I’m not sure I’ve ever come across any other region named as evocatively as the Driftless region of Wisconsin. Driftless: the word itself refers to the area’s lack of glacial deposits (or “drift”), as the land was passed by in the era of glaciation. In her essay collection, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, Tamara Dean writes: “Evading the glaciers gave [the region] magical beauty. Steep limestone bluffs overlook narrow valleys. Cold, spring-fed streams rush to converge at the Mississippi River, as they have since the time before humans.” Reading Dean’s words, I was reminded of my own experience visiting the Driftless region several years ago, driving from my home in Ohio past Chicago and Madison to a place accessible only by two-lane roads criss-crossing farmland, where I had to slow down and even reroute to make way for Amish horse-drawn buggies. I was visiting my cousins, who had recently relocated to the region like many others have in search of a home away from the urban and suburban landscapes, denuded of wildness, that so often make up the backdrop of our contemporary lives. 

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. Early on in the book, Dean writes: “I prepared myself for obstacles, debt, and hard labor. But I couldn’t have anticipated the disasters we would face. At the same time I couldn’t have known how much I would learn or how awe would change me.” 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. 

—Melissa Benton Barker

 

Melissa Benton Barker: Many of the essays in Shelter and Storm are concerned with curiosity and attention. In your preface, you write about a sense of “awe.” What do you think we gain when we approach the natural world with a sense of awe? (Or, inversely, what is lost without it?)

Tamara Dean: Awe allows us to recognize that we’re a small part of an interconnected whole and to acknowledge and honor the lives around us. That leads to learning about and caring for our environment and its inhabitants. Once, while I was sweeping the walkway, a hummingbird landed on the top of my broom handle. I stopped. The hummingbird and I held each other’s gaze for minutes. I’d never been eye-to-eye with a hummingbird. I’d never seen a hummingbird remain so still for so long. I was deeply affected by the experience. It was one brief interaction that made clear to me, in a way I hadn’t realized before moving to a rural area, that wildlife is observing us and interacting with us, not separate from us. It led me to wonder how much I could learn from not-human beings. How do we influence each other?

Without an openness to awe, we’re apt to be more selfish. I wouldn’t want to be or be around a person who believes that nothing outside themselves is particularly special or worthy of their close attention. As I wrote in “Slow Blues,” the final essay in Shelter and Storm, awe depends partly on luck and partly on effort. It can be cultivated and practiced. For me, practicing awe led to life-changing revelations. And in this way, awe begets more awe.

 

MBB: Two of your essays center around the lives of particular women: Nancy Ann Harris, who died from an abortion in the late nineteenth century, and Jennie Harebo, who held a vigil against the intrusion of electrical lines on her property. Can you talk a little about what felt important to you in the unearthing of these women’s lives?

TD: Although these women are the subjects of essays, I discovered them incidentally while researching related topics, and I think that’s significant. As people lacking power or authority, Nancy Ann Harris and Jennie Harebo, like most women of past centuries, didn’t have the privilege of documenting their own stories. Their private histories are lost to us. So I researched and wrote plausible stories for them.

I intended for “An Ordinary Woman” to be a retort to those who had maligned or dismissed Nancy Ann Harris, a woman buried in a small cemetery on my property, after her death from an abortion in 1876. In addition, I wanted to correct the local legend that claimed that Civil War veterans were buried in that cemetery and that their tombstones had been washed downstream in an epic flood. After I learned that no men were buried in that cemetery, it irked me that all the value and valor had been granted to fictitious Civil War soldiers over Nancy Ann Harris and another woman who had also died because of a pregnancy.

I knew about Jennie Harebo because she had made the newspapers when she sawed down a pole that a rural electrical cooperative had placed on her property and then parked her coupe on the downed wires. She remained in her car, fighting off the imposition of electricity, for three days and nights. When she finally emerged, having persuaded the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to remove their poles and wires, newsmen described her as exhausted, defeated, and sagging. To them, she was a spectacle, a figure of ridicule. I went along with their descriptions until I saw a photo of her posing beside the car after her vigil, holding her shotgun, chin lifted, gaze fixed on the middle distance like a movie star. She looked proud, not defeated. She was upright, not sagging. I thought that she, like Nancy Ann Harris, deserved a more nuanced and respectful portrayal, which would therefore also be more realistic, even if I had to speculate about the details.

 

MBB: Along these lines, your own life is illuminated through the lens of these essays. How do you see yourself positioned within the tradition of the literature of the natural world? Did you face any resistance entering into this space as a woman? Do you see yourself in conversation with other contemporary women writing about the environment, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer? 

TD: I write the kind of essays I love to read—those that open with a mystery or quest, compel me forward, teach me something, frame a scenario in a surprising way, reveal new insights, and land in an unexpected place. I pursue my curiosity with abandon and follow my intuition while piecing together an essay. I research more than is probably necessary. I revise many times, until I believe I’ve reached the essay’s full potential, not the aims I might have had when I conceived it. Because of this and because I want to fully live the experiences I’m writing about, whether that’s planting a prairie or making a house of mud bricks, I’m a slow writer. I’m not interested in writing or reading about passive or ordinary backyard observations.

If I’ve faced resistance entering into this space as a woman, I haven’t noticed it. I’m good at circumventing obstacles and ignoring criticism. I’m nothing if not dogged. I will find a way and continue moving forward, no matter what comes.

I’ve been inspired by many other women writing about the natural world—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Terry Tempest Williams, Anna Tsing, Ellen Meloy, Kathleen Dean Moore, Joni Tevis, Linda Hogan, Kathleen Jamie, and Camille Dungy, to name just a few. I admire the expressions of interbeing in these women’s works. Jamie and Dungy, in particular, argue rightly that too much environmental literature written by men situates the author as a singular, dynamic figure in a landscape that’s waiting and available for him to explore or experience as a means for his own transcendence. Jamie’s phrase is “the lone, enraptured male.” Dungy points out that even when men were accompanied by their wives on the journeys they wrote about, they elided their companions and presented themselves as solitary. 

Writing the essays in Shelter and Storm, I felt strongly about including the voices of those around me—for example, aging farmers, flood survivors, citizen scientists, nonprofit leaders, conservationists, and Native American neighbors whose ancestors had lived where I lived. I listened and wrote down what people said. And, while some regard an exhaustive “Acknowledgments” section as the mark of a novice author, it felt important to me to express gratitude to all who had freely offered their time and insights to help me create the book I wanted. How fortunate I was to receive their gifts.

 

MBB: I recently listened to an episode of The Hidden Brain featuring Sarah Jacquette Ray, who has written extensively about climate anxiety. The interview focused on the despair that people often face when contending with the overwhelming nature of climate change, a kind of despair that Ray terms “eco-nihilism.” The interview (which is well worth a listen) goes on to posit how even the smallest, individual action when conceived as part of a collective or community can act as an antidote to guilt, nihilism, and despair. I found echoes of this idea in every single essay in your book. Can you talk a little about how you navigate the line between hope and despair as someone whose life’s work has been deeply intertwined with resistance to climate change? 

TD: Yes, I listened to that interview, too. I found it so interesting that presenting mass movements as the answer to climate change tends to fuel despair, whereas individual action feels empowering. I feel defeated sometimes, considering the big picture. Or when I see the devastating consequences of climate-change disasters on my neighbors while politicians dismantle the measures that are our best chance at slowing climate change. I don’t understand how some in power fail to grasp that if we don’t have a life-supporting planet, nothing else matters.

I believe that we can make change from the ground up, and with joy. Find a subject or pursuit that feels meaningful. Follow your passion, whether that’s butterfly habitat or better public transportation. Learn about it and take action. Join others who share your interests. With enough steady effort and pushing, together we can change policies. As Brock Evans advised, “endless pressure, endlessly applied.” Along the way, it’s important to have fun and feel energized. That’s what it’s like when you’re taking action with friends.

I’m also inspired by this line from author Jenny Odell: “It is in the nature of Nature to try to flourish; to give up on life is unnatural.” We’re here. Let’s not give up. Let’s do what we can do to help life flourish.

 

MBB: Your essays illuminate many topics—mollusks and groundnuts, for example—that have likely been under-explored by the lay person and/or the urban dweller, and perhaps unnoticed even by those who are paying closer attention to the environment. In these essays you expertly balance research with personal narrative, giving the reader both a deeper understanding of that which may have gone unnoticed as well as a personal connection. You help us to understand why we should care. Can you talk a bit about your process? How did you arrive at these topics and how did you balance the personal with the more journalistic and research-oriented aspects of your writing?

TD: Each essay in Shelter and Storm arose from some unusual or amazing incident or discovery. While living in the Driftless area, it seemed all I had to do was step out the door and I would stumble into another topic, whether that was a rare, blue-glowing firefly, a record-breaking flood, a tornado, or a battle with beavers who kept damming a creek and flooding the neighbor’s field. Since I was curious and didn’t know a lot about the topics that struck me, I turned to research. 

I especially love interviewing people, not only to tap into their expertise, but also to find out how they feel. For “Blowdown,” I rode around with foresters for three days in Louisiana and Mississippi to commiserate with landowners who had lost hundreds of acres of trees in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita right after I’d lost forty acres in a tornado. Those days are represented by maybe two hundred words in that essay. I knew while sitting in the foresters’ trucks, viewing toppled trees, listening to the men describe the fierce wind, that I wouldn’t use most of what I was learning. But it felt important for me to get the full picture of what people were grappling with.

When I teach writing, I talk about the three elements that make up narrative nonfiction: scene, research, and reflection. Each element enhances the others. Writers can determine where and how material of each type intersects. Research can be deployed strategically for various reasons: filling gaps, connecting the personal with the universal, complicating matters to add interest, challenging claims to bolster veracity, offering a metaphor to support a theme, raising tension, prolonging suspense, or mirroring structure, for example.

A danger of researching is that the author will feel compelled to include more of what they learned than the reader needs. That’s why I advise writers, during revision, to highlight the material in their work belonging to scene, research, or reflection in different colors. In your word processing program, zoom out until each page is the size of a playing card. You won’t be able to read the words, but you can see at a glance, by color, if you have a long section of research that’s likely bogging down the narrative. You can zoom in there and cut or redistribute those findings.

Research and scene come more easily to me than reflection. It takes me a while to articulate what I feel and understand about experiences. When I’m struggling with that element, I find it helpful to write by hand in a notebook, to urge myself to overwrite and push toward what feels difficult. And I like to use a prompt I learned from Barbara Hurd: “I used to think ____________, but now I know ____________.”

 

MBB: What advice would you give to beginner writers who wish to bring attention to the natural world?

TD: I suggest writers pursue topics that excite them, no matter how trivial or esoteric they might seem. If you’re enthusiastic about a topic, it will show in your writing. Readers will be gripped because of how you write about it. Several people have told me that they couldn’t have imagined getting excited about groundnuts, but my essay did that for them.

I urge writers to seek primary or exclusive sources, too. That will make their writing stand out. Such sources might be experiential (for example, searching for a threatened species in a remote landscape), oral histories or other records housed in small museums where nothing has been digitized, or interviews with subject matter experts. Long ago, I used to hesitate to ask someone for an interview because I didn’t want to bother them. But I learned that most people love to tell you about what they know. If you ask good questions and listen without interrupting, chances are you’ll gather extraordinary insights.

 

MBB: In your essay “Fire and Time” you explore, among other things, efforts to re-wild farmland by recreating prairie habitat. The essay derives its tension from the unpredictability and the uncontrollable nature of the environment and grapples with the idea of “nonhuman intelligence.” Can you speak to this idea and how it impacted both your writing and your life in the Driftless? 

TD: I’m wary of sentimentalizing or anthropomorphizing the nonhuman. But so many strange things happened to us while we lived surrounded by nature, enjoying frequent, close interactions with plants and animals and natural forces, that I was forced to question my assumptions about how the world around me operates. (Some incidents were too strange to put into a book of nonfiction; some appear in my short stories.) While seeking answers to why things happened the way they did, it was hard not to turn to the cosmic or spiritual. At the very least, it kept me humble, which I believe is a good starting point for a writer. It’s helpful to harbor no preconceptions when you’re composing a new work.

 

MBB: Your essay “Floodways” speaks to the healing power of storytelling, specifically, efforts in the Driftless region to bring healing, hope, and peace to flood survivors. I see Shelter and Storm as part of a collective effort to heal the human relationship with our environment through story and truth-telling. What are your thoughts on the potential of writing and storytelling as venues for healing? How can writers be useful in efforts to push back against disaster and climate change? 

TD: When my friends from the Driftless Writing Center and I started the Stories from the Flood project, we hoped that inviting flood survivors to write about their experiences would benefit them. We knew about research by James Pennebaker and others showing that writing about traumatic experiences helps people heal. In narrating their stories they can recognize the inner resources they drew on and cast themselves as empowered individuals in difficult situations. But almost nobody in our community wanted to write; they preferred to talk. So, most stories came to us in the form of recorded audio. Nevertheless, the research still proved true in our case. 

We gathered stories from more than one hundred flood survivors. I collected dozens of those stories, and I noticed that after talking with me, the survivors appeared lighter. We invited survivors to a Celebration of Resilience, and people seemed relieved as they talked with others who’d endured similar hardships and as they found excerpts from their stories in the booklet we published and handed out. One legislative aide in attendance told me afterward that he hadn’t realized how badly people needed better mental health resources. We shared additional insights we’d gleaned from the stories with policymakers and public planners. Those suggestions are still informing riparian land use practices and emergency management approaches in meetings happening as recently as last month, more than six years after the project began.

So, yes, I believe strongly that writing can help us heal from trauma. Writing transforms us. We’re compelled to reconsider and make sense of what has happened to us. If we revise with care, we’re also compelled to embrace greater complexity and honesty in our retellings. I believe that makes us more empathetic and relatable. It makes us better humans.

Audiences are more moved by stories than facts, graphs, or academic summaries. I would like more policymakers to read or listen to personal stories that reveal climate change’s real impact on people’s lives. Not only formally published works such as Elizabeth Rush’s Rising, but also collective, community-powered projects such as Stories from the Flood. As an all-volunteer crew, we didn’t get around to assembling a replicable model for other disaster-affected communities to use, as we’d hoped. But I would be happy to share our plan and recommendations with anyone who wants to copy what we did, in the interest of promoting healing and change through storytelling.

 

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TAMARA DEAN has been camping, fishing, hiking, and gathering wild foods from an early age, led and inspired by her parents. Her essays and stories have been published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive, and she is author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless and The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and returns to the Driftless area often. 

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MELISSA BENTON BARKER lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with her family. Her writing appears in X-R-A-Y, Pine Hills Review, Lammergeier, Best Small Fictions 2021, and other publications. Her chapbook, Beauty Queen, is available at Bottlecap Press.