Dordt University Professor of English Howard Schaap’s memoir, Brooding Upon the Waters, coming this winter

Howard Schaap, professor of English at Dordt University, has written a memoir. His book, Brooding Upon the Waters, will be released in December 2025.

Chronicling his upbringing in the Midwest through stories of fishing with his father, Schaap explores the intersection of family, history, faith, and landscape. As described by the publishing house, Slant Books, “Brooding Upon the Waters recreates the stark beauty and haunting isolation of growing up on a failing family farm in the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way, Howard Schaap grapples with how these forces—as disparate as distorted theology and short-sighted financial greed—complicate his own struggle to remain loyal to the place he has always called home. Brooding Upon the Waters recounts not only a mental health crisis but also a crisis of the American Dream in the Upper Midwest, America’s lost landscape.”

For Schaap, the story started with the realization that he was, at heart, a nonfiction writer. “Every time I would try to write something roughly based on events in my life, it just turned into the real thing,” he explains.

Writing a memoir also presented him with the opportunity to ask deeper questions about his family’s experience with mental health and financial crisis. “I thought, ‘How did we get here?’ and just kept digging for the story—not just thirty years of what we had been through…but how other cultural and historical factors played into our lives,” Schaap says.

Schaap’s writing draws from both his personal experience fishing and farming but also from years of reading about rural life. “Sara Smarsh’s memoir Heartland was a model,” says Schaap. “In it, she explores the various aspects that led to poverty in the rural Midwest in the 1980s. I’ve long been fascinated by the factors that led to what was called ‘the farm crisis’ at the time, going back to Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America.”

“Then I read Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, in which there were these strange similarities in the Ingalls’s story to our family’s story—unpredictable events that struck which led to one domino falling and eventually to financial ruin,” continues Schaap. “Fraser shows how Charles Ingalls turns to populism, which has some implications for our own present moment. So, I found that Laura Ingalls’ actual experience as well as her books shed light on our family’s story in ways I didn’t expect.”

Between reading sections of his memoir at faculty readings and teaching Advanced Nonfiction Writing, Schaap’s writing has also been shaped by his experience as a Dordt faculty member. “The Dordt community was my first and most supportive audience,” says Schaap. “I also pursued my Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree while I taught at Dordt and took chapters of the book to two different workshops, thanks to my professional development funds and funding from the Kielstra Center.”

Thematically, Schaap hopes his memoir brings awareness to mental health, the significance of place, and the influence of relationships. “On one level it’s a mental health book,” Schaap explains. “But beyond that it’s about a specific rural landscape, the former tall grass prairie, which is one of the most transformed landscapes in the world—and what the costs are of that transformation. But then it’s also about relationships with our fathers and how that affects our views of God, for good and ill.”

Additionally, Schaap’s memoir offers an opportunity for readers to experience and reflect on life in the Midwest. “A few years ago, author Kent Meyers visited Dordt,” he says. “During his visit he said something along the lines of, ‘Midwesterners often don’t know their own stories.’ That was a prompt for me as I was writing, and so I also hope this book gets us thinking about our stories in a new, deeper way.”

Brooding Upon the Waters is expected to be released on December 2, 2025. Preorders will be available at the following link: https://slantbooks.org/books/brooding-upon-the-waters.

About Dordt University

As an institution of higher education committed to the Reformed Christian perspective, Dordt University equips students, faculty, alumni, and the broader community to work toward Christ-centered renewal in all aspects of contemporary life. Located in Sioux Center, Iowa, Dordt is a comprehensive university named to the best college lists by U.S. News and World Report, the Wall Street Journal, Times Higher Education, Forbes.com, Washington Monthly, and Princeton Review.