoldered over the practice of forcibly separating children from asylum seekers and news from back home revealed some of the children were detained in Topeka. Penner, a retired writing instructor and professor emeritus at Washburn University, said she was trying to find creative solutions or ideas about border territories but returned instead with a notebook full of "fits and starts."