About the Author

Kaethe Schwehn holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the coeditor of Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (2014). Schwehn has been the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and a Loft Mentor Series award. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. She teaches at St. Olaf College and lives in Northfield, Minnesota, with her husband and two children.

Reviews

""Kaethe Schwehn's poignant memoir explores longing, both spiritual and physical, community and faith, in prose that is calm, lovely, and filled with clear-eyed honesty and grace. Tailings is simply an exquisite book."" --Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer ""Schwehn's Tailings, is, like all of my favorite contemporary nonfiction, uncategorizable--part memoir, part spiritual reflection, part reportage. Brilliant in all of its guises, Tailings only makes me want to read more by Kaethe Schwehn. She writes with fierce intelligence and luminous clarity on all of her subjects: loss, grace, this very particular village, and the hard work of renewal. Tailings is a beautiful and original book by a remarkable writer."" --Rene Steinke, author ofFriendswood ""Already by the second chapter, this is a book hard to lay aside. Schwehn's prose is liquid and intelligent. It catches your interest immediately and swings you from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Her observations never stand still but sweep you forward into her story/memoir. She is a genuine artist."" --Walter Wangerin Jr., author of Ragman--and Other Cries of Faith