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From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a “heartfelt and refreshing” (New York Times) memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. This new edition updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope. Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development. A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.
Looking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach us. From overwintering with monarch butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, the stories in Wild Spectacle capture her luckiest moments—ones of heart-pounding amazement, discovery of romance, and moving toward living more wisely. In Ray’s worst moments she crosses boundaries to encounter danger and embrace sadness. Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home—Montana and southern Georgia—the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in t...
Discusses the loss of fruit and vegetable varieties and the genetically modified industrial monocultures being used today, shares the author's personal experiences growing, saving, and swapping seeds, and deconstructs the politics and genetics of seeds.
"Red Lanterns is a collection of new poetry that navigates a borderland between the seen world and the spirit world. Occupying a tangible world is expected of us humans. We have been taught to trust (and trust only) our five major senses, which inform the tangible. Humans, however, possess senses beyond our primary ones, not simply the sixth sense of intuition but also a sense of time, sense of responsibility, sense of being watched, and so on. Some things lie beyond the realm of human knowledge, some things are not as they appear, some places that appear empty may not be, and some things remain wild, secret, and intangible. These poems look at the place where the wild and mysterious joins w...
The book explores both the need and the possibilities for conservation of the river and the surrounding forests and wetlands.
Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - ‘the eccentric’ - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play. HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN is an examination of these characters through a daringly personal autobiographical lens. Anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imager...
Janisse Ray, award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, writes an evocative paean to wildness and wilderness restoration with an extraordinary journey into southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp. Pinhook Swamp acts as a vital watershed and wildlife corridor, a link between the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together Okefenokee, Osceola, and Pinhook form one of the largest expanse of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River. This is one of America's last truly wild places, and Pinhook takes us into its heart. Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to protect it, spending the night in the swamp, tasting honey made from its flowers, tracking wildlife, and talking to others about their relationship with the swamp. Ray sees Pinhook through the eyes of the people who live there--naturalists, beekeepers, homesteaders, hunters, and locals at the country store. In lyrical, down-home prose, she draws together the swamp's need for restoration and the human desire for wholeness and wildness in our own lives and landscapes.
This account of rediscovering her Georgia home and its landscapes is “another must-read book” by the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Tulsa World). Seventeen years after she’d left “for good,” Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story, by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and ambitious, of the adventures of returning home. For Ray, a naturalist and an American Book Award–winning author, it is a story of linking the ecology of people with the ecology of place—of recovering lost traditions as she works to restore the fractured ecosystem of her native South. Her story is filled with s...
Formed by the confluence of the Ocmulgee and Oconee Rivers, the Altamaha is the largest free-flowing river on the East Coast and drains its third-largest watershed. It has been designated as one of the Nature Conservancy's seventy-five Last Great Places because of its unique character and rich natural diversity. In evocative photography and elegant prose, Altamaha captures the distinctive beauty of this river and offers a portrait of the man who has become its improbable guardian. Few people know the Altamaha better than James Holland. Raised in Cochran, Georgia, Holland spent years on the river fishing, hunting, and working its coastal reaches as a commercial crabber. Witnessing a steady de...
A Voice for Earth is a collection of poems, essays, and stories that together give a voice to the ethical principles outlined in the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter was adopted in the year 2000 with the mission of addressing the economic, social, political, spiritual, and environmental problems confronting the world in the twenty-first century. Part 1 of the book, "Imagination into Principle," comprises Steven C. Rockefeller's behind-the-scenes summary of how the language for the Earth Charter was drafted. In part 2, "Principle into Imagination," ten writers breathe life into its concepts with their own original work. Contributors include Rick Bass, Alison Hawthorne Deming, John Lane, Robert Michael Pyle, Janisse Ray, Scott Russell Sanders, Lauret Savoy, and Mary Evelyn Tucker. In part 3, "Imagination and Principle into a New Ethic," Leonardo Boff offers a new paradigm created through reflecting on the concept of care in the Earth Charter.