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Off Izaak Walton Road: The Grace That Comes Through Loss
Loss and sorrow can overwhelm even the strongest person, forcing them to reckon with their emotions whether they want to or not. In this extraordinary debut, Laura Julier recounts her reckoning, which took place in an old cabin tucked away on a hidden and forgotten gravel road along the Iowa River. In company with silence and snow, with eagles, owls, and a host of other birds, Julier finds solace and begins to emerge from the dark corners of grief. Over time, she comes to understand she cannot bury grief or turn aside from loss but must walk in its presence, awake and humble, until, at last, she finds her own wholeness within it.
ACCLAIM
“Laura Julier in Off Izaak Walton Road marks out the perimeter of the losses in her life, not by confiding them to the page but by careful indirection. She brings the reader with her as she retreats to a house on a rural road and season by season discovers the particulars of the world that goes on without all of us. Her power of attention is formidable, and her prose is at every point lucid.”—Sven Birkerts, author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing
“Off Izaak Walton Road asks us why some places hold a grip on our imaginations, what it is about these places that allows us to be more fully ourselves, and how these places change the stories we tell about who we are and the world in which we live. Written with clarity, candor, and a tenderness of attention that is profoundly moving, this book shows the often-transformative power of loss, solace, and joy.”—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Essays
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Julier is the former editor of Fourth Genre. She is the coeditor of Nonfiction, the Teaching of Writing, and the Influence of Richard Lloyd-Jones. She currently works as a hospital chaplain and lives in Iowa City.
ACCLAIM
“Laura Julier in Off Izaak Walton Road marks out the perimeter of the losses in her life, not by confiding them to the page but by careful indirection. She brings the reader with her as she retreats to a house on a rural road and season by season discovers the particulars of the world that goes on without all of us. Her power of attention is formidable, and her prose is at every point lucid.”—Sven Birkerts, author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing
“Off Izaak Walton Road asks us why some places hold a grip on our imaginations, what it is about these places that allows us to be more fully ourselves, and how these places change the stories we tell about who we are and the world in which we live. Written with clarity, candor, and a tenderness of attention that is profoundly moving, this book shows the often-transformative power of loss, solace, and joy.”—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Essays
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Julier is the former editor of Fourth Genre. She is the coeditor of Nonfiction, the Teaching of Writing, and the Influence of Richard Lloyd-Jones. She currently works as a hospital chaplain and lives in Iowa City.
- GenresMemoir
272 pages, Paperback
Published March 4, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 17, 2025
Off Izaak Walton Road asks us why some places hold a grip on our imaginations, what it is about these places that allows us to be more fully ourselves, and how these places change the stories we tell about who we are and the world in which we live. Written with clarity, candor, and a tenderness of attention that is profoundly moving, this book shows the often-transformative power of loss, solace, and joy.
– Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings and judge of the 2023 River Teeth Nonfiction Book Awards
Bear with me, ya'll, because this one has a personal story attached to my review. What an unexpected joy to read something that feels so FAMILIAR and yet is not your own story. TL;DR - Read this beautiful book by a local Iowa City author and learn more about the natural world and how attention to your own piece of it may end up healing you.
It's the mid to late 1990's and I am moving to the same college-town that the author is writing about in this 2025 memoir. I am coming to work for the college rape crisis center, and am 10+ years into navigating my own trauma experiences, while supporting others through theirs. My joy comes in the forms of birds and connections to nature, in part introduced to me by my college roommate (and still best friend now) who is a glorious bird-nerd and absolute acolyte of long walks in nature - skills and interests that have come to be my own forms of therapy along with the more cognitive behavioral therapy that is also imperative to my healing. I have looked at what feels like hundreds of frat-bro apartments, each similar and seemingly soaked in beer and management neglect. Suddenly I find an ad in the local paper (it was the 90's, people) for a small house for rent that is slightly above my original budget but is available immediately. I call and the house is listed by a pair of local dykes who technically own the house, but have a land lease for the property that it sits upon, directly across a small dirt road from the Iowa River, just south of town.
I fall in love immediately with the tiny one-bedroom witch cottage of my dreams, down a gravel road and just outside the world of normal life. The grocery store is only a mile away but the place feels like it is a part of an Appalachian holler hidden in this mostly affluent college town. There has been a massive straight-line wind storm just before I move in, so there are many buildings that have tarps as their roof right now, and lots of tree clean-up still to be done. The cottage, however, is largely undamaged, just a few trees lost out of a whole forested plot that surrounds the tiny house and it's postage size grass front and back yards that are fenced off. This spot becomes my home and changes everything about my life over the several years that I live there. In one day I count 50+ species of birds that visit my yard and the river in front of it. I drag a mattress into the backyard and sleep looking at the stars and listening to the owls around me, feeling as safe as I have felt outside of a festival full of other dykes in the woods. I befriend the stray cats who were abandoned when the trailer next door was burned down after it's owner was taken to a nursing home (prior to my arrival) and my own cats begin the painful process of ridding the cabin of the hundreds of mice and voles that use it as a shelter or a throughline between the woods on either side. I garden and build fires and community, in almost equal measure, and I wonder every day about the lives of those who live further down this forgotten and dead-end road along the river. Waving occasionally, muttering about the bunnies being raised for meat down the road who invade my carefully-tended vegetable patch, fuming at the misogyny of the trailer a few houses down with a blow-up doll permanently installed in their yard in various poses, and watching the first tiny cabin at the beginning of the lane with Swedish-folk art painted on the walls for any signs of life outside of the sound of the mower that comes and goes and keeps the grass short.
Over the years I am there, I learn so many new plants and birds, pay deep attention to the river as it rises and falls, swim (illegally) in the large quarry pond (now Terry Trueblood Rec. Area) that is connected to my house by a ridge trail that runs at the back of the woods and straight south behind the row of houses along the lane. I watch the moon and sing to the stars and keep a tally of the mice that my cats leave dead in my slippers on on my bed. The propane tank regularly runs out because I can't afford both the rent AND the refill needed to keep the crappy gas heater in the living room running through the winter in a house full of holes and non-insulated walls. My dear ones eat dinners and build fires and take walks with me along the dirt road, wondering aloud about the other inhabitants of Napoleon Lane.
My heart grows and shatters daily as I answer crisis-line calls from survivors of sexual violence across the state while sitting in a chair at my kitchen table looking out across the river as the sun sets or rises or blazes, depending on the day and time that I am on-call at the local rape crisis center. I do morning pages and find a therapist who ends up saving my life a million times over in the 20+ years that I spend with her, healing and breaking and healing again. My living room holding books and NPR on the radio and art from beloveds and so many parties and gatherings and knitting circles and women's weekends and lovers and almost always a dead mouse and once, a raccoon, uninvited and deeply disturbing at 3:00 A.M. when the cats started hissing. It felt wild and renegade and so fully ME. The dawn chorus woke me and the four'o'clocks blooming in the back yard signaled the evenings approach each day. There was a cycle and a schedule to my days set primarily by the natural world around me, held at bay only by a crappily-built cottage with a wooden floor over dirt and the rhythms of birds and trees and the ever-moving water of the river a few feet away and visible from any room in the tiny house.
People who visit say that the space is magic, and I agree. The magic is living smack-dab in the middle of nature. The magic is feeling so deeply at HOME in this space for the first time in my life. The magic is trusting my own intuition. Healing and becoming embodied in this beautiful space, even as I hold space for others to do the same as part of my work. The magic is in the way that the lane is largely invisible to others. You have to be looking to find your way to my door if you are human. All other kin, the flora and fauna of this space, already there and thriving in this unique eco-system - riparian, liminal, mostly hidden and governed by a different rhythm, and autonomous-feeling in the day to day.
And eventually I move to town, as the city begins building more and more infrastructure right at the beginning of this previously wild-feeling road. Eventually the city buys up the land, always prone to major flooding, and a road with a bridge across the river is put in that crosses right over the little lane. The houses are demolished (one and all) and the lane itself becomes a wide and paved path from the Napoleon Park fields and the new Iowa City Animal Shelter to the newly developed Terry Trueblood Recreation Area, centered around the old quarry pond.
What does all of this reminiscing have to do with this book review? Well, Laura Julier and I were living parallel lives, unknown to each other, in cabins across the Iowa River around the same time. Hers 'Off Izaak Walton Road', and mine 'On Napoleon Lane'.
I met Laura a few years ago at a reading by a different author at Prairie Lights, introduced by a dear friend we hold in common who was visiting from the *other* college town that Julier inhabited for years, in between her times in Iowa City. This friend introduced us and said, "you two should know each other" not having any idea of the parallels. We said we should have dinner, we traded numbers, and we followed each other on social media. And then we both went on with our lives. And I saw her with her wife at our local ice cream shop recently and remembered that she had a new book that I wanted to read, and .... well, here we are.
Her book is a reminder that paying deep attention is a practice of healing, that knowing a place with our own sense and becoming accustomed to the rhythms often grounds us and regulates our nervous systems, whether we set out to accomplish that or not. In Off Izaak Walton Road, she tenderly chronicles her own reckoning with grief through immersion in a neglected corner of Iowa City. Over time, that cabin, land, and surrounding wildlife become a sanctuary where loss is neither hidden nor despised but carried with consciousness and openness. Through this, we witness the transformative power of attention and belonging.
As the Little Village review says, “Her detailed journey with the cabin and land tells a compelling story of connection to place. She shares months and years of close attention and learning — about birds (eagles and owls play prominent roles), about the river itself and its neighboring marsh, about the property’s history (though difficult to trace and remaining incomplete). This intentional familiarity leads to a deep sense of belonging. But even more significant is the development of a profound love for the place as well as self-understanding.”
Part of what makes Laura Julier such a rich storyteller is her curiosity – not only does she learn the birds and the plants around her as she settles into the cabin off Izaak Walton Road, but she experiments with fishing as she gets curious about origin of the street name, and she researches ownership and land plats to better understand her world. And I am so grateful for all of it, learning about the city, that part of the river, and so much more through her eyes and her careful learning.
What also delighted me, and kept me reading when I should be doing other things, was her ability to weave her own loss (and healing) into the ways that she lived with the natural world around her. At one point in the book she says, “I tossed the snails lightly back into the ditch, turned the frog over and headed it toward the marsh, sending them back into the under-belly of life in this place, back to a life and a fate out of my own sight line. I did it because in helping life off Izaak Walton Road to continue to flourish, in its way, off the roadbed, keeping out of sight, I am caring for the small, the vulnerable, the wounded part of myself.”
What a tribute to a place, to healing though deep attention, and to the world.
– Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings and judge of the 2023 River Teeth Nonfiction Book Awards
Bear with me, ya'll, because this one has a personal story attached to my review. What an unexpected joy to read something that feels so FAMILIAR and yet is not your own story. TL;DR - Read this beautiful book by a local Iowa City author and learn more about the natural world and how attention to your own piece of it may end up healing you.
It's the mid to late 1990's and I am moving to the same college-town that the author is writing about in this 2025 memoir. I am coming to work for the college rape crisis center, and am 10+ years into navigating my own trauma experiences, while supporting others through theirs. My joy comes in the forms of birds and connections to nature, in part introduced to me by my college roommate (and still best friend now) who is a glorious bird-nerd and absolute acolyte of long walks in nature - skills and interests that have come to be my own forms of therapy along with the more cognitive behavioral therapy that is also imperative to my healing. I have looked at what feels like hundreds of frat-bro apartments, each similar and seemingly soaked in beer and management neglect. Suddenly I find an ad in the local paper (it was the 90's, people) for a small house for rent that is slightly above my original budget but is available immediately. I call and the house is listed by a pair of local dykes who technically own the house, but have a land lease for the property that it sits upon, directly across a small dirt road from the Iowa River, just south of town.
I fall in love immediately with the tiny one-bedroom witch cottage of my dreams, down a gravel road and just outside the world of normal life. The grocery store is only a mile away but the place feels like it is a part of an Appalachian holler hidden in this mostly affluent college town. There has been a massive straight-line wind storm just before I move in, so there are many buildings that have tarps as their roof right now, and lots of tree clean-up still to be done. The cottage, however, is largely undamaged, just a few trees lost out of a whole forested plot that surrounds the tiny house and it's postage size grass front and back yards that are fenced off. This spot becomes my home and changes everything about my life over the several years that I live there. In one day I count 50+ species of birds that visit my yard and the river in front of it. I drag a mattress into the backyard and sleep looking at the stars and listening to the owls around me, feeling as safe as I have felt outside of a festival full of other dykes in the woods. I befriend the stray cats who were abandoned when the trailer next door was burned down after it's owner was taken to a nursing home (prior to my arrival) and my own cats begin the painful process of ridding the cabin of the hundreds of mice and voles that use it as a shelter or a throughline between the woods on either side. I garden and build fires and community, in almost equal measure, and I wonder every day about the lives of those who live further down this forgotten and dead-end road along the river. Waving occasionally, muttering about the bunnies being raised for meat down the road who invade my carefully-tended vegetable patch, fuming at the misogyny of the trailer a few houses down with a blow-up doll permanently installed in their yard in various poses, and watching the first tiny cabin at the beginning of the lane with Swedish-folk art painted on the walls for any signs of life outside of the sound of the mower that comes and goes and keeps the grass short.
Over the years I am there, I learn so many new plants and birds, pay deep attention to the river as it rises and falls, swim (illegally) in the large quarry pond (now Terry Trueblood Rec. Area) that is connected to my house by a ridge trail that runs at the back of the woods and straight south behind the row of houses along the lane. I watch the moon and sing to the stars and keep a tally of the mice that my cats leave dead in my slippers on on my bed. The propane tank regularly runs out because I can't afford both the rent AND the refill needed to keep the crappy gas heater in the living room running through the winter in a house full of holes and non-insulated walls. My dear ones eat dinners and build fires and take walks with me along the dirt road, wondering aloud about the other inhabitants of Napoleon Lane.
My heart grows and shatters daily as I answer crisis-line calls from survivors of sexual violence across the state while sitting in a chair at my kitchen table looking out across the river as the sun sets or rises or blazes, depending on the day and time that I am on-call at the local rape crisis center. I do morning pages and find a therapist who ends up saving my life a million times over in the 20+ years that I spend with her, healing and breaking and healing again. My living room holding books and NPR on the radio and art from beloveds and so many parties and gatherings and knitting circles and women's weekends and lovers and almost always a dead mouse and once, a raccoon, uninvited and deeply disturbing at 3:00 A.M. when the cats started hissing. It felt wild and renegade and so fully ME. The dawn chorus woke me and the four'o'clocks blooming in the back yard signaled the evenings approach each day. There was a cycle and a schedule to my days set primarily by the natural world around me, held at bay only by a crappily-built cottage with a wooden floor over dirt and the rhythms of birds and trees and the ever-moving water of the river a few feet away and visible from any room in the tiny house.
People who visit say that the space is magic, and I agree. The magic is living smack-dab in the middle of nature. The magic is feeling so deeply at HOME in this space for the first time in my life. The magic is trusting my own intuition. Healing and becoming embodied in this beautiful space, even as I hold space for others to do the same as part of my work. The magic is in the way that the lane is largely invisible to others. You have to be looking to find your way to my door if you are human. All other kin, the flora and fauna of this space, already there and thriving in this unique eco-system - riparian, liminal, mostly hidden and governed by a different rhythm, and autonomous-feeling in the day to day.
And eventually I move to town, as the city begins building more and more infrastructure right at the beginning of this previously wild-feeling road. Eventually the city buys up the land, always prone to major flooding, and a road with a bridge across the river is put in that crosses right over the little lane. The houses are demolished (one and all) and the lane itself becomes a wide and paved path from the Napoleon Park fields and the new Iowa City Animal Shelter to the newly developed Terry Trueblood Recreation Area, centered around the old quarry pond.
What does all of this reminiscing have to do with this book review? Well, Laura Julier and I were living parallel lives, unknown to each other, in cabins across the Iowa River around the same time. Hers 'Off Izaak Walton Road', and mine 'On Napoleon Lane'.
I met Laura a few years ago at a reading by a different author at Prairie Lights, introduced by a dear friend we hold in common who was visiting from the *other* college town that Julier inhabited for years, in between her times in Iowa City. This friend introduced us and said, "you two should know each other" not having any idea of the parallels. We said we should have dinner, we traded numbers, and we followed each other on social media. And then we both went on with our lives. And I saw her with her wife at our local ice cream shop recently and remembered that she had a new book that I wanted to read, and .... well, here we are.
Her book is a reminder that paying deep attention is a practice of healing, that knowing a place with our own sense and becoming accustomed to the rhythms often grounds us and regulates our nervous systems, whether we set out to accomplish that or not. In Off Izaak Walton Road, she tenderly chronicles her own reckoning with grief through immersion in a neglected corner of Iowa City. Over time, that cabin, land, and surrounding wildlife become a sanctuary where loss is neither hidden nor despised but carried with consciousness and openness. Through this, we witness the transformative power of attention and belonging.
As the Little Village review says, “Her detailed journey with the cabin and land tells a compelling story of connection to place. She shares months and years of close attention and learning — about birds (eagles and owls play prominent roles), about the river itself and its neighboring marsh, about the property’s history (though difficult to trace and remaining incomplete). This intentional familiarity leads to a deep sense of belonging. But even more significant is the development of a profound love for the place as well as self-understanding.”
Part of what makes Laura Julier such a rich storyteller is her curiosity – not only does she learn the birds and the plants around her as she settles into the cabin off Izaak Walton Road, but she experiments with fishing as she gets curious about origin of the street name, and she researches ownership and land plats to better understand her world. And I am so grateful for all of it, learning about the city, that part of the river, and so much more through her eyes and her careful learning.
What also delighted me, and kept me reading when I should be doing other things, was her ability to weave her own loss (and healing) into the ways that she lived with the natural world around her. At one point in the book she says, “I tossed the snails lightly back into the ditch, turned the frog over and headed it toward the marsh, sending them back into the under-belly of life in this place, back to a life and a fate out of my own sight line. I did it because in helping life off Izaak Walton Road to continue to flourish, in its way, off the roadbed, keeping out of sight, I am caring for the small, the vulnerable, the wounded part of myself.”
What a tribute to a place, to healing though deep attention, and to the world.
June 24, 2025
Check out my full review with River Teeth: https://riverteethjournal.com/feature...
June 9, 2025
Beautiful nature writing, observational, sensory, engaging for those who like taking time to stop and listen, taste and see the now, the changes. The ending shift in the narrator’s perspective came not from nature but from engaging with people facing loss, and I would have liked to have known more about that. Otherwise, a quiet, early-morning read.
May 28, 2025
A master of the craft.
July 3, 2025
I very much enjoyed the author’s observations of nature.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews