Sawbill: A Search for Place

by Jennifer Case

Overview

In Sawbill Jennifer Case watches her family suddenly exchange their rooted existence for a series of relocations that take them across the United States. In response Case struggles to “live in place” without a geographical home, a struggle that leads her to search for grounding in the now-dismantled fishing resort her grandparents ran in northeastern Minnesota. By chronicling her migratory adulthood alongside the similarly unpredictable history of Sawbill Lodge, this memoir offers a resonant meditation on home, family, environment, and the human desire for place in the inherently mobile twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826359490
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Case is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and the assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Sawbill 1

Building Sawbill 17

The Boundary Waters 31

Biking Behind Dad 51

Sawbill Map 63

Another Swiss Family Robinson 67

Homemaking 73

The Deckled Edge 83

Piecing 91

Movement 109

E-Mail From Grandma 119

St. Croix 125

Aloneness 139

E-Mail from Lori 143

Gardening with Ruth 149

Research 161

Appalachian Trail 167

Return to Minnesota 173

Solbakken 185

Revisiting Sawbill 199

Cook County Historical Society 211

Interview with Dad 217

Interview with Mary Alice 225

Unidentifiable Bird 235

Interims 243

Editorial Reviews

"A beautifully written book, well organized and lyrical."—Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards

"Jennifer Case embarks on a personal journey, rediscovering the vast beauty of an almost pristine landscape as well as a complicated inner landscape as she surveys the boundaries of family bonds, love of the land, and our inexplicable, inextricable connections to place."—Jill McCabe Johnson, author of Diary of the One Swelling Sea

From the Publisher