In Her Place in the Woods (University of Minnesota Press, 264 pages), David Hakensen profiles the remarkable life of Helen Hoover, “one of Minnesota’s most beloved nature writers,” according to promotional materials for the book.
But if this is the first you’re hearing of Hoover… well, you’re not alone.
“Even friends of mine that like to read nature writing would say, ‘Who are you writing about? Why are you spending all this time on somebody I’ve never heard of?’” Hakensen says.
Hakensen first encountered Hoover many years ago when he was given a copy of her third book, A Place in the Woods. Published in 1969, it details her search for a cabin with her husband, and, after they found one on northern Minnesota’s border-hugging Gunflint Lake, “all the foibles they had trying to establish themselves,” Hakensen chuckles.
Hakensen was himself looking for a cabin Up North, and Hoover’s unusual story—she was a successful research metallurgist for International Harvester in Chicago before moving to remote Minnesota—hooked him. “They were able to figure out how to live in ways that most people wouldn’t be able to tolerate,” he says. He quickly read the rest of her books, including The Gift of the Deer and The Long-Shadowed Forest, which detail the joys and challenges of her new life in the wilderness with no electricity or running water.
At the time, Hakensen was also reading the works of environmentalist Sigurd Olson, who wrote about his experiences Boundary Waters, as well as the Olson biography A Wilderness Within. “I said, ‘There’s gotta be a biography on Helen Hoover,’ and there wasn’t,” he recalls. Thus, the idea for Her Place in the Woods, which hits shelves September 9, was born.
Hakensen, who’s also the former board president of the Minnesota Historical Society, attributes Hoover’s largely unknown story in part to the passing of time. She was writing during the ’60s and ’70s, and several generations have passed since her final book, 1973’s The Years in the Forest, was released.
There’s also the fact that Hoover was a woman; Her Place in the Woods details the ways in which her career in metallurgy was stymied by her gender, and she was aware of falling outside of the “good old boys club” that determined which books would be reviewed by the New York Times and other outlets. (Olson’s accounts of paddling and canoeing throughout Minnesota were much more favorably reviewed by big-city critics; his acclaimed works, like 1956’s The Singing Wilderness, became best-sellers.)
And Hoover’s approach was a little different than the one taken by Olson and her other contemporaries. While other nature writers emphasized conservation and preservation, writing with a sort of awe of and reverence for the wilderness, Hoover’s perspective was more immersive. Her new off-grid lifestyle was full of difficulties both natural (fending off bears) and interpersonal (clashes with her new neighbors in Grand Marais).
The difference is subtle, but Hoover’s books are less about advocacy than a personal philosophy. Hakensen says there’s a throughline in them, a belief that “our role is not to impose man on nature, but to blend in and be a part of nature, and observe and coexist.”
“She was one of the first to really talk about how man can’t control nature, but how man can live among nature and should live among nature—because we are not nature’s rulers,” he continues. “She was sort of a forerunner, but she didn’t really ever write a manifesto so that she could put a stake in the ground and say, ‘This is what I believe.’”
In researching the book, Hakensen pored over the Hoover papers at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s special collections, where he took “probably a dozen” trips over the last decade. He was also lucky enough to stumble across an unpublished Hoover biography written many years ago for a creative writing MFA at St. Paul’s Hamline University. When he tried to track down the writer, he learned that she had recently died.
“I asked her daughter if by any chance they’d donated her daughter’s papers to a library or someplace, and she said, ‘No, but I have them out in the barn, I can go get them for you,’” he says. That research would provide some of the key background on Hoover’s childhood and early years, and it featured interviews with subjects who had since passed away themselves, conducted throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Hoover’s time in the woods is remarkable, but Hakensen found her pre-cabin career almost as interesting.
“She’s really kind of a protofeminist, because she was doing stuff in her metallurgy field in the '50s when there weren’t a lot of women in large Fortune 500 companies in research positions,” the author says. “In that sense—by accident, probably not really by design—she became somewhat of a pioneer.”
Not that Hoover would talk about herself that way; she was just a woman of her time, making her place in the woods and in the world.
“Given the odds that she had against her, I mean… she had a lot of smarts, wherewithal, she had a resume of experience—and she had a lot of chutzpah,” Hakensen says.
