Travel north from the upper Midwest’s metropolises, and before long you’re “Up North”—a region that’s hard to define but unmistakable to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest, is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the northern margins of the American Midwest. From the glacial past to the present day, these essays range across the histories of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also considers literary treatments of the area—and arguably makes its own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search for the North Country through personal essays, while others highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk. From the fur trade to tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.

Boy From the North Country is a humorous, poignant, and sometimes painful memoir. Written from the perspective of a gay psychologist who survived growing up in rural Northern New York after being abandoned by his father, this is a story about finding healing in mindfulness, accepting and recovering from trauma, and getting about the business of living. In this powerful self-help memoir, Dr. Durant takes us from the winding backroads of Northern New York while describing white-knuckle tales of parental volatility. Told with the energy and suspense of a car chase, the book careens from stories of childhood innocence in Upstate New York, to the late-night parties in gay San Francisco in an attempt to tell us how one man finds himself navigating back from the isolation imposed by trauma. It is a story of survival. Part Beautiful Thing, part A Place at the Table, Boy From the North Country is written by a clinical psychologist who learned how to survive as a gay kid in rural America...the hard way. Combining insights from his studies of trauma as a psychologist, his own meditation on the trials of his life, and from the personal narratives told to him by his patients at his Manhattan practice, Dr. Durant’s story provides both a cautionary tale on what happens when we abandon the needs of our gay kids, and offers a bit of hope for those struggling to survive.