Tamara Dean: Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless

Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless – Tamara Dean – University of Minnesota Press – 9781517918569 – Paperback – 224 pages – April 22, 2025 – $19.95 -ebook editions available at lower prices

Books like Shelter and Storm are all too often errantly categorized as “regional,” both by publishers and reviewers alike. That’s a problem, as if you think of this book as being “only” about the Driftless region, or Wisconsin, or even the Midwest as its “region,” too many readers might not be interested enough to read this book. It’s an irony for anyone writing from or about a specific place – it may be that through a deep understanding of a unique place that one can address and communicate the most universal issues of human life and the natural world.

Tamara Dean is a truly gifted writer, and I suspect that she can write well about almost anything. But this book is personal, and it gives her storytelling abilities the opportunity to shine. There are twelve “stories” in this book, really linked chapters that document on multiple levels, the time she spent during a “return to the land” experience not that many years ago in the truly unusual region called The Driftless because the glaciers that extended across this continent managed to miss this part of what is now mostly Wisconsin (and a bit in Iowa). It’s not flat there, but rather consists of steep hills and deep valleys, highly forested with a number of spring-fed streams.

While the stories are about Dean’s life there, she uses her own experiences to illuminate a variety of issues that matter to almost all of us, from climate change as it affects peoples lived lives (especially in farm communities), how people create community and mutuality, survive natural and household disasters, and citizen science (with a special interest in blue-glow fireflies). Dean’s personal experiences are transformative for her, and through her essays, for us as well

Tamara Dean’s Shelter and Storm is reminiscent of the best writing about nature and rural living, including works by Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry and Gary Paul Nabhan. Tamara Dean’s writing will engage those many of us who care deeply about climate change and sustainability, and her stories will make you feel that it is possible and necessary to spend more time not only being in the natural world, but reflecting on what it means now for us in our alienated, disconnected, thoroughly modern world, and how we might forge a way of being that allows us to live better lives and preserve some level of nature still.

I do want to say that this book is one of the best of the many I have read this year. And I truly enjoyed having the opportunity to speak with Tamara about the book and her experiences in the Driftless, a place I now very much want to visit to experience for myself.

Tamara Dean’s essays and stories have been published in magazines including The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive. She is also the author of The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. She teaches writing independently in various locales.

“It may sound familiar, but Shelter and Storm is an engaging read largely because Dean is a very good writer.”—Big River Magazine

“Tamara Dean’s luminous essay collection paints a thoughtful portrait of the Driftless region of Wisconsin and the struggles it faces due to climate change.”—Shelf Awareness

“The essays collected in Shelter and Storm, grounded in Dean’s experience tending to and rewilding neglected farmland in the Driftless region, are a product of Dean’s lively, curious, meticulous mind, exploring topics as varied as the impacts of climate change, the challenges of sustainable living, brickmaking, prairie tending, and the history of abortion […] At their essence, these essays are informed by awe. They are about what happens when we make space in our lives for deep attention and wonder.”—Craft Magazine

Author website here.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org

 

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Ben Goldfarb: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter – Ben Goldfarb – Chelsea Green – 304 pages – Hardcover – 9781603587396 – $24.95 – July 5, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower prices

This amazing book completely captivated me from beginning to end. Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, a Yale Forestry School graduate, is a natural storyteller, and writes with a warm and inviting style. In Eager, he demonstrates how the actions of a single mammal species so thoroughly affects the ecology of rivers and landscapes we have come to take for granted, without understanding the effects of these amazing and inventive rodent environmental engineers.

Beavers have had wide-ranging effects on the landscape for aeons. When Europeans arrived in North America, beavers were everywhere, and the very nature of rivers was completely different than they appear to us today. Slowed in flow, and wildly marshy, because of all the beaver dam building, rivers were rich and varied environments for many species of wildlife, insects and plants.

And yes, beavers are rodents – but very special and important to us all. They were trapped and hunted for their fur in the 18th and 19th centuries. That demand created a hunting and trapping economy that caused beavers to be virtually obliterated from most parts of the United States. And their disappearance literally changed our landscape, allowing the open flow of rivers, thereby causing erosion and the loss of healthy habitat over many years. The river landscapes most of us have seen in our lifetimes simply did not exist 400 years ago.

Beavers have not been appreciated, much less loved, by farmers and ranchers in North America, and typically not understood or appreciated by most of us. But now, in a time of climate change, increasing heat, more drought, and lacking the money or will to build yet more infrastructure, beavers may represent a viable alternative to restoring the health of many river systems around the country.

Ben Goldfarb’s wide ranging and witty book teaches us a great deal about beavers, personalizes their appeal, and shows us why so many people are enthusiastic about beavers now, yet he also shows how difficult it is to change the way we think about beavers and what they can do to make our world a better place. I hope this book adds more than a few beaver enthusiasts to the world, and helps change the way we co-exist with beavers in the future.

It’s impossible to read this book and not come away with a changed perspective. And I really enjoyed speaking with Ben about the book and about his experiences with beavers around the world. Overall, this book is great fun, and I am happy to recommend Eager to readers of all interests.

“Eager takes us inside the amazing world of nature’s premier construction engineer…and shows us why the restoration of an animal almost driven to extinction is producing wide-ranging, positive effects on our landscapes, ecology, and even our economy.”―National Geographic

“This witty, engrossing book will be a classic from the day it is published.” –Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist and also a writer of fiction. His writing has been published in Science, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, Audubon Magazine, Modern Farmer, Orion, Scientific American, and many other magazines and journals. He has a masters degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and was a 2018 North American Congress for Conservation Biology journalist fellow. You can learn more about his work at his website here.

If you are interested in learning more about beavers or becoming a beaver supporter, there are many organizations around the country. The Beaver Institute is a good one to start with.

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Marc Nieson: Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape

Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape – Marc Nieson – Ice Cube Press – paperback – 9781888160925 – 272 pages – $19.95

Memoirs are most often stories of self discovery. To work for readers, they have to engage us indirectly – we have to buy into the narrator’s central problem the story will show us being solved. Marc Nieson’s memoir is about a period in his life when he was confused about love and self-identity. He left his home and long term lover in New York City to attend the famed Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and ended up living in a former one room schoolhouse on 500 acres of beautiful Iowa landscape.

Escaping the travails of modern life, and living in the woods, the comparisons to Walden cannot help being made. City-bred Nieson learns how to observe the natural world, and in so doing, learns how to understand himself at the same time. Nieson keeps us involved throughout his narrative, and we come to the end of the story fully engaged in his personal adventure.

The book is structured like a schoolbook, each chapter being named after a school subject (i.e. Geography, History, Social Studies, What I Did On My Summer Vacation), which gives the book a certain charm, and while it’s a conceit, this organization helps keep the narrative moving forward. It’s a fully transformational story, even if you have never experienced the woods or the Iowa landscape.

As Nieson writes: “Here on a quiet Iowa hillside, I was hoping … to both learn and unlearn who I was. To try living not only alone and apart, but a more consciously observed life — both inside and out.” I think he achieved what he was hoping to do in Iowa.

“Those of us who have lived in old one-room schoolhouses understand the solitude, solace, and proximity to nature that they provide. During his year living in Union #9, Marc Nieson embraced these opportunities for inner growth. His new memoir—a must read—traces the story of his journey of discovery along the trail through the woods surrounding his house and along the path of human relationships. Read Schoolhouse, and you will open the door to the mind of an engaging voice, a probing, reflective writer who delights the reader with his lyrical prose on every page.”
—Mary Swander, author, Out of this World: A Woman’s Life Among the Amish

Marc Nieson has degrees from both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theatre, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. He’s been awarded a Raymond Carver Short Story award and recent fiction appears in Everywherestories: Short Fiction From A Small Planet (Press 53), Museum of Americana, and Tahoma Literary Review. He is also a screenwriter, whose credits include Speed of Life, The Dream Catcher, and Bottomland. He teaches at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, and is working on a new novel, Houdini’s Heirs.

In this interview, Marc and I talked in detail about this excellent book and his work as a writer and teacher. Special kudos to Ice Cube Press for publishing this memoir.

Author website here.
Ice Cube Press website here.

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