Water and What We Know

Water and What We Know:
Following the Roots of a Northern Life
(University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

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

How does land determine what kind of people grow in that soil? In essays that travel from the wildness of Lake Superior to the order of an apple orchard, Karen Babine searches out the stories that water has written on human consciousness and traces an ethic of place, a way to understand the essence of inhabiting a place deeply rooted in personal stories.

Winner, 2016 Minnesota Book Award; Finalist, 2016 Midwest Book Award; Finalist, 2016 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award

Click here for the reading guide for Water and What We Know, created by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library.

“Deadwood.” Weber Studies. 23.2 (2007). 90-101. Print. —Winner of the Dr. O. Martin Lewis Essay Award.

Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life ​(University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

Water and What We Know:
Following the Roots of a Northern Life
(University of Minnesota Press, 2015)