Huot-Vickery, Jim dale

(Jim dale Vickery)

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Home—Ely, MN. Agent—c/o Author Mail, University of Minnesota Press, Ste. 290, 111 Third Ave., S., Minneapolis, MN 55401.

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, 1992.

WRITINGS:

(Under name Jim dale Vickery) Wilderness Visionaries, ICS Books (Merrillville, IN), 1986, published as Wilderness Visionaries: Leopold, Thoreau, Muir, Olson, Murie, Service, Marshall, Rutstrum, North-Word Press (Minocqua, WI), 1994.

(Under name Jim dale Vickery) Open Spaces, North-Word Press (Minocqua, WI), 1991.

Winter Sign, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1998.

Contributor to Backpacker.

SIDELIGHTS: Jim dale Huot-Vickery describes life in a demanding northern climate in his book Winter Sign, which covers a span of fifteen years of backcountry life at the author's cabin, Hocoka, in the Boundary Waters region of Minnesota. There, the winters are very long and, in the author's view, souls are shaped by the long-lasting cold and darkness. Vickery looks at his world from many angles, discussing its ecology, extolling it in poetry, and using its climate as a framework for philosophical essays. He even provides practical information, such as how to make and use snowshoes. He makes observations on the winter of 1996, which saw one of the largest snowfalls ever recorded in the area. While there are autobiographical glimpses in the book, Huot-Vickery's thrust is "on the grandeur and danger of nature in winter, on the season's potentially fatal beauty," reported a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, who recommended the book as "a compelling account of a quest to understand nature and self." Bernard Mergen, reviewing the book in American Studies International, compared it to Henry David Thoreau's classic Walden and termed Winter Sign "a lovely little meditation on life in the Quetico-Superior region."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Studies International, October, 2000, Bernard Mergen, review of Winter Sign, p. 142.

Publishers Weekly, October 12, 1998, review of Winter Sign, p. 67.