Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
Paperback, signed & dated. Price includes shipping.
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.
A Georgia Food Forest.
8.5x11 inches, 128 pages. Printed in the U.S. on 10% recycled paper.
Drifting into Darien: A Personal & Natural History of the Altamaha River
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The Altamaha rises dark and mysterious in southeast Georgia. It is deep and wide bordered by swamps. Its corridor contains an extraordinary biodiversity, including many rare and endangered species, which led the Nature Conservancy to designate it as one of the world’s last great places.
The Altamaha is Ray’s river, and from childhood she dreamed of paddling its entire length to where it empties into the sea. Drifting into Darien begins with an account of finally making that journey, turning to meditations on the many ways we accept a world that contains both good and evil. With praise, biting satire, and hope, Ray contemplates transformation and attempts with every page to settle peacefully into the now.
Though commemorating a history that includes logging, Ray celebrates “a culture that sprang from the flatwoods, which required a judicious use of nature.” She looks in vain for an ivorybill woodpecker but is equally eager to see any of the imperiled species found in the river basin: spiny mussel, American oystercatcher, Radford’s mint, Alabama milkvine. The book explores both the need and the possibilities for conservation of the river and the surrounding forests and wetlands. As in her groundbreaking Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray writes an account of her beloved river that is both social history and natural history, understanding the two as inseparable, particularly in the rural corner of Georgia that she knows best. Ray goes looking for wisdom and finds a river.
Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home
Hardback. Price includes shipping anywhere in U.S.
Craving a life built on "land, history, and blood," Janisse Ray returns to South Georgia from Montana and moves into the family's rundown 1920s farmhouse in Appling County. There Ray rediscovers the pleasures of country life -- a Thanksgiving syrup boil, alligator trapping, and neighbors - as well as the dysfunction of rural community. Wild Card Quilt is the story of her return and the adventures that follow as she ponders whether she will stay "and die where seven generations of grandmothers had died" before her or whether she will leave again.
Broadside
Limited Edition of 100, Signed by the Author. Includes shipping.
Poem on the broadside is excerpted from Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray and published by Milkweed Editions, 1999. Copyright 1999. It is reprinted courtesy of the author and Milkweed Editions. Edition limited to 100 copies.
Woodcut by Josef Beery. Type was composed in Kennerley and printed by hand by students of Brown College at the University of Virginia. Published on the occasion of the visit of Ms. Ray to the College. Presswork done at the Virgnia Arts of the Book Center. Charlottesville, Virginia, April, 2011.
Description:1 sheet ([1] pages) : illustrations ; 13 x 20 inches (49 x 33 cm)
Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land
Paperback, signed & dated. Includes shipping.
Cover painting by Johnny Dame.
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 wildlife corridor, a link between the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together these form one of the largest expanse of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River, the O2O Corridor. This is one of America's last truly wild places.
Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to preserve land and expand the corridor, 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, braided 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 is a great philosophy to live by.
A House of Branches
Only a few left!
Paperback, signed & dated. Very limited supply. Price includes shipping.
This is Janisse Ray's first collection of poetry, published by Wind Publications of Nicolasville, Tennessee, which has now closed its doors. Only a handful of these books are left and no more will be printed.
Of the book, Beth Ann Fennelly said, "The voice familiar to lovers of Ray's nonfiction is here -- clear eyed and questing and newly charged with lovely lyricism that honors the natural world and the wisdom she finds in it. It is a pleasure to share this journey and be enlarged by it."
There is a VERY limited supply of these books.
9x6 inches, 104 pages. Cover art by Philip Juras, landscape painter.
Ceux Qui Sèment: Graines de Resistance (The Seed Underground in French)
Only a few left!
Paperback, signed. Very limited supply. Price includes shipping.
At no time in our history have Americans been more obsessed with food. Options -- including those for local, sustainable, and organic food -- seem limitless. And yet, our food supply is profoundly at risk. Farmers and gardeners a century ago had five times the possibilities of what to plant than farmers and gardeners do today; we are losing untold numbers of plant varieties to genetically modified industrial monocultures.
In this work of literary nonfiction, award-winning author and activist Janisse Ray argues that if we are to secure the future of food, we first must understand where it all begins: the seed.
The Seed Underground is a journey to the frontier of seed-saving. It is driven by stories, both the author’s own and those from people who are waging a lush and quiet revolution in thousands of gardens across America to preserve our traditional cornucopia of food by simply growing old varieties and eating them.
The Seed Underground pays tribute to time-honored and threatened varieties, deconstructs the politics and genetics of seeds, and reveals the astonishing characters who grow, study, and save seeds.
The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
Paperback, signed & dated. Price includes shipping.
At no time in our history have Americans been more obsessed with food. Options -- including those for local, sustainable, and organic food -- seem limitless. And yet, our food supply is profoundly at risk. Farmers and gardeners a century ago had five times the possibilities of what to plant than farmers and gardeners do today; we are losing untold numbers of plant varieties to genetically modified industrial monocultures.
In this work of literary nonfiction, award-winning author and activist Janisse Ray argues that if we are to secure the future of food, we first must understand where it all begins: the seed.
The Seed Underground is a journey to the frontier of seed-saving. It is driven by stories, both the author’s own and those from people who are waging a lush and quiet revolution in thousands of gardens across America to preserve our traditional cornucopia of food by simply growing old varieties and eating them.
The Seed Underground pays tribute to time-honored and threatened varieties, deconstructs the politics and genetics of seeds, and reveals the astonishing characters who grow, study, and save seeds.
This book is a voyage to the country of seed-saving. It is driven by stories, from individuals and groups who are waging a lush and quiet revolution in thousands of gardens across America, a battle to preserve our traditional cornucopia of food. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012.
Winner of
- 2013 American Horticultural Society Book Award
- 2013 ASJA Eisenberg Book Awards
- 2013 Silver Award of Achievement
- 2013 Nautilus Gold Book Award : Green Living Category
- 2013 The Green Prize for Sustainable Literature
- 2013 GWA Gold Award of Achievement for Best Book Writing