Bio included in Joe Paddock's poetry book Dark Dreaming, Global Dimming:

Immersed in local story and in love with the little lakes and hardwood hills of his home region, JOE PADDOCK grew up in the small central Minnesota town of Litchfield. He went to the University of Minnesota where he wrestled, got a degree in philosophy, and studied under poets Morgan Blum, Allen Tate and Howard Nemerov.

In the late 60s and early 70s he spent much of a six-year period living in an unimproved cabin on Minnesota’s wild Kettle River. These were critical mid-life years during which he concentrated on nature observation, meditation, and dream work. He began then as well seriously to write poetry.

In 1975, he was drawn back to the agricultural prairies that stretched south and west of his home region. He became one of two first National Endowment for the Arts Poets-in-the-Community, his residency placing him in the small town of Olivia. Then, working with his writer wife, he became a regional poet for the Southwest Minnesota Arts and Humanities Council and a Poet-in-Residence for Minnesota Public Radio at Worthington. During these residences he discovered the use and value of oral history, and he developed a poetry based on local story and its underlying myths.

While living on the Kettle River, the ecological vision of interconnectedness took hold in Paddock, and for more than a decade the land organism became the central metaphor in his writing. Practicing a “soft activism,” he next became a land theme developer for the American Farm Project and then a founding member of the Land Stewardship Project. His book length poem Handful of Thunder: A Prairie Cycle and his Sierra Club book Soil and Survival were outcomes of this work.

In the early 1990s, Paddock discovered wilderness preservationist Ernest Oberholtzer’s “university of the wilderness” on tiny Mallard Island on Rainy Lake. Through the 90s, in this place that fulfilled his long-held dream of a cultural center in harmony with nature, he spent much time researching and writing Keeper of the Wild, the biography of Ernest Oberholtzer.