Tamara Dean
Special guest
Tamara Dean is the author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), an essay collection reviewers call "remarkable," "insightful," "lyrical," and "captivating." Her short stories and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, The Southern Review, STORY Magazine, and other publications. I'm also the author of a book on sustainable living, The Human-Powered Home, and bestselling college textbooks on computer networking. Her essay "Safer Than Childbirth" received a 2024 Pushcart Prize Special Mention and "Slow Blues" was named a 2021 National Magazine Award finalist.
Tamara earned an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She's been awarded fellowships at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Mesa Refuge, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and elsewhere. She teaches writing workshops independently and through writing centers such as Hugo House, The Loft, and Writers.com.
Tamara Dean has been a guest on 1 episode.
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Episode 286: Shelter and Storm, with Tamara Dean
April 17th, 2025 | 50 mins 4 secs
My guest is Tamara Dean. 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.