Pete Kero, author of Minescapes: Reclaiming Minnesota’s Mined Lands
Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction Category, sponsored by Annette and John Whaley
Each week leading up to the 36th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
The large-format, hand-drawn renderings of the future minescapes of the Mesabi Range done in 2001-2013 by the landscape architecture professors and students from the University of Minnesota for the Laurentian Vision Partnership are simply gorgeous and inspiring masterpieces! I wish these could have been included, as well as the wonderful landscape and action photography of Vance Gellert and Joe Treleven.
Tell us about someone who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
My wife, Miriam. She is the unsung hero of both this book and Redhead Mountain Bike Park. She does not aspire to the spotlight, but her support takes the form of unwavering, grounding and very tangible actions that allow me to tackle large projects like this book. While this book is interwoven with my own autobiographical details, I would have liked to feature her perspective more because she grew up on the Mesabi Range and has an interesting sociological perspective on everything that has happened and is happening there.
Tell us about a favorite read from the past year. Why did you find it enjoyable, insightful, or memorable?
Virgil Wander by Leif Enger. It, too, is set in a (fictional) Northeastern Minnesota small town that is trying to transition from its industrial birth to a vibrant, post-industrial middle life. The book features a discussion amongst City Councilors who are planning an event called Hard Luck Days which is intended to be the instrument of their town’s revival. I laughed out loud at the concept and their dialogue because it was truer than non-fiction, as Mailer used to say!
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known.
As a child, my hobby was collecting snakes. My cousin Al and I would gather them from beneath rocks, stray pieces of sheet metal and abandoned mud flaps in the fields near our house. We had a personal record of eighty-eight copper bellies and garter snakes at one time which we counted by assembling into bunches of five and then pressing them between our outspread fingers like hash marks on a tally sheet. We fed and housed them for a while and then returned them to the fields. This “hands-on” experience is what helped instill in me an appreciation for the resiliency of nature.
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
Libraries are, and have always been, my happy place. They stoke a fire of curiosity. I seem to get an “a-ha” moment, a little dopamine hit, every time I go. I just cannot believe they are “free” (I know, of course, they are paid for by our taxes and fees) because the idea of all that accumulated knowledge at our fingertips blows my mind. It was my love of books and everything they have given me that finally inspired me to try writing my own – the thought that maybe something I learned or thought along the way might somehow be useful or inspirational to some other reader. I think libraries are one of the great institutions of civilization.
Pete Kero is an environmental engineer practicing at Barr Engineering Company in Hibbing, Minnesota. For more than twenty-five years, he has consulted with public agencies, mining companies, and communities who are reclaiming and repurposing the mining landscape of the Midwest.