What if staying in a place where women's rights are threatened is its own kind of resistance?
When arborist and wildland firefighter Jen Jackson Quintano first arrived in Idaho, she found economic opportunity, generous neighbors, and glorious terrain. Locals mistook her and her husband's ruggedness--including the trappings of their tree-removal business--for ideological alignment. But after the US Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision and Idaho's subsequent abortion ban transformed the lives of women, families, and health care providers, she faced a question so many people in politically divided America are asking: When the land where you live passes laws that do harm, do you leave, or do you stay and fight for the place you love?
Quintano realized her new home needed more than her assimilation and silence. In 2023, she organized a stage production of community-sourced abortion stories in Sandpoint--a North Idaho town better known for its wild landscapes, fierce independence, and deep conservatism than for public testimony about reproductive freedom. Two months after that first performance, the region's only hospital serving tens of thousands closed its labor and delivery unit. Physicians began fleeing new laws that made providing essential care to patients legally perilous. As the place she loved became harder to defend, Quintano reached an inflection point that would define how she showed up: for her community, for other women, and for herself.
Part memoir, part lyrical meditation on land, rewilding, and resilience, A Field Guide to Staying is an ode to a people and a place--and a call to personal and collective change. Here, women's stories accumulate like weather across a range--revealing how political decisions settle into bodies, families, and communities, reshaping the lived geography of care. Through a lens attuned to wilderness and habitat, Quintano's words trace how people remain rooted amid fracture--and how story can help us reclaim and remake the ground beneath our feet.
