Brooding Upon the Waters: A Memoir of Farming, Fishing, and Failure in America's Lost Landscape

Brooding Upon the Waters is Howard Schaap’s memoir of his father, whose bipolar disorder went untreated for thirty years and who fell from Minnesota’s Young Farmer of the Year to financial failure in the farm crisis. Slant Books published it in 2025 as a 238-page paperback.

Schaap looks for answers in the landscape, recalling hard-luck fishing trips to the mud lakes of the tallgrass prairie, and in local history, finding a precedent for his father’s fall in Charles Ingalls, the Pa of the Little House on the Prairie books. It recreates growing up on a failing family farm in the 1980s and 1990s.

The publisher describes the book as also recounting a crisis of the American Dream in the Upper Midwest.