Dr. Karen Babine is a UC Foundation associate professor of English at UTC and a published nonfiction author. Photo courtesy of Dr. Karen Babine.
In 2014, Dr. Karen Babine packed up her tiny camper, loaded her two cats in the car and left Minneapolis for Nova Scotia.
She spent the next month camping her way east, eventually making it to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince EdwardIsland.
“I had never been out that far east,” said Babine, a UC Foundation associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “I was like, ‘Why not?””
More than a decade later, that trip inspired “The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo,” published by Milkweed Editions in 2025.
The trip began with a realization that Babine didn’t need to wait for someone else to travel with her.
“What am I waiting for?” she remembered thinking. “If I want to do a thing, I should do a thing. I don’t have to wait for anybody to do it with me or give me permission. I am a fully capable adult.”
She already had the camper, which she bought in 2008 after wanting one since she was 17. She also had Galway and Maeve, two cats that had been camping with her since they were kittens.
Babine had been researching her father’s French-Acadian roots and knew they had ties to the region, but she had never explored that history in person. She decided the trip would give her the chance to visit archives and historic sites and see what she could learn by being there.
The trip also gave her a chance to think about what people inherit from their families and what can be lost when stories aren’tpassed down.
“I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to go stand in these places,’” she said. “I’m going to go see what archives I can get my hands on and see what new things I can add to this conversation.
“There are things that you cannot know if you’re not standing there.”
Babine wrote much of the book’s foundation during the trip, but it would be years before she returned to the material and began putting it together. Because the story involved family history, she wanted to be deliberate about what she included.
“I have very strong opinions about writerly ethics,” she said. “I do think that the stories we tell matter. Their stories aren’tneutral.”
The finished book became more personal than much of her previous work, exploring what it means to live independently while remaining connected to family and the places and stories that came before.
Babine said she prefers to use her own experiences to unravel larger questions rather than make herself the focus.
“There’s a difference between using your life as subject matter and using your life as a lens,” she said.
**********
Click here to learn more about and purchase Dr. Karen Sabine’s books.
**********
Her interest in place can also be found in her first book, “Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life,” published in 2015. Her second book, “All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer,” published in 2019, grew out ofwriting she did while her mother underwent cancer treatment.
Babine began writing long before those books were published.
She remembers making up stories in kindergarten and first grade. In college, she discovered creative nonfiction and began to see the kind of writer she would become.
Until she took a course on Minnesota writers, she never really considered that the places around her could be book worthy.
“It was the first time that I really realized that I didn’t have to write things set elsewhere,” she said. “I could write about the things that I saw around me and the people that I saw around me and the ideas that were around me.”
Babine went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts in nonfiction from Eastern Washington University and a doctoral degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before joining UTC in 2019.
Now in her own classroom, Babine tells students that being a writer and being a published writer are two different things. Getting work into print can take years, and rejection is part of the process.
“The difference between writers who are published and writers who are not largely is a matter of persistence,” she said.
In her literary editing and publishing course, students learn about the publishing process while producing UTC’s undergraduate literary journal, “Sequoya Review.”
“We have also been going through book production stuff with my own work as the class is going on,” she added. “We can talk about the real-world work and what this means.”
Babine recently helped edit an upcoming nonfiction anthology and delivered a manuscript for a book about the craft of nonfiction.
She tells her students that whether that work ends up on a bookshelf or not, it doesn’t change the work she did.
“If I never publish another thing ever for the rest of my life, I would still be a writer,” Babine said. “I couldn’t stop it if I tried.
“My brain is words. My life is words.”
Learn more
