The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South

by John Lane (Editor), Gerald Thurmond (Editor)

The Woods Stretched for Miles gathers essays about southern landscape and nature from nineteen writers with geographic or ancestral ties to the region. This remarkable group encompasses not only such well-known names as Wendell Berry and Rick Bass but also distinctive new voices, including Christopher Camuto, Susan Cerulean, and Eddy L. Harris.From the savannas of south Florida through the hardwood uplands of Mississippi to the coastal rivers of the Carolinas and the high mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the range in geography covered is equally broad. With insight and eloquence, these diverse talents take up similar themes: environmental restoration, the interplay between individual and community, the definition of wildness in an area transformed by human activity, and the meaning of our reactions to the natural world.

Readers will treasure the passionate and intelligent honorings of land and nature offered by this rich anthology. With the publication of The Woods Stretched for Miles, southern voices establish their abiding place in the ever-popular nature writing genre.

Genres: Nature

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

John Lane (1954–) is emeritus professor at Wofford College, where he taught creative writing, environmental studies, and directed the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. There, he helped imagine and direct the Thinking Like a River Initiative. Lane was named one of seven regional Culture Pioneers by Blue Ridge Outdoors. He has been honored with the Water Conservationist Award from the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, the Clean Water Champion by South Carolina's Upstate Forever, and inducted, in 2014, into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.

His selected poems, Abandoned Quarry, won the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Book Award, his nonfiction book, Coyote Settles in the South, was named a finalist and a Nature Book of Uncommon Merit by the John Burroughs Society, and his novel, Fate Moreland's Widow, was named Independent Publisher Silver Medalist.

One of the founders of the Hub City Writers Project, Lane lives near the banks of Lawson's Fork outside of Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of "New Nature Writing from the South" was a bit uneven (and sadly, no longer so "new," as it was released in 1999). It's unfortunate that I found it so uneven because I know and like one of the editors, John Lane, very much, and because the University of Georgia Press rarely puts out a bad book on either "the environment" or "the South," broadly speaking. Selections from Barry Lopez, Janisse Ray, E.O. Wilson, Wendell Berry, and Chris Camuto were stunning--especially Janisse Ray's piece, "Whither Thou Goest," which I hadn't seen anywhere before and which made me tear up quite a bit. E.O. Wilson's piece will unveil to you a somewhat amazing set of happenstances that led him to entomology in the first place. Other pieces, like Jan DeBlieu's "Hurricane," Franklin Burroughs's "Lake Waccamaw to Freelands," and Susan Cerulean's "Searching for Swallow-Tails" deserve mention as excellent selections as well. Overall, I would recommend this book to folks who read a lot of nature writing already and are used to the genre, but not to those who are interested in starting to read nature writing for the first time, as some selections disappoint.

[Ray Zimmerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great essays about the natural world.