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This Tender Place
The Story of a Wetland
Year
Laurie Lawlor
Terrace Books
FIRST PAPERBACK
EDITION
Published in April 2007
LC: 2005005447 QH
190 pp. 6 x 9
20 b/w photos, 2 drawings
ISBN: 0-299-21464-8 Paper $19.95 t
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-21464-7
Memoir / Environment / Natural History / Wisconsin
Blurbs:
"In the wetlands of southeast
Wisconsin, Lawlor initiates a genuine relationship with the land.
From spring peepers to sandhill cranes, there is an unyielding
sense of her direct participation with nature, and through her
encounters and descriptions one feels a new sense of belonging–a
continuity with all life through time."–Nina Leopold
Bradley
Reviews:
The
Nature Conservancy Magazine | Booklist
| Wisconsin State Journal | Isthmus
Books Quarterly
"This
Tender Place: The Story of a Wetland Year/The Nature Conservancy Magazine
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS/TERRACE BOOKS
(OCTOBER 2005)
After the deaths of her father and father-in-law,
author Laurie Lawlor discovers an unlikely place for healing
and transformation in a wetland in southeastern Wisconsin.
Her new book, This Tender Place, parallels Lawlor's personal
growth and spiritual regeneration with that of the wetland and
challenges the reader to look twice at the natural resources
that surround us yet are so often taken for granted.
In her own words, Lawlor says: "This is the story of a wetland
year and what I discovered about plants and animals, fire and
water, humans and insects, refuge and renewal."
The particular wetland captured in Lawlor's book is Pickerel
Lake Fen, a special place The Nature Conservancy has been working
with local landowners to protect since 1985. The Conservancy
and its conservation efforts at the fen are featured prominently
in the book."—The Nature Conservancy Magazine,
October 1, 2005
"Lawlor,
Laurie. This Tender Place: The
Story of a Wetland Year/Booklist
In search of a country home, Lawlor was dismayed by the dilapidated
farmhouse she looked at in southeastern Wisconsin but felt an
instant affinity for the wetland out back, a mysterious place
astir with strange forces—and, sure enough, her new home
proved to be a place of wonder. The author of many books for
children and adults, Lawlor has a remarkably transparent style,
the perfect vehicle for capturing the subtle beauty of the fen,
a rare and precarious form of wetland fed by underground limestone
springs. Adopting an "attitude of regard" and gamely
exploring the wetland via kayak, Lawlor vividly describes cattails
and water lilies and an astonishing array of wildlife, including
beavers, turtles, muskrats, and swans. Lawlor is just as illuminating
in her thoughtful reflections on the site's human occupants,
from the mound-building Ho-Chunk to swamp-hating white settlers.
Like the surprising fecundity of the unassuming fen, Lawlor's
seemingly placid book teems with hidden life and significant
observations, as she reveals the beauty and inestimable value
of an often-maligned but truly essential natural landscape. .
. . Nature lovers will be entranced by Lawlor's descriptions
of animals and the history of a place."—Donna Seaman,
Booklist , September 15, 2005, Chicago, IL
"At home
on the wetlands/Wisconsin State
Journal
In 1994 author Laurie Lawlor and her family decided to move
to the country and found a "rustic" home in the wetlands
of southeastern Wisconsin.
This Tender Place: The Story of a Wetland Year (Terrace
Books: UW Press: $26.95) tells the story of Lawlor's love for
her land and her education about what that land entails.
Lawlor's story meanders from prehistory to yesterday, mixing
stories of how the Potawatomi scraped the inner bark from the
black spruce to create a poultice for inflammation with tales
of her own experience tromping through the marshes.
"The
ground shakes and quivers and gurgles as I walk. Water seeps
over the tops of my boots. Around my ankles swim back, tiny creatures
not bigger than the point of a pencil. Hundreds of tadpoles!
Thousands of tadpoles! Their tails flail. They crash into on
another in their blind rush to get out of my way."
She speaks of the Wisconsin Glacier in one paragraph and of a
hibernating snapping turtle buried beneath the winter mud in
another.
"Looking deeply into the accumulated live and dead remnants
of one year in the marsh is like examining the crowded attic
of a reclusive pack rate. Nature is prolific and wasteful, a
churning factory of biomass. And yet I can only look on the such
fecundity in wonder. There's something profoundly optimistic
about this towering stack of chaotic stem and seed and leaf.
Something, I tell myself, must
be worth living for and dying for if the same process happens
again and again, season after season, year after year."
It's a charming book, one that nature lovers will read and reread
as a means of keeping alert to the Wisconsin landscape that surrounds
us all."
—William R. Wineke, from Footnotes, Wisconsin
State Journal
December 4, 2005, Madison, WI
"Book News/Isthmus
Books Quarterly
This Tender Place: Story of a Wetland Year (University of
Wisconsin Press/Terrace Books) is a departure for author Laurie
Lawlor. Although Lawlor has penned 33 previous books for children
and adults, this one was a challenge as she tried to combine
what she saw as three stories: 25,000 years of geological history,
an annual cycle in the year of a wetland, and her own personal
journey working though grief after her father died.
"This is my first memoir. I was trained as a journalist,
so I got a little nervous going this route," Lawlor says
of using herself as the "anchor" of the book. "But
it did seem a natural way to tell three stories simultaneously,
the land, the people and my own dealing with grief and reconciliation,"
Lawlor found that "getting to know a piece of land so well,
and the animals and the plants, can be very cathartic."
After her father and father-in-law's deaths in 1994, Lawlor and
her husband were looking for a place in the country to "reconstruct
ourselves," Lawlor writes. The spot they chose, in northeaster
Walworth County is on a kind of wetland called a fen, rare in
the United States.
Lawlor spent 10 years hunting for information on the land in
the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society as well as kayaking
through the wetlands themselves. She learned that wetlands were
seen by settlers as a menace, to be destroyed by draining, because
they were thought to cause or spread diseases. Native Americans,
though, viewed wetlands as "a great supermarket, where you
would go to get everything you need."
Unlike many nature narratives, Lawlor's story focuses more on
the history of the land and its animals than on her own personal
journey. She hopes the book will aid in wetland conservation
and "encourage adults and children to go out and sit in
the mud, or walk, or kayak, and see what a wetland is like."
Lawlor, a native of Evanston, Ill., teaches at Columbia College
in Chicago but spends half of her time at the Walworth County
house. "I had never really thought of owning a marsh,"
Lawlor muses. "It is one of the hot spots of biodiversity
in Wisconsin. The Nature Conservancy has done a terrific job
in southeastern Wisconsin. It's a miracle it has survived."—Isthmus
Books Quarterly
Author's
Bio:
Laurie Lawlor
is the author of thirty-three books for children and adults,
among them Addie Across the Prairie and Window on the
West: The Frontier Photography of William Henry Jackson.
Her books have received accolades including the Carl Sandburg
Award for Children's Literature, the Golden Kite Honor Book for
Nonfiction award, and the American Library Association Best Books
for Young Adults award. She teaches writing at Columbia College
in Chicago.
For more information, in addition to this
press kit, contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734,
email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu
[Return
to the book page for This
Tender Place]
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Cover image:
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Author Photo
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Awards and
other news
THIS TENDER PLACE: THE STORY OF A WETLAND
YEAR
was selected (June 2006) for "Outstanding Achievement recognition
by the Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards Committee."
The book was featured on the Larry Meiller
Show, Wisconsin Public Radio, Madison;
on At Ten Milwaukee Public Radio Show on KPFA-FM; and
on Against the Grain 94.1 FM San Francisco Public Radio
It was excerpted in national NATURE CONSERVANCY MAGAZINE,
Summer 2006
Special feature in Wisconsin Wetlands quarterly publication,
Wisconsin Wetland Association
Excerpted in national NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE, Winter
2006
Imprint:
This logo for Terrace Books can
be downloaded and used in any web-based publicity any Terrace
Book. For a 300 dpi version,
click here.
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