Some Things We Can't Tell Anyone
Some things we can’t tell anyone, and yet they ache to be told.
I’m opening a small doorway called Wild Confessions—a place for truths we carry in silence, similar to the famous PostSecret project.
Write your secret on a postcard. No rules, no return address, no names, no identifying evidence. The secret can be a sentence, a drawing, a fragment, a confession whispered to the trees.
If it concerns nature, wildness, biota, Earth, or sustainability, great.
Mail your postcard to me, and let it travel through wind and weather until it lands in my hands.
I will be sharing these in Trackless Wild, as testimony to the mysterious, untamed lives we all lead. The wilderness in us wants to speak.
Send to:
Janisse Ray
895 Catherine T. Sanders Road
Reidsville, GA 30453
If you create your own postcard, the standard size is 4 inches x 6 inches, on paper that is cardstock or thicker. That size will require a postcard stamp, which costs $.53. However, a postcard can be any size. Those larger than 5 inches x 7 inches will require a letter stamp of $.73.
Deadline for the first installment of Wild Confessions is December 1.
A Longer Essay, With a Few PhotosWhy I’m Obsessed With Place and Why You Should Be TooMeeting a new person, do you wonder where they’re from?
Do you think about where you live, how you got there, and if it’s the right place for you? Do you ponder the idea of home?
Most of us do. We do these things because we humans are obsessed by place and ideas of place.
I was born in an odd, matchless place. Not a suburb. Nor a town. Not inner-city. No farm or ranch or even the country.
It was a junkyard, in the south of Georgia.
Here’s a photo of me. I’m the child next to my dad.
As I grew up, I could look around and see that other kids weren’t growing up the way I was. I read tons of books, and the children in books weren’t either.
So I knew pretty early on that
place was a thing
it meant something
I was different because the place I was from was different
Different?
For one thing, a strange plant grew in the junkyard. It was called pitcher plant, and it ate insects.
After I found those, everything became more bizarre, more unique.
It took some years, but I finally learned to love my place, with all its peculiarities.
I thought you’d like one more photo of me gardening as a young girl in the junkyard. Of course I got attached to this place. My knees were in its dirt.
I grew up and became a nature writer, a person who writes books about nature and thinks a lot about place.
A few years ago I was speaking at Berry College in Georgia when a young person in the front row raised her hand and asked a question I had never been asked.
How do you learn to be in place?
The student sensed she was missing something from her life. She wondered what a place-based life would look like.
Strange, isn’t it? I told her. We are told daily that place doesn’t matter. Our culture focuses on built environment and on technology. Places are destroyed. They are homogenized.
Yet, we are made of place. We evolved to live within landscapes, to deeply know the Earth’s cycles, to flourish within those cycles. Placelessness shows up in us as a kind of homelessness, a soul wound.
I’ve never been asked what you just asked me. I don’t really know the answer to your question, but I wish I did.
So I created a book about placekeeping, tracing a year in a place, with tiny lessons that a busy person could accomplish in 15 minutes without becoming overwhelmed. It seeks to answer one question, How to be in place?
How to love our place. How to become intimate with it. How to witness it and be witnessed by it. How to strengthen the fabric of life around you. How to find a support network that is the earth itself.
Cover Reveal!
Cover designed by Flournoy HolmesThis is a manual for
getting to know
falling in love with
living well in place
I am right now launching it via Kickstarter. Why is a whole other story. I don’t treat Kickstarter as a crowdfunder but as a way to help a book find people who want it and need it.
The Kickstarter will be live until 10:25 pm on Oct. 25, 2025.
However, if you don’t want to bother with Kickstarter, no worries. In 6-8 weeks the book will be available on my website, and then in 8-12 weeks available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other platforms. Getting this from your favorite bookstore could take a few months.
I lifted much of the writing in this post, by the way, from my Kickstarter’s story. So if you go there, it will feel familiar to you.
More About the BookJourney in Place contains 52 explorations consisting of
• a tiny essay on some aspect of place
• an on-the-ground exercise
• a writing prompt or two
• a reading list
• an occasional offering of a photograph or piece of writing
• an occasional recipe involving a foraged food or medicine
• handouts and worksheets.
At the end of the year you could have a
• body of knowledge about your place
• deeper understanding of it
• knowledge of secret parts of it that very few other people (I dare say none) know
• greater love for place
• body of writing about it and about your relationship with it
• greater feeling of groundedness
• willingness to pay attention, to listen, to see details
• more acquaintances, more friends
This is a lot. It suggests that we could be very different people in a year. And why not?
Why not work to understand where we live and why it resonates so deeply?
Why not work to be human in a landscape?
Why not bring your global environmental ethic down to the specific and personal?
Most of my personal sensibilities are directed to a landscape that includes nature. However, most people don’t live rural lifestyles.
Therefore, I make a directed effort to think about place differently in this book, as the environment around us, including the built environment of an urban landscape.
Jan. 1 is a perfect time.
Thank YouThank you for sticking with me this far. “Place” is a subject that enflames me, perhaps is my life’s work. I want you to know about this book and about the Kickstarter campaign.
Again, if Kickstarter is not an app you want to sign up for, no worries. Plenty of options for getting a book will be available later.
If you want to check out how a Kickstarter works, then follow the link.
How to KickstartI will be teaching a small, intimate, free workshop live via Zoom on “How to Kickstart.” If you are interested in running one, let me know and I’ll get you on the invite-only list. I may be reached at my email.
Splendorous FlightI want to share with you a photo taken by my friend Sean Sexton, poet, photographer, and rancher. He lives in central Florida. Have you seen his collection, Portals? Notice in the photograph how the leaning palm has become a portal.
Surprising Publishing NewsAs a writer, I’m trying to stay atop major changes happening in the publishing industry. I was shocked to learn yesterday that another traditional press is closing its doors. I received an e-letter from Megan Mustain, provost at Trinity University, with the subject line “Sunsetting operations.”
What I’m Anticipating
After careful consideration of the strategic needs of the university, I have decided to begin a 16-month process of sunsetting the operations of Trinity University Press, which will close in December 2026.
I remain proud of the press, and especially the dedicated and talented team of people who have made it a place where authors and readers meet, and where so many beautiful ideas and stories have been brought forth to enrich our community. This pride in the high-quality work of the press, its staff, and its authors makes its closure a difficult decision.
And yet the costs of running a high-quality small press have become unsustainable in light of the additional investments that the university is making in its educational mission and the core operations that support that mission. While profit has never been our aim, the costs of production and promotion have increasingly outpaced revenues, and the university’s subsidy for press operations has been growing year over year despite diligent efforts to contain expenses.
My old friend Susan Cerulean, nature writer, arrives today to my farm for a long-anticipated visit. She has not met Little Fawn, so she is about to fall head over heels in love. Remember the post I wrote months ago, “How to Make Guests Feel at Home?” Susan appears in that post, albeit unnamed. She is the host who sets out photos of guests before they arrive. I am very excited to spend time with my old friend, and this morning I’m planning what flowers I can cut for her room.
Next WeekI’ve been processing ideas of meaning in our lives, especially my life, in this time of big changes—some of them terrifying—and I hope to have those thoughts in enough order to share them with you. Plus I’ll make sure to get a photo with Susan to share with you.
Thank You AgainI know how full your inbox can get these days, and I want to make sure you know how honored I am that you let me keep showing up there.
Peace to your home.
