Clouded Waters - Paperback

by Dianna Hunter (Author)

*2024 Winner: Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for Fiction

In the far north, as water defenders and pro-mining forces clash, the publisher of a struggling newspaper unearths a corrupt conspiracy.
Near Iron, Minnesota, waters split along a three-way divide, carrying minerals and contaminants to Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico. Susan B. Ellingson (SB to those who know her) runs a small paper with the help of her best friend and a part-time staff. When a mining company seeks a permit to dig for copper and nickel and store potentially harmful mining waste nearby, SB commits to covering the story.It isn't easy. She wrestles with financial stress and personal pain. Her dead wife lingers in spirit. Their children have grown and left home, and SB's Labrador provides sweet but insufficient company. Her mother-in-law leads a group of Ojibwe and Métis grandmothers fighting to protect the water, and after an intriguing new woman comes to town, SB isn't sure how to feel or act. After a fiery environmentalist informs her that a local water scientist has gone missing, she follows a trail of evidence from a tiny, off-grid community into a global tangle of lies, corruption, whistleblowing, and danger.

Author Biography

Dianna Hunter is the author of two nonfiction books, Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life (University of Minnesota Press) and Breaking Hard Ground: Stories of the Minnesota Farm Advocates (Holy Cow! Press). Both were finalists for the Minnesota Book Award. Her short fiction, journalism, essays, and book reviews have appeared in national and regional publications, including the In These Times Rural America blog, the Rural Women's Studies Association blog, Peregrine, Feminist Collections, Hurricane Alice, Earth Matters. A former farmer and retired teacher of writing and women's studies, she currently writes, gardens, and forages in the rocky green spaces of Duluth, Minnesota, where she lives with her wife, Deb.