Ox-Bow House - Lynne Heasley in Conversation with Keith Taylor
Dr. Lynne Heasley is an environmental historian and professor at the Institute of the
Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. Her earliest research
was in West Africa. Later, she spent many years in the spectacular Kickapoo Valley of
southwestern Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, for which she wrote A Thousand Pieces of
Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley (University of Wisconsin
Press, 2012). Today, her work centers on the more-than-human worlds of the Great
Lakes. She co-edited and contributed to Border Flows: A Century of the
Canadian-American Water Relationship (University of Calgary Press, 2016).
Dr. Heasley’s recent book, The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the
Great Lakes (Michigan State University Press, 2021), is a genre-crossing collection that
foregrounds the St. Clair River, a critical connecting water and maritime corridor
between Lakes Huron and Erie, and between the US and Canada. She has deep
respect and affection for a river’s (and a Great Lake’s) many aquatic citizens and
stewards. They are guides through the twin biodiversity and climate crises reshaping
our region, and toward uncertain but more hopeful futures. She has just embarked on a
new project called Dreamscapes—explorations, collaborations, celebrations, and
writings about three remarkable Great Lakes landforms: alvar “pavement” grasslands on
Drummond and Manitoulin Islands in Lake Huron; the St. Clair River delta forming the
US-Canada border; and Great Lakes coastal sand dunes.
Keith Taylor is originally from Western Canada, but has lived for the past 45 years in
Michigan. He has authored or edited 18 books and chapbooks. His most recent are Let
Them Be Left (Alice Greene & Co., 2021) and Ecstatic Destinations (Alice Greene &
Co., 2018). His last full-length collection, The Bird-while (Wayne State University Press,
2017), won the bronze award for the Foreword INDIES Poetry Book of the Year. His
poems, stories, reviews, essays, and translations have appeared widely in North
America and in Europe. He recently retired from the University of Michigan, where he
taught creative writing for 20 years. About the Library of the Great Lakes: The Library of
the Great Lakes is based on the geologic formation of Lakes Michigan, Erie, Superior, Huron
and Ontario, transcending borders and boundaries; a library without walls. The mission of the
Library is to inspire and support exploration of the science, history, literature, arts, and cultures
of the Great Lakes, as a curated portal, amplifying works of and about the region.