Stephen Lyons is a flatlander, a resident of the southern Illinois prairie, but he is also a man with a deep
love for the Driftless region, a land of hills and winding valleys comprising contiguous portions of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois. The region is split by the Mississippi, which defines much of its character. The Driftless region intrigues Lyons, and over the years he has made numerous trips here. That’s how I met him.
Interviews
Stephen was interviewing Decorah residents as part of his projected book, Going Driftless, and we met at an exhibition of the work of Decorah painter, muralist, and printmaker, Carl Homstad. Since much of Homstad’s art is an interpretation of the Driftless landscape, he was a natural for Lyons to interview.
The core of Going Driftless consists of numerous interviews Lyons conducted over a period of four years with organic farmers, artists, writers, communards (yes, there are communes in the Driftless), a naturalist, a book store owner, a food co-op manager, and a dozen others, including my wife, Bonnie Koloc, and myself. Most of the people Lyons interviewed were suggested by other interviewees, and for that reason this sampling of Driftless residents is a collection of liked-minded individuals whose sensibilities are attuned to one another.
They do not work retail, they do not broker stocks, they do not work nine-to-five-thank-God-it’s-Friday jobs. To one degree or another they identify with the region. And in varying ways they are creative.
Is There a Driftless Sensibility?
But there’s another population in the Driftless region: the farm families and village residents who were here long before most of the book’s subjects arrived. But that exclusion, I think, is intentional and very much to the core of Lyons’ purpose. He is looking for those people who make the Driftless region one of the most creative rural areas in the country.
“Something magical surrounded the Driftless region,” he writes early on, “and in this fast-paced, digital world, I wanted to know just what such a magical landscape can teach us.” Going Driftless is a book about a quest: Lyons wants to know what the newcomers to the region think and feel about their adopted home. He is continually asking his subjects questions that imply, “Is there a Driftless sensibility?”
He asks more than one person, “Do you feel a connection to the entire region?” Lyons himself feels that connection deeply, but one day when he doesn’t feel like “participating in the spirit of the Driftless.”
He wonders if this spirit of the Driftless can be found in its foods. He talks with a Madison chef at a cheese tasting. She tells him that she can taste the Driftless in a certain cheese. “It had a pineapple taste,” she says, and others there agree that pineappily taste in cheese makes region’s cheese distinctive.
In another chapter Lyons asks himself whether apples grown in the Driftless region have their own particular taste.
With an organic farmer he decides to “try out my theory that the region is more defined as a state of mind.” The farmer agrees, but identifies that state of mind with the region’s agricultural practices due to its topographical constraints.
When he visits novelist David Rhodes, he decides “to lay out my theory that the Driftless region is a subculture within a nation . . I tell him I see the Driftless as a Midwestern ecotopia . . .”
Rhodes disagrees and says he does not believe that a particular landscape breeds people of a certain character. On the other hand, Carl Homstad tells Lyons that the Driftless area naturally produces cooperation between man and nature.
And so it goes. Lyons comes to no explicit conclusion, which is perhaps why Going Driftless ends with an interview with Shoken Winecroff, Abbott of Ryumonji, a Zen monastery in northeast Iowa. Zen no-mind, seeing without judging, simply being—is that how Stephen Lyons has decided to experience the Driftless? Not through ideas nurtured in part by a creative imagination?
Whatever his conclusion, if any, Stephen Lyons’ book is a gift to those of us in the Driftless. Going Driftless weaves a mosaic of personalities and occupations that gives those of us who live here a better knowledge of our neighbors—yes, neighbors—across our region. Stephen Lyons helps us to look at ourselves.
For sale on Amazon:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Going-Driftless-Lessons-Heartland…/dp/0762780657
e-book: https://www.amazon.com/Going-Driftless-Lessons-Heartland-Unraveling…/B00X2507IU
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