Marc Nieson reads from "Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love and Landscape." He will be joined by Jim Heynen, author of "Schoolhouses of Minnesota," among other books.

Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape concerns the search for where identity, place, and heart intersect. The memoir opens with its Brooklyn-born narrator standing on his head outside an old one-room schoolhouse amid 500 acres of remote woodlands in Iowa, his new home. Why this Walden-like retreat? Is it to attend the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or is he actually on the lam from love? Structured like a schoolbook, each chapter is named after a school subject (i.e. Geography, History, Social Studies, What I Did On My Summer Vacation), which collectively forms an overall lesson plan for his coming back out of the woods. Schoolhouse is a study of both nature and of human nature.

Marc Nieson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theater, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. His recent fiction has appeared in Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction; Literary Review: Iowa Review: Green Mountains Review: Chautauqua from a Small Planet: Conjunctions; and Hawk & Handsaw. Nieson serves on the faculty of Chatham University, and is working on a new novel, Houdini’s Heirs.

Jim Heynen learned to read and write in a one-room schoolhouse and is a product of both religious, conservative Iowa and the cutting edge Pacific Northwest. He makes his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has been a writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota and Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. His books include Cosmos Coyote and William the Nice and The One-Room Schoolhouse.

Schoolhouses of Minnesota is a magical foray into the nearly forgotten world of one-acre school grounds, kerosene lanterns, coal-burning stoves, and old desks that eventually had sixty years worth of initials scraped into them. Heynen tells twenty-five beautifully crafted tales on the evolution of lunch pails, the consolidation of rural schools, profiles of bullies and teachers pets, and the timeless wish of schoolchildren of all generations school closing on snow days. Images by photographer Doug Ohman take readers inside the simple, often abandoned, sometimes refurbished, and nearly vanishing Minnesota pioneer and early schoolhouses.