Gichigami is an eerie coming-of-age novel that follows a young girl’s search for her mother after her mother mysteriously disappears from Madeline Island in Lake Superior. About the novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley writes, “Steffes captures the mystery and beauty of the area with rare artistry. She also writes a compelling story—the plot is suspenseful, but more than that, the characters, with their idiosyncrasies and their faults, bring the plot alive.”

Lindsey Steffes was awarded the Juniper Prize for Fiction for her debut novel Gichigami, which was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in March 2025. She studied fiction at University of Wisconsin, Madison and has an MFA from University of California, Riverside, where she was mentored by Jane Smiley and Susan Straight. Her work has been recognized by Glimmer Train and featured in Midwestern Gothic, Black Heart Magazine, and Sad Girl Diaries. She has taught creative writing as a fellow for the Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts and has served on Sarabande Books’ Young Professionals Board. She currently lives in St. Paul with her partner, son, and two dogs, and much of their free time is spent up on the shores of Lake Superior, where her novel is set.

—

On March 16th, 2015, Tracy Youngblom was rushing to finish last-minute preparations for a class she would teach the next day when there was an unexpected knock at her door. Grudgingly, she answered it to find a uniformed officer standing on her front porch. Youngblom realized then that her youngest son Elias should have been arriving home from a trip to Fargo where he was visiting friends at North Dakota State University. The officer told her that Elias had been in an accident and was in the hospital. Later, she learned that his car had been struck nearly head on by a drunk driver going 70 miles per hour. Denial and shock took over as she made the long drive from their home in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. When she saw Elias in the ICU–swollen beyond recognition, covered in stitches, with a myriad of tubes attached to him–the full gravity of the situation descended.

On the day of the crash, Elias had been driving back to Coon Rapids to celebrate National Ice Cream Day with friends. An avid lover of music, he’d been working as a conductor while wrapping up his degree, moving toward his dream of becoming a marching band director. After the accident, Elias begins his long journey of recovery, which is set back when doctors announce that his optic nerves are dead. Despite it all, Elias never wavers, approaching each challenge with resilience, grace, and humor.

Alongside Elias, Youngblom faces her own challenges, staying by his side in the ICU for weeks, coordinating with other family members and friends, and never flagging in her care of her severely injured son, yet all the while coping with her own emotions, fears, and trauma. She struggles to support Elias, heal her self, and let him go on with his life. In this riveting memoir, Youngblom traverses her family’s lives before and after the accident, capturing the complications of grief, recovery, and the strength it takes to move forward–because we must.

Tracy Youngblom has been writing and publishing since the early 1990s. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She has published two chapbooks of poems and two full-length collections, Growing Big and the recent Boy. Her awards and honors include two Pushcart nominations, including one in 2017 for a poem from Boy. In addition, her memoir, Because We Must, won the Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in March 2025.