Welcome to Rayz Reviewz. Past editions are archived on my web page. This week’s photos are from the Tennessee RiverPark, Curtain Pole Road section. The fence lizard photo which appears on every issue was taken at Cloudland Canyon State Park.
 
Travel Close to Home
 
Learn to recognize the birds in your back yard with American Bird Conservancy’s bird of the week. Most recently, the bird of the week was an Indigo Bunting.   https://abcbirds.org/bird/indigo-bunting/
 
The Tennessee Naturalist Program offers a one-year course for anyone interested in learning more about the natural world of our state. It is offered at locations across the state, with most classes meeting once each month.  https://tnnaturalist.org/

​Opportunities for Writers and Other Creative People
 
Boulevard magazine offers a nonfiction contest for emerging writers. The entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Boulevard. The first-place winner will receive publication and $1,000. https://boulevardmagazine.org/nonfiction-contest
                    
The Masters’ Review offers contests and publication opportunities for writers.
https://mastersreview.com/short-story-award-for-new-writers/
 
The Chattanooga Audubon Society has extended the deadline for their photography contest.
https://www.chattanoogaaudubon.org/
 
I missed out on the literary journal Number One this year. If you are one of their regular contributors, so did you. Apparently, a security upgrade to their server blocked all messages with attachments. They simply did not receive the submissions and could not publish a 2020 edition. Perhaps the issue will be resolved this year and we will be able to send submissions to Number One, Volunteer State Community College, Gallatin, Tennessee for the 2021 edition. 

​Feature Essay: A Unity of Minds
 
Could a mockingbird mimic the strains of “Jupiter: Bringer of Joviality,” or any other section of “The Planets,” that whimsical set of tone poems composed by Gustav Holst? Imagine the morose tune of “Mars: Bringer of War” issuing from the throat of a bird. Though such complex mimicry may be beyond the abilities of birds, animals frequently amaze and amuse us with their behavior, sometimes mistaken as antics.  
 
We gasp when hearing of how a captive killer whale, incarcerated for years, bit more than the “feeding hand” and took the life of its keeper. Intelligent beings, they learn tricks rapidly, but intelligence makes them dangerous captives. For millennia, killer whales have survived in ocean currents, but escape becomes a ‘current event.” 
 
Killer whales, intelligent captives in public displays, are not meant to perform for our amusement let alone on a regular schedule, not even when the producer claims that the show will generate empathy and respect. We forget that they are killers, able to take a seal or a man in a fast attack. Charm ends here, for they have become too much like us. We too kill to survive. Whether dining on wild harvested venison, or range fed beef, we sacrifice other lives on the altar of our continued existence
 
Perhaps their behaviors hold charm for us because we recognize our own triumphs and foibles when we look at them? We see ourselves in their behavior, and even their anatomy. The bones of a bird’s wing are those of a human hand, revealed in the glow of an X-ray. The same is true of a whale’s flipper, which moves them through the ocean in tandem with the thrust of a tail.  
 
We will only make peace with our animal neighbors when we see them in us as we see ourselves in them.  Some of us have already learned to do so.
 
Shameless Self Promotion
 
I published an article about Casper Cox and his book, Snorkeling the Hidden Rivers of Southern Appalachia in the Chattanooga Pulse earlier this year. If this outdoor activity, growing in popularity appeals to you, his book is available online. Read the article here. http://www.chattanoogapulse.com/arts/features/from-page-to-screen-casper-cox-searches-for-hidden-rivers/

Rayz Reviewz Volume 1 Number 18
 
Welcome to Rayz Reviewz. Past editions are archived on my web page. My feature article, Whale Watch: A Cape Cod Memoir, follows the Travel Close to Home section and the Opportunities section. This week’s photos are from the Curtain Pole Road portion of the Tennessee Riverpark in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Travel Close to Home
 
For the past few weeks, the Curtain Pole Road section of the Tennessee Riverpark has been my “go to” location for nature photography. I have spent several mornings there, collecting photographs of Great Egrets, Great Blue Herons and Green Herons, and more recently, dragonflies, robber flies, and cicadas, as well as fruits and flowers.  
 
Meanwhile, the Chickamauga Dam is still productive for viewing Osprey, Double Crested Cormorants, and Great Blue Herons.  If you want to know more about the birds mentioned here, see the online field guide of the National Audubon Society.
 
The picnic area of the Tennessee Riverpark near the Hubert Fry Center has some lovely flower gardens which are productive for butterfly observation and photography.
 
The American Lotus at Amnicola Marsh are rapidly losing their flowers. The large seed heads are prominent and green with some turning to brown. Soon the duck and geese populations should be more visible.

Chattanooga Outdoors provides information about outdoor sports on their web page https://outdoorchattanooga.com/. This is the place to find out about bicycling, kayaking, white water rafting and other opportunities.

Unknown Territory
This is my response to Brian Doyle’s essay, “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” which appeared in Orion Magazine.
 
The word “greatest” leads into the treacherous ground of superlatives. With overuse, superlatives have a numbing effect, a tendency to produce a “so what?’ response. They also have overtones of arrogance, advertising, and P.T. Barnum coming to town with his circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth.”.

That said, Brian Doyle has given us a fine essay on the art of essay writing. After my initial response to the word greatest, I calmed down and found five paragraphs of genuine, perhaps gently humorous, views on what should happen in such an essay. First, the essay must get the reader’s attention, not in the sensationalist terms of the news headline, but in a way that takes the readers out of themselves and into an unexpected place where they secretly hoped to go.

In her poem, “The Speed of Darkness,” Muriel Rukeyser said, “The world is made of stories, not atoms.” She then spins the reader into her world of pain. This is what Doyle proposes the next few paragraphs should do, but in the realm of nature. The beauty unfolds, but a threat to the natural world is unveiled. He then states that writer should “tiptoe” back to the gently unfolding story without sermonizing or grandiose conclusions. The essay should end with the reader aware of a tapestry of beauty with dark threads of threat interwoven into a cloth of hope.

Some reviewers have said that his essay meets its own criteria, that it is in fact “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” This makes the piece a “meta-essay,” a work written in the form it describes, much like the “Ars Poetica” of Horace. Horace perhaps unexpectedly founded a school of poetics, which took the name of his poem. Though originally written in a poetic form, it is usually translated as prose, and the full text appears on the website of the Poetry Foundation. Here is a brief sample:

Ye who write, make choice of a subject suitable to your abilities; and revolve in your thoughts a considerable time what your strength declines, and what it is able to support. Neither elegance of style, nor a perspicuous disposition, shall desert the man, by whom the subject matter is chosen judiciously.

Doyle’s essay gives similar instructions which might have led me to the conclusion that I have read very few nature essays. Make no mistake, I have read extensively from the works of naturalists, from Thoreau’s Waldon and Cape Cod to Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Peter Matthiessen’s National Book Award winning The Snow Leopard. I must wonder if Doyle’s definition leaves room for Dillard’s frog shriveling to an empty bag of skin after the attack by a giant water bug, or Matthiessen’s freezing feet as he crosses the Himalayas. There is certainly not room for Thoreau’s Cape Cod with the bodies of Irish immigrants lining the beach after a shipwreck and awaiting the arrival of wailing relatives. Nevertheless, these authors meet the exhortation of Horace to choose a subject suited to their abilities, which are considerable.

This line of reasoning led me to “The Cowboy and his Cow,” by Edward Abbey. The piece is self-aware, in that the transcription for publication included the audience reactions to a reading of the essay. Many of those reactions were shouted by the audience. These parenthetical records include the concluding words (gunshots in parking lot). His physical location at the reading, in Wyoming cattle country, as he criticizes government subsidized grazing land, guaranteed a hostile response. Abbey’s piece is not an essay though. It is a polemic, best described as a contentious rhetoric intended to support a position and undermine the opposing position. Much of what is broadcast on “talk radio,” is polemical. Here is a brief segment of Abbey’s polemic.

Overgrazing is much too weak a term. Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call "cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds.

Imagine reading that piece to an auditorium full of cattlemen and students at an agricultural school in Wyoming! The essay gives insight to Abbey’s devotion to the land which left no room for middle ground. As such it violates Doyle’s dictum of “no sermonizing.”

By contrast, “The Dead Man at Grandview Point,” a chapter in his book Desert Solitaire, achieves the feel of a lyric essay, defined in the Eastern Iowa Review, in part, as follows: “…The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving." - Deborah Tall 

I once prepared a profile of Abbey for the environmentalist tabloid Hellbender Press, named for a large species of salamander. Here is some material I quoted from “The Dead Man at Grandview Point,” a chapter of his book Desert Solitaire. Upon returning home from assisting a search party to find a missing senior citizen, found deceased at Grandview Point, he identified with the dead man, but paradoxically, also with the circling vultures. 

I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.

I think this fits Doyle’s criteria, and I find his comments helpful, but not an exclusive set of criteria for writing nature essays. The self-aware aspect of the work is interesting. I suppose that the phrase, “in the flow,” might describe its opposite. It matches the ancient Greek term of Kairos as opposed to Chronos. Chronos is the ordinary time kept by a clock or chronometer. Kairos is sometimes described as “the opportune moment,” but can also mean sacred time. It is the time in which hours pass yet the observer may think it has been only a moment. It is the intersection of the divine with the ordinary. It is the realm of the Muse.

I find my nature observation and journaling to be more Kairos than Chronos. I fish in a river, observe the wildlife in a marsh, or investigate the wildflowers in a wood lot with no awareness of time until I have reached some sense of completion and realize that the morning is gone. This also happens when I am writing. The alarms on my cell phone help me with keeping appointments.

In her book of essays Upstream, Mary Oliver says that writing will make you late for appointments and wake you up in the middle of the night. This is another way of seeing my intent here.

I am unable to separate the comments from personal experience. For me, the concept of self-aware observation or journaling seems to contradict the sense of wonder achieved in Kairos time. For others, that sense of wonder might be retained even as they notice their own reactions to their observations and their writings. I might hope to reach that state, but it does not seem possible for now.

Find Brian Doylle's essay here. https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-greatest-nature-essay-ever/
 
Shameless Self Promotion
A few months ago I wrote an article about Robert Sparks Walker for The Chattanooga Pulse.

Welcome to Rayz Reviewz. Past editions are archived on my web page.  This week’s photo is a Fence Lizard photographed at Cloudland Canyon State Park on the last Sunday of July, 2020. That story will appear in next week’s newsletter.
 
Opportunities
 
Swallow-tailed Kite viewing in Sequatchie Valley and online.
 
Thursday of last week, I crossed Signal Mountain from Chattanooga to the Sequatchie Valley in search of Swallow-tailed Kites. Finding the viewing spot on Stone Cave Road proved easy, with four vehicles pulled off and multiple people with binoculars close by. Nine birds circled over the fields and swooped for insects, which they are known to pick from vegetation while on the wing.
 
Although the Swallow-tailed Kite was once common in the southeast, they are now found primarily in coastal areas. The range map posted on the National Audubon Society web site shows these birds present in South Carolina, down the coast, and around to Louisiana and Texas. Though they may visit other inland locations after completing the nesting season, I have only heard of them in the Sequatchie Valley.
 
As part of the National Audubon Society’s bird mural project, the artist known as Lunar New Year painted a Swallow-tailed Kite mural on a building just off 155th street, New York, New York. The mural overlooks the grave of John James Audubon in Trinity Church Cemetery.  Although the Kite is most prominently depicted, the artist included several species of birds.
 
Additional information about Swallow-tailed Kites is available on the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology web page “All About Birds.” This page includes an extensive collection of audio and video recordings as well a photos, maps, and descriptions.
 
The Missouri Review offers an editor’s prize for fiction, poetry and nonfiction. I have never published anything in this fine journal, nor can I name any acquaintance who has, but it is excellent reading. October 1 is the deadline for the Missouri Review’s annual contest. According to their web site, the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize awards $5000 and publication in the spring issue to winners in each category.
 
Opportunities abound for poets who wish to create poems inspired by works of art. The Chattanooga Writer’s Guild offers a weekly ekphrastic challenge. Look for information on their Facebook page. The online publication Quill and Parchment offers a monthly Ekphrastic challenge as does Rattle Poetry, a print publication with a strong online presence.
 
Review
This review appeared in my column, “Nature’s Bookshelf” which was a regular feature in The Hellbender Press of Knoxville, Tennessee several years ago. I have gathered the columns into a booklet, also titled Nature’s Bookshelf. Hellbender Press is a publication of The Foundation for Global Sustainability.
 
Billy Watson’s Croker Sack, ISBN 0-8203-1999-6, University of Georgia Press
Franklin Burroughs
Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman in The Hellbender Press, Volume 7, Issue 7
November/December 2005
 
“It is always dangerous to question a college professor. They are paid to talk by the hour.” So begins the explanation that Franklin Burroughs gives of the term “croaker sack.” The explanation is really a postscript originally written for an editor unfamiliar with the term. As used in Burroughs’ writing, the croaker sack is a large cloth bag containing the results of a day's foraging the bounty of low country wetlands.
 
Despite this warning of long windedness, Franklin Burroughs is an accomplished essayist. His writing is equally eloquent whether he is describing his homeland in coastal South Carolina or his adopted home in Maine. The two disparate lands are not so much contrasted as joined by the striking narratives contained in this book.
 
The contents of a croaker sack are surprising and unpredictable, but the contents of this book are surprisingly delightful. In his work, Burroughs includes descriptions of fishermen, duck hunters, one moose hunter, and an aging bird dog to which he pays his final respects. These stories are an engaging tapestry woven together on a loom, which is the landscape itself.
 
When Mr. Burroughs spoke at the Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga earlier this year (2005), he delighted the audience with his humor and his love of the subject matter which shines through his writing. This love of the land is clearly illustrated by a short piece about his recuperation from a childhood illness. Unable to accompany his father on a duck hunting trip, he looks forward to his daddy’s return when he will see the results of the days hunt, and he reads voraciously. Among his books is Audubon’s Birds of America.
 
About the picture of a wood duck in this book, Burroughs says, “Once in Sunday school we were asked what we would have presented to the infant Jesus in the stable if we had gone there. The right answer turned out to be a pure heart or something along those lines, but I knew in my heart that it would be a pair of wood ducks, bright and friendly as the ones Audubon had painted.”
 
 
            ***********************
 
Afterword
Franklin Burroughs is a recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing and a regular contributor to Down East magazine, a publication devoted to his adopted home of Maine. 
https://downeast.com/author/fburroughs/
A brief biography and a critical description of his work appears on the web page Southern Nature.
https://www.southernnature.org/writers-profile.php?Writer_ID=13
 
Prompt
 
You probably don’t have a croaker sack filled with oysters, eels and other low country bounty, but you may own a cloth bag (or several) filled with shopping day bounty. Look at the objects included and see if there is a story behind one of them. If you have herbs or spices, what memories do the aromas bring to mind. Tell us about them.
 
Shameless Self Promotion
 
Now that I am finalizing my booklet, Nature’s Bookshelf I am pleased to offer free copies in PDF format. This is a collection of articles I wrote for the Hellbender Press of Knoxville, Tennessee several years ago. You can request a copy by email from znaturalist@gmail.com . 
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