Living a Deliberate Life

Tom Montgomery Fate is someone with a very busy schedule.

Sitting in his office, Fate, an English professor of 21 years, is surrounded by shelves of books, his computer and plenty of desk space. He leads a typical modern life with working at his job, raising his family in Glen Ellyn.

During a sabbatical a few years ago, Fate, 50, and his family immersed themselves in the solitude of a cabin in Sawyer, Mich., stepping away from hectic, every day trappings. It is there that Fate, with the literary influence of nineteenth-century author Henry David Thoreau, applies the author’s insights about nature to a 21st century modern life.

Fate captures his experiences with vivid imagery in his nature memoir, Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild.

Fate, the son of a congregational minister and a music teacher, grew up in Iowa with his three brothers. Fate began his journey as an author when he attended the University of Iowa to become a high school English teacher and basketball coach. He instead went into the state’s  Nonfiction Writing Program. 

 His works took him outside his homeland to explore other countries affected by war and religion. His first book, 1988's Nicaragua: Rice and Beans and Hope, reflected on his experience living and writing in the hostile setting of Nicaragua and studying its religious and political history. This later led him to enroll at Chicago Theological Seminary where he earned a masters of arts in religion. After seminary, he and his wife Carol, taught at a small remote college in the Philippines for two years.

That experience resulted in his next book, Beyond the White Noise, a collection of essays delving into the complexity of multi-culture, and critiquing the tragic history of missions and missionaries.

The idea for Fate’s latest book came from his rereading of  Thoreau’s Walden, which reflected on the author’s life in the woods at Walden Pond. Fate wrote in his book how Thoreau was committed to the environment, encouraged people to follow their ‘own drummer’ and lived not to material excess. Inspired by his work, Fate wanted to answer the questions of “How does one live a meaningful life?” and “What does it mean to be human?”

By asking those questions, Fate explained that he invites readers to “vicariously live in those questions with me for a while, and in so doing find greater meaning and beauty in their own lives and stories. I try to explore these huge questions within in the context of my very ordinary life by looking closely at the idea of deliberation, of the struggle to find emotional and spiritual balance between the pairs of issues I address in each chapter: nature and religion, art and activism, and parenthood and childhood.”

Tonight, he will appear at a 7 p.m. book reading at the , 400 Duane St. He will also greet readers for a 7 p.m., Monday, June 13 event at Anderson’s Bookshop, 123 W. Jefferson Ave., Naperville.