Biography: Louise Young

Louise Young lives along the Amnicon River in a Finnish community known as Outer Mongolia. On her way there, she worked on an assembly line that produced Jovan Musk perfume (“Get It On!”), gave birth to a tour company that arranged home stays on Panama’s San Blas Islands with the indigenous Kuna people, mooned a mountain goat, earned a master’s degree in botany, wrote a novel that Publisher’s Weekly selected as their “Pick of the Week,” listened to cow elk hum lullabies to their calves, studied indigenous fiber arts on three continents, and shared mutton and lies with sheepherders in Montana’s Absaroka/Beartooth Wilderness (the sheepherders provided the mutton and some of the lies). She’s been processing, spinning, and weaving bast fibers for more than 20 years but admits that when she craves comfort she reaches for a spindle and a handful of fine Shetland fleece.

THE BOOK OF THE NORTH is inspired genius in the way it unites so many disparate and seemingly unrelated fields of study inside one cover: history, ethnology, literature, botany, visual art, chemistry, fiber arts, indigenous studies, ecology, linguistics – and probably others that I’m forgetting. It’s incredibly inspiring to be a part of a project that reproduces and records history while also opening a new page of unified studies. I have learned so much working on this project and am very proud of my small contribution to the ultimate end product, which will not only be the final manuscript but all of the knowledge that has been shared through the process of producing the volume. As Horace Kallen said, “The going is the goal.”