Alison Swan

Alison Swan is an award-winning environmentalist whose work Fresh Water won a 2007 Michigan Notable Book award. Her writing has appeared in Peninsula, Essays and Memoirs from Michigan...

Fresh Water
Women Writing on the Great Lakes

Alison Swan

Winner: 2007 Michigan Notable Book Award

Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes is a collection of nonfiction works by women writers. These works focus on the Midwest: living with the five interconnected freshwater seas that we know as the Great Lakes. Contributing to this collection are renowned poets, essayists, and fiction writers, all of whom write about their own creative streams of consciousness, the fresh waters of the Great Lakes, and the region's many rivers: Loraine Anderson, Judith Arcana, Rachel Azima, Mary Blocksma, Gayle Boss, Sharon Dilworth, Beth Ann Fennelly, Linda Nemec Foster, Gail Griffin, Rasma Haidri, Aleta Karstad, Laura Kasischke, Janet Kauffman, Jacqueline Kolosov, Susan Laidlaw, Lisa Lenzo, Linda Loomis, Anna Mills, Stephanie Mills, Judith Minty, Anne-Marie Oomen, Rachael Perry, Susan Power, Donna Seaman, Heather Sellers, Gail Louise Siegel, Sue William Silverman,Claudia Skutar, Annick Smith, Leslie Stainton, Kathleen Stocking, Judith Strasser, Alison Swan, Elizabeth A.Trembley, Jane Urquhart, Diane Wakoski, and Leigh Allison Wilson.

Reviews

"There is the hydrology, the biology, and the biochemistry of our Great Lakes...the history, the economics, and the sociology...somewhere in there we forget the aesthetics—but it is our sense of their beauty that brings us back to our Lakes and which will ultimately protect them. Alison Swan’s Fresh Water is an essential collection of essays by some of our finest women writers. This book reminds us of the small transformative moments we experience on and around our Great Lakes, and it adds significantly to the record of the beauty we find there." — Keith Taylor, author of Guilty at the Rapture and co-editor of The Huron River: Voices from the Watershed

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"Fresh Water will take you back—to the Great Lakes or to the lakes, rivers, streams and creeks you have known. The writings here will change you: stimulating you to read, to see more clearly, and perhaps to write your own words of water and of place. — Patricia Clark, author of My Father On A Bicycle and Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan.