Tailings: A Memoir

In August of 2001 Kaethe Schwehn needed her own personal Eden. She was a twenty-two-year-old trying to come to terms with a failed romance the dissolution of her parents marriage and her own floundering faith. At first Holden Village a Lutheran retreat center nestled in the Cascade Mountains seemed like a utopian locale: communal meals consensus decision-making and eco-friendly practices. But as the months wore on the idyll faded and Kaethe was left with 354 inches of snow one prowling cougar sixty-five disgruntled villagers and a pile of copper mine tailings 150 feet high. Her Eden was a toxic Superfund site. How do we navigate the space between who we are and who we would like to become between the world as it is and world as we imagine it could be? Tailings is a lyrical memoir of intentional community told from the front lines a passionate and awkward journey about embracing the in-between times of our lives with grace and hope. Kaethe Schwehns poignant memoir explores longing both spiritual and physical community and faith in prose that is calm lovely and filled with clear-eyed honesty and grace. Tailings is simply an exquisite book. --Dinty W. Moore author of The Mindful Writer Schwehns Tailings is like all of my favorite contemporary nonfiction uncategorizable--part memoir part spiritual reflection part reportage. Brilliant in all of its guises Tailings only makes me want to read more by Kaethe Schwehn. She writes with fierce intelligence and luminous clarity on all of her subjects: loss grace this very particular village and the hard work of renewal. Tailings is a beautiful and original book by a remarkable writer. --Rene Steinke author of Friendswood Already by the second chapter this is a book hard to lay aside. Schwehns prose is liquid and intelligent. It catches your interest immediately and swings you from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Her observations never stand still but sweep you forward into her story/memoir. She is a genuine artist. --Walter Wangerin Jr. author of Ragman--and Other Cries of Faith Kaethe Schwehn holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and is the coeditor of Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (2014). Schwehn has been the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and a Loft Mentor Series award. Her fiction essays and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. She teaches at St. Olaf College and lives in Northfield Minnesota with her husband and two children.