The emerging movement to deepen and expand higher education's civic mission and work is calling on scholars to enter the public realm and become actively engaged in civic life. To heed the call, scholars will need to embrace and pursue a view of scholarship as a public rather than a private craft, one that brings them into public space and relationships in order to facilitate knowledge discovery, learning, and action relevant to civic issues and problems. In this paper, we tell the story of one scholar who has helped us understand and appreciate the craft of public scholarship in land-grant education. Drawing from the findings of an action research project we have launched, we then identify some of the practical skills, value commitments, and institutional supports that public scholars need in order to be successful in their work.