The biography of one of Minnesota’s most beloved nature writers, from her career in the city to her rustic cabin on Gunflint Lake
 

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Helen Hoover’s stories and essays of life in the wilderness on northern Minnesota’s Gunflint Lake, published in popular magazines and several bestselling books (including The Gift of the Deer in 1966 and A Place in the Woods in 1969), found millions of fans and earned her accolades alongside nature writers like Sigurd Olson, Rachel Carson, Sally Carrighar, and Calvin Rutstrum. Hoover’s own unlikely history of leaving a corporate career in Chicago for a small cabin without electricity or running water—with no interest in hunting or fishing—is just one chapter of the remarkable life that David Hakensen describes in Her Place in the Woods. This first complete biography illuminates how Helen Hoover (1910–1984) made a place for herself and for countless readers in, as she put it, the world of her time.

 

Hoover defied convention. Self-trained and without an academic degree, she worked in the male-dominated metallurgical field as a researcher at International Harvester, where she solved a long-standing problem with the manufacture of discs for farm implements and earned a patent. She and her husband, Adrian, a commercial artist, had long dreamed of moving to a remote cabin in the woods. As they started the long return drive to Chicago after a summer spent on Gunflint Lake, they finally made the leap, quitting their jobs with a long-distance phone call from Grand Marais and figuring out the rest as they went.

 

The Hoovers were woefully unprepared for life off the grid and slowly learned how to convert sheds into chicken coops and fend off bears. Social encounters presented their own challenges, with Helen’s fiery personality leading to clashes with hunters and other Gunflint neighbors. Gradually, the Hoovers settled into the rhythms of their remote homestead, and Helen would craft a prolific literary livelihood from her keen observations of nature and encounters with animals in the surrounding woods.

 

Her Place in the Woods captures both an awakening to the power and fragility of the natural world and the efforts and talents of an extraordinary woman defining herself as a writer. Though Helen Hoover would move on from the secluded North Woods, as she wrote in her final book, The Years of the Forest, “From this time on it would be both here and with me wherever I might be, as long as I should live.”

In Her Place charts a network of artists working at a high caliber with deceptively specific criteria—they are all women, and they all work in Nashville, Tennessee. The plurality of styles, subjects, and media they choose to work in is so diverse that grouping them together proves that, if anything, there are as many differences among these artists as there are similarities.

But isn’t that what it is to be Southern? Hasn’t life in the American South been a quagmire of contradictions from the very start?

The South has always been defined as much by what it isn’t as what it is, in much the same way that women have been defined by how they are not like men. The standard for an American artist—and perhaps for a person in general—seems to be a white, straight, cisgender man of vaguely Northern residence. Anything that deviates from that criteria needs to be justified, pointed out, turned into something exceptional in order to simply be visible. It is refreshing, then, that this exhibition does not wallow in the stagnant waters of Southern stereotypes. The artists of In Her Place are legion. They include a Tehran-born sculptor making vessels out of Tennessee red clay, an artist from Arkansas working with cardboard and references to unsettling histories, and a Nashville-born painter whose images of civil rights–era sit-ins read just as poignantly in 2026 as they would have in 1960.

If anything ties these artists together, it is not their gender or their location. It is their shared ingenuity and the comfort with which they subvert.