​Greetings:
I hope you are all well as you receive these words. 
I have devoted several past issues of this newsletter to Nature Writers with a strong focus on those living in or writing about Tennessee. Today, I introduce a few others whose works I am just beginning to explore. 
But first, some shameless self-promotion. 
My short story "Family" appears as the final piece in the 2022 edition of the Mildred Haun Review. The Review is a journal of Appalachian culture, and my piece fits the motif. https://www.ws.edu/_media/pdf/special-events/mildred/review/2022-review.pdf.

My essay "How I Became a Poet" will appear in an upcoming edition of Waxing and Waning, a literary magazine from April Gloaming Publishing in Nashville. They also published the Sinew anthology from Poetry in the Brew, an open-mic poetry group that met online during the pandemic. Poetry in the Brew returned to Portland Brew East, a coffee shop in east Nashville, and I have a poem in the Sinew anthology. 

Now for the Promised Content
Other Nature Authors Briefly Noted

Many of the referenced works are available online.

Edward Abbey (1927 – 1989) was born in Home, Pennsylvania, and lived most of his adult life in the desert southwest, where many of his works are set. He authored the text for Elliot Porter's photographic montage, Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains. The written portions are substantial, as coffee table books go. Abbey devoted a part of the text to William Bartram and his book, frequently referred to as Bartram's Travels (1791). The publisher included some of Bartram's original line drawings as illustrations. 

Dr. Hal DeSelm (1926-2011) was a plant ecologist who recorded plants present at over 3,000 sites in the state. His papers are preserved at the University of Tennessee, and an article about him appeared online in The Hellbender Press. 

Wilma Dykeman (1920 – 2006) authored The French Broad for the American Rivers book series. A chapter titled "Who Killed the French Broad" brought environmental issues to public attention years before Rachel Carson. An article about Dykeman appears in the Tennessee Encyclopedia, and an excerpt from another book appears in the volume Writing Appalachia. 

Albert F. Ganier (1883 – 1973) was trained as an engineer, but birdwatching was his hobby. He published several articles in scientific journals. His books included A Distribution List of the Birds of Tennessee, Water Birds of Reelfoot Lake, and The Wildlife met by Tennessee's First Settlers. The Biodiversity Heritage Library includes archived papers.

Dr. Augustin Gattinger (1825-1902) was a Physician and Botanist who immigrated from Germany. He served as the company physician at the copper mines in Copper Hill, Tennessee. He published a guide to medicinal plants of Tennessee and an annotated checklist of Tennessee Plants. The second volume includes "Philosophy of Botany," a review of scientific botany beginning with Aristotle. A brief biography of Gattinger appears on the website of the Tennessee Native Plant Society.  

Dr. Thomas Hemmerly (1932 – 2006) was a Botany professor at MTSU. He authored several wildflower guides, including Appalachian Wildflowers, Ozark Wildflowers, and Wildflowers of the Mid-South. He was one of four contributors to the project Wildflowers of Tennessee, the Ohio Valley, and Southern Appalachians.

Dennis Horn was the senior author in the collaborative project, Wildflowers of Tennessee, the Ohio Valley, and Southern Appalachians. His biography appears in the Tennessee Native Plant Society Hall of Fame. 

Dr. Brian Miller has researched reptiles and amphibians for 40 years. A list of his technical publications appears on his faculty website. He teaches, conducts research, and supervises graduate students at Middle Tennessee State University. Ray Zimmerman’s interview with him appears in The Hellbender Press. 

Mack Prichard (1939 – 2020) began his career with Tennessee State Parks while still in high school. He served as State Archaeologist and later as State Naturalist with the Tennessee Department of Conservation and environment. The Friends of South Cumberland State Park have developed a Mack Prichard Legacy Project with the online publication of Mack’s writing, video appearances, and photographs.

Dr. Else Quarterman (1910 – 2014) was a plant ecologist who mentored doctoral students at Vanderbilt University. She is credited with rediscovering the Tennessee Coneflower, which was thought to be extinct, and was involved in preserving the fragile Cedar Glades of central Tennessee. She was published in academic journals. A biography appears in the Tennessee Native Plant Society Hall of Fame. 

Scott Somershoe is an ornithologist with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency who authored Birds of Tennessee: A New Annotated Checklist. His book includes information on the status, distribution, and abundance of 415 species reported in the state. Check out his book on Goodreads.

Dr. Eugene B. Wofford served as Herbarium Director and Curator at the University of Tennessee. He published numerous papers and guides to plant identification. He is included in the Tennessee Native Plant Society Hall of Fame. 
 

In my ongoing examination of the published works of Robert Sparks Walker, I learned that he put his experience as a magazine editor and publisher to work for the Chattanooga Audubon Society. Beginning in 1945,  Flower and Feather, which began as the newsletter of the Chattanooga Audubon, became a quarterly magazine.
 
The directors produced one issue in 1944. Volume 1 Number 1 appears to be mimeographed from a typewritten original. It is four pages, printed on one side. A bird guide to Audubon Acres is appended to the newsletter. 
 
The newsletter included reports on the acquisition of the property and its suitability as a nature sanctuary. The directors announced a plan to build a suspension bridge and a wading bird habitat. Plans also included a small library and museum with Dr. W.K. Butts as the curator. The directors formed a committee to restore the historic log cabin. 
 
Beginning with volume II, the newsletter became a 48-page nature magazine. The directors produced one per year, with four issues per volume: January, April, July, and October. 
 
No editor is named in the January 1945 issue, which began with reports by four members who remembered seeing the extinct Passenger Pigeon. Walker later included some of this information in his book, As the Indians Left It. A poem by Robert sparks Walker concluded the issue. 
 
Dr. W.K. Butts wrote the lead article for the April issue. Robert Sparks Walker provided a lead piece and a concluding poem and was officially listed as editor beginning in July 1945. 
 
Walker personally sponsored a poetry competition with over 3,000 entries with the founding of the CAS. The Chattanooga Audubon Society sponsored a photography contest. Each quarterly issue of Flower and Feather had a monochrome photograph on the cover. Many included nature poetry in addition to Walker's concluding poem.  
 
Volume XI, January 1955, includes an article on the acquisition of Maclellan Island in the Tennessee River. This was a significant growth opportunity for the Chattanooga Audubon Society.
   
The October 1960 issue was prepared before Walker's death on September 26, 1960. It included an announcement of the revised edition of State Flowers and Birds, forthcoming in October, and Walker's article, "An All-American Thanksgiving Dinner."  The report of Walker's death appears in the January 1961 issue. The publishers of State Flowers and Birds state that the 1960 revised volume was his final book.
 
Walker had written several pieces for the magazine, which served as lead articles through 1971. Wendell Walker served as editor. The organization produced two issues in 1972 and ceased production. In 1980, the Board of Directors resumed production. The second series continued through 1983. 
 
A complete bound collection resides at the Chattanooga Public Library. The Chattanooga Audubon Society has some bound volumes. Others are collected in ring binders with other historical information, each issue in a sheet protector. The Special Collections of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Library has a set, according to worldcat.org. 
 
Following is a photo of the walker gravesite at Audubon Acres. 

The wetland at Curtain Pole Road is a part of the Riverpark between downtown Chattanooga and Amnicola Marsh. Parking is just off Riverside Drive. I created these photographs in the spring and summer of 2022 with a Canon EOS Rebel T6i Digital Single Lens Reflex camera. 

Writing the South
 
 
The Nashville Author Margret Renkl formerly edited the website Chapter 16, a part of Humanities, Tennessee. She now writes a weekly column about southern culture and backyard nature for the New York Times. Her book, Graceland at Last, is a collection of several of her New York Times articles. She addressed southern writing in one piece, which began with the following paragraph:
 
“From time to time, a debate resurfaces in Southern literary circles about whether there can still be a recognizable literature of the South in an age of mass media and Walmart. The 21st-century South would be unrecognizable to the Agrarian poets, whose 1930 manifesto, ‘I’ll Take My Stand,’ set out many of the principles that still cling like ticks to the term ‘Southern writer.’ Far more urban, far more ethnically and culturally and politically diverse, the South is no longer a place defined by sweet tea and slamming screen doors, and its literature is changing, too. ‘It is damn hard to put a pipe-smoking granny or a pet possum into a novel these days and get away with it,’ the novelist Lee Smith once said.”
You can read the full article at 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/what-is-a-southern-writer.html.
 
Her comments certainly apply to Southern nature writing, which is part of southern writing, or perhaps it is a Southern subset of nature writing. 
 
Renkl’s first book, Late Migrations, included nature stories and family histories. The family histories seem to me a distinctly southern approach to writing, and she is not the only nature writer to mix nature stories with family histories. 
 
J. Drew Lanham, America’s best-known Black birdwatcher, also took this approach in his book The Home Place. His parents were teachers and farmers, and his stories include a fierce love of the natural world. His collection of poems is titled Sparrow Envy. You can also read his work on the website of Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/contributor/j-drew-lanham/
 
Many of the best-known contemporary southern nature writers are women. Janisse Ray added personal and family history to her nature writing in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, her first nonfiction book. She also picked up this thread in her later book, The Wild Card Quilt She has written and edited several nonfiction books and published three poetry collections. She released her first book-length work of fiction this year. Her interview when inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame appears here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38ztIKCrl00
 
The Cherokee/Appalachian poet and essayist Marylou Awiakta also gave us a picture of the family as she presented wisdom and the importance of the natural world to her two cultures. She recently designated the Special Collections unit of the University of Tennessee Library as the recipient of her personal and professional papers. Although her books are out of print, they are available from used book dealers. Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom is a collection of essays and poems. Abiding Appalachia is a collection of poems. When Awiakta decided to make the University of Tennessee the recipient of her personal and professional papers, the university library created a video celebration of her work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHuso0fmIUA&t=1325s
 
So, these four authors, Renkl, Lanham, Ray, and Awiakta, have points of similarity despite writing from vastly different cultural histories. None of them will appear at the Southern Festival of Books in 2022, but as far as I know, Janisse Ray is the only one to have published a book in the current year. This is a requirement to be named a presenter.
 
I have read the books named in this article and highly recommend them. I recommend Janise Ray’s book Drifting into Darien and Awiakta’s Rising Fawn. If you don’t have time for reading, search for the four authors on YouTube. You will find surprising results. 
 

I have temporarily deactivated my Facebook account. Catch me here. 
I encountered a glitch in the event software that makes me really mad. 

​This is the time of year for hawk migrations. You can read my article on hawk watching on the website of Appalachian Voices newspaper. https://appvoices.org/2021/02/26/counting-hawks/

Unknown Territory

This piece is a response to "The Greatest Nature Essay Ever" by Brian Doyle at: 
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-greatest-nature-essay-ever. 

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 the overtones of arrogance, advertising, and P.T. Barnum coming to town with his circus, "The Greatest Show on Earth.". 

I had never heard of Brian Doyle before, which may have led me to the first impression of arrogance. Greatest nature essay ever? From an author of whom I have never heard? Having read the piece, I have changed my mind. I like his work and now want to read more of it. 

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 piece 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 the healing arms of nature. 

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 following 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 the 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 criteria and 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. The work founded a school of poetics. It is usually translated into prose, and the full text appears on the website of the American 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 might have led me to the conclusion that I have read very few nature essays. Please make no mistake; I have read extensively from the works of naturalists. I have read Thoreau's Waldon and Cape Cod, Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Peter Matthiessen's National Book Award-winning book, The Snow Leopard. 

This reasoning led me to reconsider "The Cowboy and his Cow" by Edward Abbey. The piece is self-aware in that Abbey recorded the audience's reactions to a reading of the essay. His 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, however. It is a polemic, best described as contentious rhetoric intended to support a position and undermine the opposing position. Much of what is broadcast on "talk radio" is polemical. 

Abbey's devotion to the land left no room for middle ground. As such, it violates Doyle's dictum of "no sermonizing." "The Dead Man at Grandview Point," a chapter in his book Desert Solitaire, achieves a lyric quality and meets some criteria of essays, though not all of Doyle's, indeed not the short length. I once prepared a profile of Abbey for the environmentalist tabloid Hellbender Press, named for a large species of Salamander. I quoted some material from the Grandview Point portion of his book. 

So, I find Doyle's comments helpful but not an exclusive set of criteria for writing nature essays. The self-aware aspect of the work is interesting. I suppose 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 unnoticed. It is the intersection of the divine with the ordinary. 

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. When I have reached some sense of completion, I 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 meetings 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 contradicts the sense of wonder. For others, that sense of wonder might be retained even as they notice their reactions to their observations and writings. I might hope to reach that state, but it does not seem possible now.
 

September 2019

This morning I shared my table with a tiny gray spider, perhaps a quarter inch long. The spider was fully formed, as arachnids are even at hatching. I am tempted to say that it was an adult, given the time of year, but the unseasonably hot days of September make the statement less confident.

The spider seemed indisposed to stay, crossing to the far end of my table. When I interposed my pen in the path, the arachnid raised the front pair of legs for a tactile examination. Not interested, the spider turned back toward me.

When I placed an open book in the path, the spider climbed onto the page with its world map. Uninterested in the land masses of North and South America, the intrepid spider crossed the Pacific Ocean north to south.

Not satisfied with this adventure, the spider crossed to the opposing page, which held a world map illustrated with time zones. Continuing its southerly movement, the spider followed the Hawaii/Tahiti time zone, which includes a bit of Alaska, a vast land mass that crosses three time zones.

My spider showed interest in none of these distant lands, simply traveling across Hawaii and Tahiti. It did not enter the adjacent Alaska Time Zone or the Samoa Time Zone. I suppose there is something to be said for singleness of purpose.

When I interposed my pen again, this spider happily accepted a ride down to the porch floor and went on spidering.
 

Moody Forest: A Review

Moody Forest is the story of a forest and swamp on the banks of the Altamaha River. A remarkable family preserved this gem, but it was nearly lost when Miss Elizabeth Moody, the last of the three heirs that had held the forest in trust, died in her ninth decade. The forest became part of her estate with numerous heirs who decided to sell the land.

Janice Ray edited this unique book, which includes stories written by family members and friends who had known Miss Elizabeth and her brothers. She also wrote a portion of the book which reveals how several timber companies bid on the land, but The Nature Conservancy outbid them all. Ray also speaks of visiting Miss Elizabeth in her home during her final years.

The other stories in the book give the history of the land and the family. Some speak of wildlife sightings, and one tells of a famous hunting dog. Monochrome photos show Longleaf Pine trees 200 years and older and Cypress as much as 600 years old. Much of the forest had never been logged, and even one of the loggers who cut part of it to pay estate taxes spoke of how losing it would be a shame.

That loss was avoided, and portions of Moody Forest are open for public use today. I hope to see it someday. Although I have visited a primeval tulip tree forest, I have never seen a mature longleaf pine or cypress forest.