David Hakensen – Helen Hoover on Gunflint Lake

About

David Hakensen is a communications consultant and the immediate past president of the Minnesota Historical Society. He is the author of "Her Place in the Woods: The Life of Helen Hoover.” The biography of one of Minnesota’s most beloved nature writers, from her career in the city to her rustic cabin on Gunflint Lake

David will discuss his new biography about the life of Helen Hoover. Helen was a best-selling nature writer from the 1960s and 1970s who lived on Gunflint Lake with her artist husband Adrian. David will explore Helen’s career in Chicago before moving to the Gunflint Lake area in 1954 and her success writing books for adults and children.

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.”

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.

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 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.

All presentations are family-friendly and free to the public. Donations are always appreciated. Take your time driving up the Gunflint Trail National Scenic Byway.