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Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 814.6 BAB | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
2016 Minnesota Book Award Winner for Memoir & Creative Nonfiction
Consider your place, the place where you feel the most at home: a tree-lined lake, a bean field planted on stolen land, a rig drilling the golden prairie, city streets alive with energy. Written in the language of the northern landscape of experience, Karen Babine explores the meaning of being in your place on a particular day.
In essays that travel from the wildness of Lake Superior to the order of an apple orchard, Babine traces an ethic of place, a way to understand the essence of inhabiting a place deeply rooted in personal stories. She takes us from moments of reflection, through the pages of her Minnesota family's history, to the drama of the land and the shaping of the earth. From the Mississippi's Headwaters in Itasca State Park--its name from veritas caput, or "true head"--she explores the desire that drives the idea of the North. The bite of a Honeycrisp apple grown in Ohio returns her to her origin in Minnesota and to pie-making lessons in her Gram's kitchen. In the Deadwood, South Dakota, of her great-great-grandfather, briefly police chief; in the translation of her ancestors from Swedish to Minnesotan; on the outer edge of the New Madrid Fault in Nebraska; through the flatlands along I-90; at the foot of Mount St. Helens: Babine pursues what the Irish call dinnseanchas , place-lore. How, she asks, does land determine what kind of people grow in that soil? And through it all runs water, carrying a birch bark canoe with a bullet hole and a bloodstain, roaring over the Edmund Fitzgerald, flooding the Red River Valley, carving the glaciated land along with historical memory.
As she searches out the stories that water has written upon human consciousness, Babine reveals again and again what their poignancy tells us about our place and what it means to be here.
Author Notes
Karen Babine is assistant professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in River Teeth, Sycamore Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Ascent, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
With roots going back generations in the northern Midwest, Babine delves deeply in this essay collection into a firmer, purer definition of place that extends beyond geography and into history of the most personal kind. Bravely facing the questions raised by her settler family's past (Everywhere I have lived is stolen land), she finds that to truly understand place one must be willing to confront the complexities that humans bring to a landscape. She travels through the recent and the long ago, considering the impact of the 1997 Red River flood, searching for answers about her family's decision to leave the East and live and die in Deadwood, South Dakota, and then looking to the bigger issue of how history itself is recorded. Babine's focus is on the call of the West and the mountains and rivers that carved its shape. Eloquently, passionately, she strips back the mythology of this land, seeks out the truth lying beneath our American stories, and embraces the complications we must all accept in calling anyplace home.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2015 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Introduction: In This Place, on "This Day | p. ix |
| Roald Amundsen's Teeth | p. 1 |
| The Inheritance of Apples | p. 14 |
| Water and What It Knows | p. 31 |
| The River-1997 | p. 51 |
| The Canoe | p. 71 |
| Deadwood | p. 84 |
| Petrography | p. 104 |
| Recorded History | p. 120 |
| Holden | p. 145 |
| Faults | p. 152 |
| Grain Elevator Skyline | p. 161 |
| 1-90 | p. 176 |
| Ballerina in a Snowsuit | p. 194 |
| The Weight of Water | p. 202 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 219 |
