Author Event: Sue Leaf Presents Impermanence

Zenith Bookstore hosts this in-store author event with Sue Leaf presenting her new book Impermanence: Life and Loss in Superior’s South Shore.

Impermanence is a journey through the South Shore’s story, from the early days of the Anishinaabe and fur traders through the heyday of commercial fishing, lumber camps, and copper mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula to the awakening of the northland to the perils and consequences of plundering its natural splendor. Noting the geological, ecological and cultural features of each stop on her tour along the South Shore, Leaf writes about the restoration of the heavily touristed Apostle Islands National Lakeshore to its pristine conditions, even as Lake Superior maintains its allure for ice fishers, kayakers and long-distance swimmers. She describes efforts to protect the endangered piping plover and to preserve the diverse sand dunes on the Michigan coast, and she observes the slough that supports rare intact wild rice beds central to Anishinaabe culture.

Part memoir, part travelogue, part natural and cultural history, Leaf’s love letter to Lake Superior’s South Shore is an invitation to see this liminal world in all its seasons and guises, to appreciate its ageless, ever-changing wonders and intimate charms.

Leaf is author of The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake; A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts; Portage: A Family, a Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life; and 2021 Minnesota Book Award winner Minnesota’s Geologist: The Life of Newton Horace Winchell. Trained as a zoologist, she writes about environmental and natural history. Her family has owned a cabin outside Port Wing on Lake Superior’s South Shore for 35 years.