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Janisse
Ray, author of the poignant American Book
Award-winning memoir Ecology of a Cracker
Childhood,
is the
2003-2004 John and Renée Grisham Writer
in Residence at the University of Mississippi.
The Georgia native assumed the prestigious
teaching post in the Department of English
August 15.
A naturalist, activist, and regular commentator for National Public Radio, Ray
is the newest recruit for the 11-year-old program that embraces emerging Southern
writers. The annual appointment, including housing and a stipend, is funded by
the best-selling author and his wife, who were Oxford residents for several years.
Recipients are invited to teach writing workshops and participate in department
activities.
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 1999) is Ray’s story
of growing up poor and white, raised by fundamentalist parents amid a junkyard
in Baxley, Georgia, near the Florida border. She poetically twines the ecology
of a family with the ecology of the destroyed longleaf pine forest that once
swept over the Southern Coastal Plain. The books is required reading for
Southern Studies 101 and some English and honors courses at the University
as well as
in classes at other universities and colleges around the country.
In her latest book, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (Milkweed Editions,
2003), Ray passionately describes returning to her childhood home, with her
9-year-old son, after spending years in Montana. “Could I resolve the troubles of childhood,
since I would no longer be a child in a childhood place?” she asks in the
book’s opening pages.
“
I am thrilled that Janisse will be at the University of Mississippi this
year,” said Ann Fisher-Wirth, a professor of English who teaches creative
writing. “She is a wonderful writer, a compelling teacher and speaker,
a passionate environmentalist, and an all-around amazing woman whom I am
honored to have as a friend.”
Fisher-Wirth, who also writes about the environment, met Ray four years ago
at Ossabaw Island, off the Georgia coast, at a writer’s weekend retreat
Ray organized “to meet other people who wrote environmental poetry,
fiction, or nonfiction in the South—to build an artistic and activist
community.” “Many
firm friendships, many environmental projects and a lot of good writing have
resulted from the group that formed, which included writers such as Lola
Haskins, James Kilgo, Frank Burroughs, John Lane, Bill Belleville, and Susan
Cerulean,” Fisher-Wirth
said.
A phenomenal success, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood also won the Southeastern
Booksellers Award for Nonfiction, Southern Environmental Law Center Award
for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment, and Southern Book Critics
Circle Award. It also was honored by the Georgia Center for the Book as “The
Book Every Georgian Should Read.”
Joseph Urgo, University English chair, said his faculty were tremendously
impressed with the book. “In a short time, Janisse Ray has established herself as
an important new voice in what’s called creative nonfiction—essays,
nature writing, sustained observation and reflection,” he said. “We
wanted to invite someone working in this genre, and when we sat down to talk
about it, Ms. Ray’s name kept coming up.”
Ray has published essays and poems in magazines and newspapers such as Audubon,
Coastal Living, National Geographic Traveler, Sierra, Tallahassee Democrat,
The Sun, Georgia Wildlife, Orion, Wild Earth, Missoula Independent, Florida
Wildlife,
Hope, and Florida Naturalist. She also has provided commentaries for Peach
State Public Radio and NPR’s “Living on Earth.”
As an activist, Ray hopes to slow the rate of logging in Southern forests.
She is a founding board member of Altamaha Riverkeeper, a group dedicated
to repairing
the Georgia’s mighty Altamaha River. She helped form the Georgia Nature-based
Tourism Association and worked to save the 3,400-acre Moody Forest in her
Appling County home.
For more information about the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence
program, call 662-915-7439.
Deidra Jackson
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