Impermanence: Life and Loss on Superior’s South Shore

“Sue Leaf’s Impermanence is a fascinating combination of personal memoir, natural history, and cultural history. She writes beautifully about Lake Superior’s South Shore and its forests, wetlands, and peoples. Her reflections on her family cabin on Lake Superior, and her grief about its potential loss from bluff erosion due to climate change, are particularly evocative. Anyone who loves Lake Superior will find this book rewarding.”–Nancy Langston, author of Sustaining Lake Superior and Climate Ghosts

“Sue Leaf has given us a gift: a vivid and meticulously researched portrait of one of the most remarkable freshwater coasts in the world. I thought I knew the place well, but I learned something new and fascinating on nearly every page.”–Jerry Dennis, author of The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas and The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes

Sue Leaf is author of The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake; A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts; Portage: A Family, a Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life; and 2021 Minnesota Book Award winner Minnesota’s Geologist: The Life of Newton Horace Winchell, all published by Minnesota. Trained as a zoologist, she writes about environmental and natural history. Her family has owned a cabin outside Port Wing, Wisconsin, on Lake Superior’s South Shore for thirty-five years.