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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Sarah Neidhardt: Twenty Acres A Seventies Childhood in the Woods

Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods – Sarah Neidhardt – University of Arkansas Press – Paperback – 320 pages – 9781682262276 – $29.95 – Published March 7, 2023. Audiobook and ebook versions available at varying prices.

Twenty Acres is a wonderful, rewarding family memoir that will resonate both for elder veterans of the sixties and seventies “back to the land” counter culture but most especially for their now adult children, of which author Neidhardt is one. She was just a baby when her quite intelligent, middle class, young, naive parents left Colorado Springs to move to an extremely isolated part of the Arkansas Ozarks, where despite being woefully unprepared and underfunded, they managed to build a cabin and set out to live their lives and raise their children away from the materialist world they came from.

Their idealism was quickly met with the harsh realities of country life, of course. Sarah Neidhardt’s early life with her struggling parents and her siblings was not easy, and the crushing poverty and difficulties they endured as a family are reconstructed by Neidhardt as a way to understand her early life in deeply rural Arkansas. Still, the book is filled with many joyful and humorous moments – it’s not an altogether dark story, but a complex one that is filled with the ambiguities and complexities of family life in any time or place.

This story is similar to other back to the land adventures I’ve read that did not end well, or ended with the participants deflated by the rigors of a life they were never prepared for, though it is different from some because of the relatively extreme isolation the Neidhardt family experienced. Communards had it better in some ways than those who set out on their own in places where the culture was so deeply foreign to their generally urban or suburban backgrounds and counter culture values. But the underlying conflicts of culture, education, expectations, and the challenges of rural life really are common for so many of the children of the counter culture, unwilling participants in what was generally a short-lived socio-political explosion that had long lasting ramifications for its youngest and most innocent participants (even as that era’s most deeply held values and beliefs have survived and become entwined in modern culture in so many important ways).

It’s been more than fifty years since the era of the hippies, and books like this one will help set down and explain the history of that brief period of time, when so many young people thought we could change the world for the better. Talking to Sarah about her book, her family, and the process of writing their story was rewarding for me and I hope for all who listen to our conversation.

Sarah Neidhardt has worked as a bookseller, secretary, paralegal, copyeditor, and stay-at-home mother. She grew up in Arkansas and Northern California and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and teenage son.

“Disillusioned with the modern world and idealistic about living closer to nature, Sarah Neidhardt’s parents packed up from Colorado–a place that some other back-to-landers would seek out–and moved to small, isolated Fox, Arkansas to attempt living completely self-sufficiently and off-the-grid. In this memoir, Neidhardt examines her memories from that time, and also pinpoints one of the most particularly problematic parts of the back-to-the-land movement, which is that many of its participants were anchored in privilege. … A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry.”—–Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature

Author website here.
Buy the book here.

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Ross Benes – Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold

Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold – Ross Benes – 9780700630455 – hardcover – University Press of Kansas – 256 pages – $29.95 – January 26, 2021 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Ross Benes is a journalist and author who now lives in New York City. But he was born and raised in a tiny town in Nebraska. That experience shaped his early worldview, and of course also makes him suited to understand and explain the culture and politics of his home state to the rest of the world. As the book subtitle lays out, he’s after explaining how Nebraska, like so many other midwestern and southern states, has gone from having a diverse electorate to being viewed as almost monolithically conservative in its views and policies. While the book is focused on Nebraska, much of what he describes about the political culture of his home state broadly applies to much of the rest of our contentious country.

Nebraska may be quite similar to many other midwestern states, but as Benes explains, Nebraska has a long history of populism and quite a commitment to direct democracy and even nonpartisanship. This makes it even more curious to try to understand what has happened there over the past twenty five or more years.

Nebraska is, except for its urban and college town oases, as purely “Trump country” as it could be. As a native-born Nebraska who has broadened his horizons by living in (heavens protect us) the heart of liberal America and working for (even worse) the so-called “liberal media,” Benes may be an ideal interlocutor between these two wildly divergent Americas.

Rural Rebellion gives Benes the opportunity to document Nebraska, past and present, exploring its political history and current explores landscape through the lens of his own personal, family, and small town experiences. There is no question that he deeply cares for his home town and home state, despite the flaws he is determined to call out. In the course of writing this book, he interviewed family, friends, and fellow citizens as well as US senators, representatives, governors, state representatives in the uniquely Nebraskan unicameral governing body, and other political figures, all toward showing Americans not only how we got here, but what we might imagine doing by way of antidote. Benes remains clear-eyed about the difficulty of any sort of success in “healing” the rifts in our body politic and culture. He wishes for a form of discourse that may literally be impossible in a world where some 30% of the overall population, and a much higher percentage of the Nebraska population, simply does not recognize the same reality as many other Americans. Fox News certainly deserves some of the credit, but as Benes points out, small town churches and their powerful anti-abortion, anti-“sin” worldview, and the lack of cultural diversity in rural communities are deeply rooted and provide much to explain how it is we got where we are today.

Benes has one foot rooted firmly in the state he grew up in, the other foot is planted in a completely different environment. Because he has experienced both nodes of our dissonant culture, he can see the full spectrum of our anguish. I am not sure anyone can resolve the differences though. And I do not believe that the “both sides” approach of traditional journalism really works anymore.

While it is certainly true that people in the Fox News dominated, evangelically oriented. semi-rural heartland are all too often viewed as stick figures by many who live in the more diverse and tolerant urban coasts, it is Fox and the church leaders who create imaginary portraits of the people with whom they disagree in outlook and belief, and the right wing now stokes a belief system that see fellow citizens as less than human to a degree that is impossible to excuse. This is not a situation where “both sides” are equally responsible.

In Rural Rebellion, Benes recounts real-life stories that help explain rural Americans’ attitudes about abortion, immigration, and the so-called big government they forget supports their agricultural successes. He also tells his own stories about how his views changed over time away from home, and crucially locates some of the reasons in the ways that what he was taught were impossible. While his argument – that Americans would be less hostile to one another if they just knew each other a little better – makes sense in theory, there are too many powerful forces at work that have a vested interest in keeping Americans at each others’ throats. We want to believe in the essential goodness of our fellow citizens, but there are those that are working diligently to prevent that from happening. No matter where you may fall in the spectrum of belief system, Rural Rebellion is quite useful and a valuable contribution to our socio-political discourse.

Ross Benes is the author of The Sex Effect (2017) and Sex Weird-o-Pedia (2019). He has written for Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Lincoln Journal Star, Nation, Omaha World-Herald, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, and others. In addition, he is an analyst at eMarketer. A native of Brainard, Nebraska (population 420), he now lives in New York City but still roots for the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

We had a terrific conversation about this book. I hope you enjoy it as well.

You can find the book for sale here at Bookshop.org.

“Rural Rebellion is informative whether or not you agree with the author’s political views. . . . Benes does a good job connecting past and present, and he asks many of the questions that historians are likely to ask when they look back on the early twenty-first century.” —Nebraska History

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