Families can be messy.
In Dean Kuipers’ new book, just out, “The Deer Camp,” one family, shattered on page one, grows even further apart — then comes together … only to have a bittersweet resolution. Sort of. In a nutshell, it is about how a storied piece of land purchased by the author’s alienated father after his sons are grown, is used as a pawn in a familial game of chess. The object of the game: to scratch through the hard scrabble of unyielding fallow land, to get to the bounty of what lies beneath. Can families really be mended by brooks and rivers, by forests and sand?
The memoir, in which Nature is as much a character as any of the family members, is honest and breathtakingly poetic. When I received an advance copy and read this line only six pages in, I was hooked:
“The leaves overhead twisted with breathy sounds against a purple-black city sky, describing in a kind of semaphore how the trees felt about the barely cooling night breeze.”
Kuipers, who has a stack of writing credentials — The L.A. Times, The Atlantic and Rolling Stone, to name a few — will make a stop at Rediscovered Books on Thursday, May 30, for an event that will feature an author’s talk and book signing.
I recently had the opportunity to ply the author with a few questions about life, the act of writing, and what comes next.
Jeanne Huff: Your book, “The Deer Camp,” is a memoir about a certain period of your life, which deals with you and your siblings reconnecting with your father. Without giving too much away, can you talk a bit about your early life — where you grew up, what you wanted to be — sort of the “three-minute elevator speech” version?
Dean Kuipers: I grew up in rural Michigan, to a sprawling Dutch American family. My folks are from the Holland-Zeeland area and I’m related to thousands of people there. Both my parents came off the farm and had five siblings each, and on the Kuipers side they were all robust men who hunted and fished, obsessively. My two younger brothers and I came up constantly assessing the habitat — will the big acorn crop mean more deer? Are there grouse down in the gray dogwood thicket? Can we catch big pike through the ice? It was the 1970s, so we reveled in our freedom to roam unsupervised through the woods. I loved both science and literature from the very start.
The pastor of our church encouraged this by giving me really heavy works of philosophy, like Francis Schaeffer’s “The God Who Is There,” when I was 15. I read philosophy and also ecologists such as Paul Shepard and Gregory Bateson, most of which was way over my head. I was madly in love with Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Grace Paley because I could feel Nature creeping through them. I was trying so hard to make sense of my innate connection to the natural world that surrounded me. I wanted to be a doctor, until I discovered in a college class I could write, which ruined everything. I was invited to be part of a six-year M.D. program at the University of Michigan and my utter failure at the interview was the first time I realized how much of a bumpkin I was. I guess things work out.
JH: Why did you want to write this memoir?
DK: I needed to write this book because of a change that came over my father, and how our engagement with the landscape helped it happen. My dad, Bruce, was always taking us to the river or the woods because he was no good in the house. He cheated on my mom repeatedly and was controlling and angry. My youngest brother Joe probably took it the hardest, becoming a teenage alcoholic. We needed a dad who was loving and present, but he was silent and absent. When our mother, Nancy, divorced him in 1988, he went out and got this deer camp in Michigan, partly as a way to get us back in his life. We resisted it for a decade or more, but finally my middle brother Brett pushed to do a habitat project on the land, making it better for grouse and woodcock. It led to a huge fight with our father that was exhausting, but finally one spring a new forest came up and when it did our father completely and utterly changed. He was hugging us, kissing us, telling us he loved us. Something about the work on the land and the arrival of these trees released him. He saw the sandy soil itself was trustworthy, we were trustworthy, love could be real, we were OK people. It took so much grueling work to get him there, but I had to write this because if our shattered family could change that much, then anyone’s could. Maybe nature is a connector that could help other people, too.
JH: In writing a memoir, the author is exposed and so is everyone the author writes about. Did your siblings or your father have any misgivings about your book?
DK: Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” I hope that’s not true for us. Honestly, this new relationship to our father was one we’d hoped for all our lives, and I was in my 40s when it happened, so I was trying to figure out how to write about it. Then my father died, too young, and that idea got a little simpler. But only a little. So much of the story belonged to my mother and my brothers and we all started talking. My brothers don’t care to be part of any media work, including social media, but they understood why I wanted to write this and were intrigued by the ecopsychological aspects, like I am. My mom didn’t really want to get into my dad’s infidelities and all that — just too painful. But we were going through photos and opened up this whole topic, and it was actually good to talk about. As a kid, you know things are happening, but it was so affirming to get the story straight from her: it made me feel like I wasn’t crazy. I knew I had seen things in their relationship, and I had. My mother had been blamed for divorcing him, when clearly he was the one wrecking everything; she had never sought to correct the record, but I felt like that was the only way I could explain how far we all had to come to develop a real relationship again. My dad was so damn stiff; he had locked all this stuff inside and couldn’t talk about it. I would have tried to get him to talk about it, eventually, but who knows if he would have. If he were alive it would have been a very different book.
JH: Did you ask permission to talk about such an intimate time?
DK: Yeah, I had to make sure that Mom, my brothers Brett and Joe, and Brett’s longtime girlfriend, Ayron, were all OK with this and on board with what I wrote, as it was as much about them as it was about me. I interviewed them all quite a bit and explained what I was doing, and then had them read the final draft. They signed off on it, but we all recognize this is MY take. My brother Joe, who saw more trouble than all of us, would have written a very different book. He never did feel that his relationship with Dad got all the way to where it needed to be. I suspect my mother’s version would have been a lot more about the loads of fun we had as kids, as we were all clowns and had a great time most days. She’s an optimistic person.
JH: Was it hard for you to “go there,” to be honest in writing about such an emotional look at families, at your family?
DK: When you read a great memoir, like Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club” or Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk” or Geoffrey Wolff’s “The Duke of Deception,” part of what is so satisfying it that they tell you things about themselves that no one would tell. They make themselves vulnerable. I really loved my dad. If my brothers and I didn’t love him so much, we wouldn’t have worked so damn hard to make a new relationship with him. Because it was really hard and frustrating work. So it’s discomfiting to see him described as a bad father, or as a philanderer. Or to see my brother Joe described as an alcoholic. And if they hadn’t changed, I’m not sure I would like to see that in print, because what is the point of that? Just to say those things are bad? I have no desire whatsoever to just do a confessional and talk about how (crappy) things were. But because they changed, we get to see the arc and to consider why it happened. More important, in a way: we get to figure out if this can happen for someone else. If you get your father or mother involved in a garden or some kind of project that relied on natural systems, could they change? How does that work? What went into it that can be replicated?
JH: What surprised you most, what did you discover while writing about the whole experience?
DK: I discovered a few stories, like my father getting into a fistfight with his own father at 16 and breaking my grandfather’s jaw. I hadn’t heard that one, because my father absolutely refused to talk about his youth. But overall, as I wrote, I saw a period in my life when I became like my father: I wasn’t married with kids like he was, but I had a lot of girlfriends when I was younger and I hurt people I loved. I didn’t go into it other than a couple scenes, because that would have been a different book. It felt indulgent and gross. I wanted to stick to our family interaction and what it took for there to be trust and real love between us, and how the trees and sand and grouse were involved. That relationship was one I really needed to fix so I knew that love was possible. It’s hard to feel such intense love for someone in your family and then to be absolutely unable to communicate with them. I’m sure many of us have felt this.
JH: How has it affected you and your relationships overall?
DK: It gives me a lot of confidence to know that this relationship to my father got so much better. I was so often despairing when I was young, I wondered what was the point of living when your own family was so frustrating. I say to all young people: Hang on until you can know what’s really going on in your family! It will look so different one day! To know now that my father felt love that he could not communicate seems to fill every human being with potential. I have a wonderful relationship to my wife, Lauri, and my son and stepsons, and I’m so grateful that there’s openness and communication and talking all the time. Let the love come through. I try to find it now in everybody I know: there’s someone different inside there.
JH: Nature, being in nature, rural America, Michigan farmland and hunting and fishing — all are a part of your narrative. Would you say this acts as more of a background — or is it such a strong element that could be considered one of the characters?
DK: Oh, in this book, nature is not just one of the characters; it’s the protagonist. It’s an ecopsychological work. Ecopsychology is the psychology of the interdependence of human beings and all the rest of nature. I understood from my childhood, and then from reading guys like Shepard and Arne Naess around the time I was in college, that my mind is inseparable from the mindedness of the rest of the material world. Its thoughts are my thoughts. Bateson said: “What thinks is the total system that engages in trial and error, which is man plus environment.” When the trees came up on our deer camp and my dad started to think and feel a different way, it made perfect sense to me. Part of my job with this book was to explore how that might work without getting carried away with the science and philosophy and just let it be a story.
JH: What do you hope readers take away from your memoir?
DK: Your family can change. Individuals can change. Even governments and politics can change. Recognition of our fundamental being as part of nature and our reliance on the earth is a route to truth that can reveal love in the other. We all want to know that.
JH: You’ve written for Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic and The L.A. Times, among others — was this your first book-length project? If so, can you talk about how that process was different — did you hit a wall, have writer’s block?
DK: I have written a number of nonfiction books, including “Burning Rainbow Farm,” about a pair of gay, libertarian pot advocates gunned down by authorities in Michigan in 2001, and “Operation Bite Back,” about an animal rights crusader who tried to destroy the fur farming industry in the 1990s. Those books were easier for me to write than this one, mostly because this one is about my family and that means writing as a group rather than just one person: every detail has to satisfy not just me but all the other people who observed it, within reason. Also, I got incredibly hung up for about four years trying to write about the philosophy and science behind ecopsychology. I wrote a book that was full of long quotes from everybody I had read and that tried hard to convince the reader that this connection with the earth was real and that it mattered. It was a long struggle before I realized I just had to let the family story be a story and tell itself. My poor wife, Lauri, read a dozen drafts of that wrongheadedness. But everyone hung in there and finally the real story emerged.
JH: What’s next?
DK: My wife Lauri Kranz and I co-wrote a garden book called “A Garden Can Be Anywhere,” and that came out in February 2019. Having two books out at the same time is super fun but also kind of madness. So I haven’t committed to the next one yet.
JH: What do you do for fun?
DK: We are an outdoors family. I go to the deer camp about four times a year, when I’m lucky, and my brothers and I have work projects: I was just there during the first week in May, and Brett and Joe and I planted 2,000 conifers. It took forever and broke our backs, but that’s typical of us. We always work too hard. We put in a new field of alfalfa and clover, or we make a new motorcycle trail, or build a wood duck pond. We’re desperate to get our hands in that dirt. We fly fish the Pere Marquette and the Manistee rivers. We ski Mammoth Mountain, which is my home mountain, and other places in the West. My stepson Milo is a rock climber and now that takes us to amazing places like Bishop, California, and to the tramway above Palm Springs and to Red Rocks outside Las Vegas and other places people climb. And when we have a good dog, we’ll run around and try to find a grouse. Lauri and I also cook together every single day, and the kids are getting into that. My 19-year-old son is now cooking every day for his mother, too.
JH: Do you have any pets?
DK: We have two wonderful rescue mutts, Max and Sam, who fill us with joy. My son also has a Shih Tzu/poodle mix rescue named Jenkins that is old now and toddles about like Mr. Magoo. I’m convinced our houses need to be filled with animals.
JH: Anything else you want to say?
DK: Thank you for allowing me to go on and on like this.