Each day leading up to the April 16 announcement of the Minnesota Book Awards, and in collaboration with community editors from the award-winning Saint Paul Almanac, we highlight one of the thirty-two finalists. Today we feature 2016 Memoir & Creative Fiction Finalist:
Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life by Karen Babine
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Category Sponsors: Kevin and Greta Warren
Book Synopsis by Clarence White, Saint Paul Almanac:
Geography, climate and place are the themes of this collection of essays that are engaging, philosophical, and tell an important story of Northern Minnesota—and places along the waterways of the same mid-continent latitude. Karen Babine’s memoir is a page-turner that is the result of time spent close to the emotional and physical geography of home from which her forbearers hale, and that elicits questions of identity and living. From an apple orchard in Ohio, through Northern Minnesota, to the Dakotas, to Mount St. Helen’s, she weaves the Irish Concept of dinnseanchas and Nietzsche’s concept of “true climate” to convey the idea that climate is more than just physical and geographical, but that this geographic climate illustrates the climate of the thinker. Babine asks, “what kind of people are grown in this soil?” Water and hydrology provide a handy metaphor that runs through the landscapes of this many-waterwayed region.
Author Bio:
Karen Babine is the founder and editor-in-chief of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She was born and raised in the Lakes Country of Hubbard County, Minnesota. She traded lakes and trees for prairie and grass on the Red River Valley of western Minnesota for college, then hopped I-94 west to Spokane to earn her MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University. Her PhD in English is from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her interests include place studies and travel writing, contemporary Irish literature, literary heritage, teaching creative writing and all forms of nonfiction. Her essay “An Island Triptych” was listed as a Notable in the 2014 Best American Essays. She lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Karen Babine is on Twitter and has a blog.
An Excerpt from Water and What We Know:
I can feel my heartbeat more strongly if I touch my wrist than if I touch my nose. The geography of the Midwest known as the Heartland grows a mythology of blood and heart, a story we have created for ourselves that tells of a place where the heart beats, the heart of an emerging country, the heart of a people who came to this place looking for home. It is a mythology, this Heartland, one that ignores realities of how such a land was cleared of its inhabitants and its ecosystems, but it is a mythology that persists.
Here, in Clara City, I feel like I am standing with both feet on the heart of the world.
Reviews:
“What is the effect of place on character? Of our birth landscape on how we see the world? This wonderful, meditative book asks all the right questions.”—Will Weaver, author of Red Earth, White Earth and Sweet Land
“What does it mean to know a place? To be from somewhere, and formed by a particular terrain? Though Babine, who edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, lived for a time in Spokane, her geographical roots are in the northern Midwest, and it is this area of lakes and land that truly forms her consciousness… Alongside this human narrative, she unearths deeper stories, geological tales of rock and water that we may not even realize form our way of being in the world. She shows us the great rushing water of the Mississippi starting at the headwaters in Itasca State Park in Minnesota; she compels us to observe, to be present, to feel water flowing through our consciousness, and to recognize our attempts to label everything as a means to hold fast to the land.”—Renée E. D’Aoust, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Some writers make you feel like you’re coming home after a long, hard day. You kick off your shoes, stretch out on your favorite couch or recliner, and say to yourself, ‘maybe today isn’t so bad.’ Karen Babine’s introduction to Water and What We Know might have led me into this feeling: she contemplatively sits on the couch at her grandparents’ beloved cabin with a warm mug of tea at her elbow, looking out the window at a lake beyond. But it was more than that: it was her loving appreciations and contemplation of her Scandinavian and Minnesotan roots, and her fixation on water—both its beauty and its danger.”—Neil Gilbert Redman, Split Rock Review
“Babine’s meditations on winter light, on the color, taste, and sound of green, on hearing Swedish spoken, capture precisely and with tenderness the experience of living in and loving the northern places that to others seem inhospitable. Her essays are grounded: they begin in exploration of the soil where a river runs, where apples grow, and they explore with academic rigor and familial love how place draws and creates its people. This is a book that seeks to define the mythology of the North.”—Minnesota Book Awards preliminary round judge
Watch:
SELCO librarian Reagen Thalacker reviews Water and What We Know:
Read a great three-part interview with Karen Babine on Jactionary: A Book Lover’s Blog
Part One: Ghost Runners, Minnesota Writers, & Irish Crime Fiction
Part Two: The Triangular Prism, Water and What We Know, & Galway
Part Three: Butt in Chair, Wanderlust, & Author Desert Island
The evening features a Preface Reception with complimentary passed wine and cash bar, author meet-and-greet, book sales and signing; the Awards Ceremony with live music, celebrity presenters, artisan cheese plates and breads, complimentary wine and lemonade, with emcee Stephanie Curtis of MPR; and the Epilogue After-Party with complimentary champagne, sumptuous desserts, and additional live music. Tickets now on sale, or click here for more information.
Today’s winner: Karin DuPaul. (We’ll be in touch via email, and arrange getting the book to you!)
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