Writing—on how to remain rooted and wild
Why This Book & Why Now
A Field Guide to Staying:
Essential Activism for Women’s Rights in Red America
At a time of increasing restrictions on bodily autonomy in red states, many people feel at odds with their homeground. They wonder if relocation is a better option than resistance.
At the same time, there is a deep hunger for hopeful stories of remaining, resisting, and reclaiming a sense of home. A Field Guide to Staying offers just that: a narrative map for enduring in a difficult place, building community and cultural change. Jen writes from one of the country’s reddest and most mythologized regions, showing that what works in rural North Idaho can translate elsewhere.
Often there is a sense that our only choices amidst cultural friction are complicity or escape. But A Field Guide to Staying offers a third way.
What This Book Offers
Braiding personal story, regional and natural history, and the stories of physicians, patients, and community members, the book offers a lived blueprint for regional social justice activism and a field guide for readers navigating similarly fraught landscapes.
This book provides:
A framework for staying in places that feel hostile or misaligned, treating home as a practice, not a place
A way to direct anger at injustice in service to connection rather than destruction
Tools for reading manufactured fear and actual risk more clearly
A blueprint for community activism accessible to all
A model for using personal story to subversively shift culture and reduce stigma
Above all, A Field Guide to Staying strengthens a kind of hope that fuels action—a long-haul hope that keeps us from retreating or going quiet. A kind of hope, as David Orr writes, that is “a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.”
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Praise
“[Jen] is a poet-journalist with her finger on the pulse of canyon country."
—Terry Tempest Williams, author
“...a young writer on the rise…someone stylistically and perceptually akin to the late Ellen Meloy.”
—M. John Fayhee, author
“My students were rapt. They had questions for weeks afterwards. Jen made a deep impression on them, inspiring them and guiding them.”
—Carrie Baker, author and professor, Smith College
About Jen
Jen Jackson Quintano is founder of The Pro-Voice Project, an Idaho-based nonprofit employing storytelling to dismantle abortion stigma in deeply conservative spaces. Her narrative activism includes stage productions, writing workshops, filmmaking, and facilitated community conversations. Jen’s writing, situated at the intersection of landscape and culture, has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including High Country News, High Desert Journal, and The Seattle Times.
Excerpt from A Field Guide To Staying
Idaho: Love it or leave it, they say.
As if resisting and remaining were incompatible.
Let me assure you: They’re not.
The thing is, I do love Idaho, even amidst an undercurrent of doubt and rage. I love it for my community, my home, these landscapes, their relative emptiness and wildness. I love it for the way my daughter is supported, the way our business is valued, the way longtime residents unite to nurture those in need. I love it enough that I refuse to leave on anyone’s terms but my own. I love it enough to fight to make it a more equitable and empathic place to call home.
What if loving one’s home is not blindly rolling over when you think it’s in the wrong? What if loving your home is staying? What if it’s fighting the bullies telling you to do otherwise? Or, even better, what if it’s coming to understand the bullies aren’t actually monsters but people who show up when others are in need. The bullies might be so much more than just bullies, making the fight more complicated but also more hopeful.
I’d rather effect change in Idaho than add to an echo chamber of West Coast virtue signaling. I’d rather remain where the edges of my congruence with place are rough, creating friction, heat, sparks. I want to burn for my home. I want to be constantly aware of it as a presence and a persistence—rather than blithely sink into complacency about its place in my life and my life in this place.
For me, home is a question requiring daily affirmation and renewed commitment. Home is a practice, not a given.
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