Böcker av Karen Babine

One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.In her mid-thirties, happily single if also tied closely to a family that has long thought of her as their historian, Karen Babine hitches up her Scamp and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia, to find the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago.As the miles roll by, she wonders: “Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can’t—or shouldn’t—happen?” The road reveals more questions than answers about history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about where she is in life and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship and attachment to home on one hand, and a deep desire for independence on the other. Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we’re told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.

"A lush gem of a book, both heartbreaking and heart-making."-AMY THIELEN

2016 Minnesota Book Award Winner for Memoir & Creative Nonfiction Consider your place, the place where you feel the most at home: a tree-lined lake, a bean field planted on stolen land, a rig drilling the golden prairie, city streets alive with energy. Written in the language of the northern landscape of experience, Karen Babine explores the meaning of being in your place on a particular day.In essays that travel from the wildness of Lake Superior to the order of an apple orchard, Babine traces an ethic of place, a way to understand the essence of inhabiting a place deeply rooted in personal stories. She takes us from moments of reflection, through the pages of her Minnesota family\u2019s history, to the drama of the land and the shaping of the earth. From the Mississippi\u2019s Headwaters in Itasca State Park—its name from veritas caput, or \u201ctrue head\u201d—she explores the desire that drives the idea of the North. The bite of a Honeycrisp apple grown in Ohio returns her to her origin in Minnesota and to pie-making lessons in her Gram\u2019s kitchen. In the Deadwood, South Dakota, of her great-great-grandfather, briefly police chief; in the translation of her ancestors from Swedish to Minnesotan; on the outer edge of the New Madrid Fault in Nebraska; through the flatlands along I-90; at the foot of Mount St. Helens: Babine pursues what the Irish call dinnseanchas, place-lore. How, she asks, does land determine what kind of people grow in that soil? And through it all runs water, carrying a birch bark canoe with a bullet hole and a bloodstain, roaring over the Edmund Fitzgerald, flooding the Red River Valley, carving the glaciated land along with historical memory.As she searches out the stories that water has written upon human consciousness, Babine reveals again and again what their poignancy tells us about our place and what it means to be here.