Non-Fiction

Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless

A collection of twelve fascinating essays that weave together nature, history, and science. Shelter and Storm invites readers to step into Wisconsin's magical Driftless Area and consider how we tend the earth in times of uncertainty, what we owe our neighbors, and ways we thrive in community.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls Shelter and Storm "generous and self-aware," "a love letter to the joys and griefs of living on the land," and "a revelatory study of person and place, entwined."

The Progressive named Shelter and Storm one of its favorite books of 2025 and called it "A delightful book that bears comparison to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."

Yale Climate Connections named Shelter and Storm a must-read title on climate change for the summer of 2025.

Poets & Writers magazine listed Shelter and Storm among its top 12 new titles released in spring 2025.

Wisconsin Public Radio featured Shelter and Storm on its Chapter A Day program, adding: "[Dean's] for storytelling unites personal experience with science and history, presenting a perspective as informative as it is compelling. “‘The Land Remembers’ for the 21st century”."

Shelf Awareness calls Shelter and Storm "luminous."

Award-winning author Jane Hamilton writes, "Dean writes with a clarity and wisdom that illuminates the past, the present, and the future. Shelter and Storm is an essential book for our time."

Living mindfully with nature during a time of uncertainty
In the midst of the environmental crises of the early twenty-first century, Tamara Dean sought a way to live lightly on the planet. Her quest drew her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There, she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic needs while facing the ravages of climate change—an experience at once soul-stirring and practical that she recounts in Shelter and Storm. 

Dean’s boundless curiosity and gift for storytelling imbue these essays with urgency and a sense of adventure. She invites readers to share in her discoveries while hunting for water, learning that a persistent weed could be food, or burning a hayfield to recreate a prairie. Contending with the fallout of fires, floods, and tornadoes, she offers responses to natural disasters that reflect the importance of community, now and for generations to come.

Whether tracking down a rare, blue-glowing firefly, engineering a beaver-friendly waterway to appease a dying neighbor, or building a house of earthen blocks, Dean unites personal experience with science and history, presenting a perspective as informative as it is compelling.

Keenly attentive to the stakes for our planet’s future—and the implications of extreme weather, shifting agricultural practices, and political divides—Shelter and Storm illuminates a thoughtful way forward for anyone concerned about climate change and its far-reaching consequences or for anyone searching, as Dean has, for a more sustainable way to live.

Advance praise for Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless:

"In this remarkable collection of essays, Tamara Dean conveys the depth of our connection to the natural world with careful research and gentle words, bringing the Driftless area of Wisconsin to life. Shelter and Storm is regional literature at its finest. These smoothly flowing essays reveal both the character of the author and the character of the land in equal measure."

—Joan Maloof, author of Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest 

"There is so much to admire in these beautifully written essays, but foremost among them are Tamara Dean’s sense of awe in the natural world, her citizen science undertakings, and her deep research into both history and biology. Significantly, she is clear-eyed about assaults on the environment, documenting among them fierce storms, flooding, fires, and the spread of Lyme disease as results of climate change.

Although Dean’s homeplace is one particular area of Wisconsin, her passions and observations will resonate with readers everywhere."

—Nancy Lord, former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North

Published by University of Minnesota Press, 2025 Excerpt

The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles Over Motors is a compendium of information on the physics and physiology behind pedal-powered, treadled, and hand-cranked devices. In includes plans for building your own human-powered machines and stories about how these devices are used around the world. Published by New Society Publishers, 2008. Excerpt

An essay about my experience of being run over by an SUV and the plight of pedestrians, published in the Guardian's Long Read section on November 22, 2022. Excerpt

My essay about farming ambitions and disillusionment, "So Near the Soil," appears in the Winter 2023 issue of The Georgia Review. It was nominated by the editors for a Pushcart Prize and a John Burroughs Nature Essay award. Excerpt

Living in a rural town with a Dark Skies ordinance gave me a beautiful view of the Milky Way. Still, I sought better ways to see after dark. "Night Vision," published in the Summer 2023 issue of The American Scholar, describes where that led me.
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At one time, abortion wasn't a polarizing issue in the U.S. "Safer Than Childbirth," in the Spring 2022 issue of The American Scholar, tells the story of a woman who lived--and died of an abortion--just when that policies and opinions were changing. Reprinted in The Guardian in July 2022. Listen to a conversation with me about this essay on the Smarty Pants podcast and a feature based on this essay on the Middle of Everywhere podcast.

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The story of searching for a rare, blue-glowing firefly while living with the all-too-common blacklegged tick in Wisconsin's Driftless region. Published in the Autumn 2020 issue of The American Scholar. An interview with me about writing this essay, which was named a 2021 National Magazine Award Finalist, appears on Nieman Storyboard. Excerpt

When beavers came between us and a farmer up the road, we knew something more was at stake. Published in The American Scholar, Winter 2017. Excerpt

This essay, in the Summer 2015 issue of The Southern Review, braids the story of Woody Guthrie's recently rediscovered novel, House of Earth, with our experience of building a mud-brick home, which, like the characters in Guthrie's novel, we imagined would shelter us from economic and environmental storms. Excerpt

When a tornado tears through a beloved landscape, is it possible to just let nature heal itself? Published in The American Scholar, Autumn 2010. Excerpt

How did a vital, indigenous food source, well-known to Thoreau and Native Americans, become just another weed? Published in Orion, November-December 2007. Excerpt

My latest article in The Progressive describes how a broad coalition of community groups succeeded with its persistent, multi-pronged approach to block a marina that would have devastated part of Michigan's Saugatuck Dunes.  Excerpt

Grateful to be a coauthor--with main author, Caroline Gottschalk Druschke--on this article in Open Rivers about our Stories from the Flood project, which aims to help people who survived the devastating 2018 flooding in southwestern Wisconsin process and heal from their experiences. Excerpt

An article about Detroit's only community-supported lower-power FM station which aired its first broadcast on May 11, 2017. Excerpt

In the middle of a frac sand mining boom, local officials across the political spectrum speak out against an attempt by some Wisconsin legislators to remove local control over the sand mines. Cover story in Madison's Isthmus, March 20, 2014. Excerpt

Profile of Pam Jahnke-- a.k.a. theFabulous Farm Babe--Wisconsin's iconoclastic farm broadcaster. Cover story in Madison's Isthmus, July 11, 2014. Excerpt