I’m Kathleen Heideman, a writer, artist, and environmentalist working in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Recently I joined Emma Palova on the For the Love of Books podcast to talk about my new poetry collection, The Caving Grounds, and the long, strange labors that went into writing this book. Below I summarize our conversation, and offer an excerpt. If you want to enter the giveaway, please listen to the podcast.
What is The Caving Grounds about?
The Caving Grounds excavates the rubble of Negaunee, a small Upper Peninsula town hollowed by a century of iron mining. Extraction of hematite left the land pockmarked with sinkholes and undermined neighborhoods. Houses, churches, even cemeteries were moved. Dangerous areas were fenced off and labeled “caving grounds.” The book follows those ruptures—literal and metaphorical—tracing the underside of mining, the sacrifices of landscape and labor, and the ways place holds memory.
I used the term “caving grounds” both as a technical term (areas made unsafe by underground mining) and as a metaphor for collapse—of relationships, communities, landscapes. The poems move between geology, local history, personal reflection, and mythic guide-figures to map an ecosystem of loss and persistence.
How the project began: heartbreak, landscape, and the pull of place
The seed of the book began in private heartbreak. I used the image of the foundation of a house collapsing under itself as a metaphor. Pretty quickly I lost interest in my own relationship story and became captivated by the real place—the town of Negaunee and the hidden topography beneath it.
What drew me in was how nonlinear and interconnected the landscape was: hundreds of mines, pits leading to shafts, tunnels crossing and re-crossing and opening into stopes, all of them reaching for the same ore. The human stories—families who stayed generation after generation, neighborhoods that had to be dragged out of danger—were as compelling as the geology.
Research: microfiche, mine tours, helicopter flights, and interviews
photo credit: Pamela Arnold
This project took time—decades, really. I started twenty-seven years ago, and my research was deep and varied. I turned every stone I could: microfiche archives, dusty mining inspector reports, library journals, historical societies. I visited every underground mine tour I could find—silver, copper, iron and others—to learn the sensory details of working underground.
Grants from the Jerome Foundation, McKnight, The Loft, and a Bush Foundation residency allowed me to travel, collect samples, and spend a year back in the region finishing interviews. I even hired a helicopter to see the pockmarked landscape from above at a time before Google Earth made that view convenient. Those visuals helped me understand the extent of the reworked landscape.
Rusty: my guide, mask, and trickster
In the book Rusty is not a single person. He (and sometimes she) is an amalgam: historical figures, people I interviewed, story-keepers, and mythic guides. Rusty performs like Virgil leading me into the underworld, or like an Anishinaabe trickster who knows what not to reveal. He takes me under fences, tells stories, and allows the book to move between first-person witnessed accounts, and my own observations. In that sense, Rusty is a mask—a narrative device I use to inhabit perspectives that are not strictly my own.
Challenges: interviews, recording, and the cost of time
The hardest part was my lack of formal training in oral history. Twenty-five years ago I didn’t record interviews consistently; I took notes and collected fragments. I regret not having full recordings of many conversations—as most of those people have since passed. That felt like an obligation: to honor their stories and not lose them.
Another challenge was pacing. Projects this long compete with new work for the author’s attention; funding and life intervene. If I could do it again I would have published sooner—partly so more of the voices I recorded could have seen the book while they were still alive.
Surprises and discoveries: mining methods, deep time, and fossils
I learned that mining in Negaunee was more complex—and more willful—than I first imagined. Methods like block caving and stoping intentionally removed mine supports to extract every last bit of ore, even when it meant surface collapse. Companies often took ore knowing it would lead to subsidence. That intentionality reframed the human and environmental costs for me.
Another astonishing discovery: the age beneath our feet. The ore-bearing sediments are roughly 2.1 billion years old. At Empire Mine I collected rock samples with fossils like Grypania spiralis—visible relics of deep time. Holding those rocks made the scale of connection palpable: local history dwarfed by planetary history.
What the book taught me—and what I hope readers take away
On a personal level, The Caving Grounds taught me how to be a poet: layering, collage, inhabiting masks, and learning to work in long, patient arcs. The book functioned as my teacher.
For readers, I hope the book encourages more attention to the origins of material things. When you pick up a rusty nail, a chunk of metal, or an old iron tool, consider the labor, the communities, and the landscapes impacted to make it. The extraction that gives us metal connects to immigrant labor, to warfare and industry, and to geological history. Tug any one of those threads and you find connections everywhere.
Negaunee today and the afterlife of extraction
Negaunee is reinventing itself. Some caving grounds are now crossed by recreational trails for walking and mountain biking. “Olde Town” Negaunee, previously abandoned and fenced off, is a destination. Plaques offer limited historic interpretation, but there’s a tension between “proud heritage” and unpalatable histories: moved homes, relocated cemeteries, and buried narratives of labor and sacrifice.
What’s next
I’m working in fiction for the first time and developing new poetry centered on the wild northern landscape of the Upper Peninsula—examining the tension between extraction and preservation. Miners remain characters in the work, but I’m exploring new terrain.
An excerpt from The Caving Grounds
You can hear Kathleen read this excerpt on Emma Palova’s podcast
“Entering the heavy door of the Negaunee antiques store
we pause at the swollen books marked FREE
and begin humming in the room of china, where each cup touched
rings clean against a serving plate, stained teapot, vase,
against mixing bowls in a rainbow of chipped glazes—
even toxic crimsons and cobalts — for looks only —
gaudy menageries of ceramic knickknacks: the dog-playing-fiddle
with a hollow middle meant for storing pennies, the rooster cookie jar
with lewd red comb and menacing talons, the chicken dish
with wings half-spread over butter-dish chicks…
Notice how cleanly the hen’s chipped neck lifts from her body
at the widest point, convenient, an invisible axe-line
that opens to reveal her stuffing cavity? Elsewhere, there are
music boxes, rooms of knives, the metal song of meals long-finished,
tarnished silver, bent spoons sleeping back-to-belly…(This excerpt is from the poem “We Make a Certain Music, Entering.”)
Parting thoughts
Next time you see a rusty fender or an old nail, try a brief meditation on its life: where the iron came from, who touched it, who worked to make it, and what its story might be next. I’ve been experimenting with eco-prints made with rusty nails—creative afterlives for materials that seem spent.
And a small reminder: stay curious about place. The earth holds stories; you only have to notice.
— Kathleen Heideman
