Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home

by Janisse Ray

Chronicles the author's return to her grandmother's northern Appling County, Georgia farm and offers stories of the community and longleaf pine ecosystem she left seventeen years ago, and the changes she found upon her return.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Nature, Essays, Ecology, Southern

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

is an award-winning and beloved American writer. Her work encourages wild, place-centric, sustainable lives and often calls attention to heart-breaking degradations of the natural world.

She writes the popular Substack TRACKLESS WILD, tracklesswild.substack.com.

Her newsletter for writers, SPIRAL-BOUND, janisseray.substack.com.

She is a sought-after and highly praised teacher of writing. She leads both in-person and online writing workshops, including a summer memoir course online, WRITE YOUR OWN STORY.

You can find more information about workshops and courses at her website.
https://janisseray.com/product-catego...

Check out her book CRAFT & CURRENT: A MANUAL FOR MAGICAL WRITING.

Janisse has won an American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, Southern Bookseller Award, Southern Environmental Law Center Writing Award, Nautilus Award, and Eisenberg Award, among many others.

Her collection of essays, WILD SPECTACLE, won the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence.

Her books have been translated into Turkish, French, and Italian.

Janisse's first book, ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD, recounts her experiences growing up in a junkyard, the daughter of a poor, white, fundamentalist Christian family. The book interweaves family history and memoir with natural history—specifically, descriptions of the ecology of the vanishing longleaf pine forests that once blanketed the Southern coastal plains.

ECOLOGY was followed by many other books, mostly creative nonfiction--often nature writing-- as well as poetry and fiction.

She earned an MFA from the University of Montana, has received two honorary doctorates, and was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. She has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Georgia Writer's Association.

She lives on an organic farm inland from Savannah, Georgia, where she enjoys wildflowers, dark chocolate, and the blues.

Reviews

[Janisse Ray]

I gave this book 5 stars, but seeing as I wrote it, I thought that might be too biased, and I removed the stars. LOL.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Janisse is a writing role model for me. Here she talks about moving home, back to south GA where she grew up, to her town of 1400. She was a single mom with a young son, moving to her grandmother's old house on the family farm. She is an activist for restoring and saving the remaining native pine forests and for living rurally and locally. I just inhaled this book since I am in the middle of moving to the county where I grew up, to a town of 146. It is a moving account of a woman growing up, in a sense, getting in touch with her ancestors, yet still maintaining her resolve and her ideals from her youth. Beautiful!

[David Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home by Janisse Ray (Milkweed Editions 2003) (Biography).
This is author Janisse Ray's third book about South Georgia from the point of view of a naturalist. Ray returns to her home ground after years away; she writes lovingly of the things that set South Georgia apart: longleaf pine forests, gopher tortoises, the Okefenokee Swamp, Creek Indian relics, and indigo snakes. Having lived in South Georgia myself, she has a keen eye for what makes her home ground special. This is a superior collection of essays written by a proud native. My rating: 7.25/10, finished 11/22/16. I purchased my paperback copy from McKay's in very good condition for $1.50. PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is beautifully written. It is as ecologically concerned as Ray's other writing, but those concerns are seamlessly woven into the narrative rather than being largely contained in mini-chapters between more memoir driven chapters as in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. And even that's not said correctly because the memoir bits are ecologically concerned in Cracker, too, but there's a back and forth of writing style there that isn't present here.

I love Ecology, but I think I love this book even more because as much as I find power in Ray exploring her roots, I find even more power and resonance in her choice to come back to those roots. What does it mean to leave and then come back?

Highly recommended.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful Remminder

This book took me back to my beloved Georgia land, much to it no longer the same. I love how the author tied the quilt she and her mother was sewing in with the land. Amazing book.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I just love Janisse Ray’s writing. The way she seamlessly incorporates nature writing into memoir makes it seem like all memoir should include ecological references. I’ve had this book for a while, and it got lost under stacks of project reading. I’m so glad I finally read it.

[Bram Pinkley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such an admirable, courageous voice for conservation. The love for her place makes me envious.

[Misael Linarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Janisse Ray and there way of writing, am not gonna spoil it but for me the book was really like a Wild Card Quilt, each entry is like a stand alone sequence, there is no order, well kinda, as you keep reading the book gets easier to understand. I want to talk a lot about the chapters but I myself know the pain of being spoiled, it's one of the worst things ever so if you want to know the life that Janisse lived through as she moved back to Baxy, Georgia, then get to reading, you won't regret it.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Less autobiographical than Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and more informative about her conservation efforts for the Georgia long leaf pine forests. When Ray is seeking out like-minded people in rural Georgia she laments, "Over
decades the South has bled people who were thoughtful about the land and society. They couldn't take the racism or the Bible thumping, and they left."

I have found this to be painfully true.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ray's writing demonstrates again and again her ability to understand humanity and nature to be intricately woven together. Her metaphor of the quilt works well to address this theme, as well as to capture the fading remnants of folk culture in the ever "progressing" South. Readers of Ecology will recognize species and characters mentioned in Wild Card Quilt. This book made me ache for home.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that craves to go backwards in time. This is an honest and deep book, a retrospective dialogue with its reader, another piece of the quilt, to be sewn, and included in the tapestry of community. A book that honors love, family, and nature; one that mends old quilts and manufactures new ones, starting from the heart. There are so many good moments within its pages, you’ll have to reflect upon what you have read. My favorites chapters: Syrup-Boiling, Local Economies, Milton, and A Forest for the Children.

[Deborah Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wild Card Quilt is a memoir of Ray's return to the small Georgia town where she grew up, with the aim of reconnecting to family and raising her young son as part of a familiar and substantial community. There's so much to love about this book, but I am especially awed by the way the author expresses so much affection for the people and the place even as she fights to preserve the eroding environment and culture.

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love her writing. It shows her deep, heartfelt appreciation of nature, family, and friends. Her optimism and authenticity is refreshing in today’s world.

[Kate Van]

This book helps me remember why I fight to stay in the South. I need it and it needs me.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll give it 4 stars ... she is a wonderful writer. I enjoyed the flow, the storytelling. With that said, I think I am too West Coast Yankee to appreciate the nuance of the pull of the deep southern family dynamic. The author is a self proclaimed liberal thinker, although I don’t remember if she uses the word liberal. The book is about her going “home” with her young son, literally to the town, house and land of her youth & figuratively to reunite with kin(her word). Most of the book is her reconciling & verbalizing why she is determined to move back near, live with, get along with, engage deeply with “kin” who are polar opposite in mind, action and words. Why? Why raise your son in that? Is the southern family draw that strong? To prove a point? Lonely? To repair relationships and try to influence thinking? I don’t think she’s wrong, I think I just don’t have a good enough perception of it to understand the culture.

[Deborah Kramb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cracker Childhood was my introduction to Janisse Ray and I've become more aquainted with her work by following her blog, taking her classes and meeting her husband, Raven. Janisse sent me this book to put in our Little Free Library, but I thought I ought to read it first. Most of the 'essays' I found to be informative and enjoyable. There were a few that were too detailed for me but as a naturalist working in Georgia I found most of the information applicable. I loved finding out more of her life story and I identified with her descriptions of small town, rural Georgia since that is where my maternal roots also lie. However, as a westerner by upbringing I have a different perspective of Southern life. This book may not appeal to everyone because it is so site specific but it is a good peek into rural Georgia.

[Jean Becker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just read The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by this author for the second time so I was happy to uncover this follow up in my TBR pile. It is about 10 years on and she has come back to Baxley with a son in tow. Her purpose is to live the environmentalist’s commitment while giving her son an agrarian childhood. If I had read this book first, I don’t think I would find it as magical as Cracker. But that does not diminish the beauty of Ray’s prose, commitment and grace.

[Melissa Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author returns to her family homestead in rural Georgia and realizes she doesn’t quite fit in, if she ever did. She finds community where she can, in bits, pieces, and remnants and realizes the beauty through the rips and the tears. Beautiful and inspiring writing. Highly recommend to all who wish they could go home again but know that they can’t.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a long time to "get into" this book, but about halfway through, I really began to enjoy it. I appreciate the author's love of the Earth, and her work and dedication to help save its precious spaces. Thank you Janisse for all you do for the Earth, and all of its inhabitants! You are a gift, and I am grateful.

[Treasure Island Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this account of the author's return to home and family after a long time away. I learned a lot about the ecology of Georgia, but the parts that resonated most were the chapters that dealt with fitting into her community, her family, and her life in an authentic way that reflected who she had become and not who her family expected her to be.

[Tamara York · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up. A memoir about moving back home to a rural South Georgia farm in the late 1990’s. The author is a naturalist and mourns the loss of longleaf pine forests near her home. There are some lovely sentiments about home and a slower way of life that I could connect with, as well as her love of nature.

[Joyce Reynolds-Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Community makes sense. That's a major underlying theme of this book, and the assorted essays circle around this notion in various ways. An excellent collection that addresses issues of the rural South with regard to being female, raising a child, and, most of all, going back home.

[Anne Vandenbrink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this sequel to Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Janisse returns home after 17 years with her young son. She fixes up her grandmother's house, reestablishes friendships and family relations, and, as in her first book, recounts past childhood memories. A wonderful book of finding oneself.

[Arch Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to see the places you describe and see them through the lens of deep time, as you do. Feeling your connection to place and family was strong. I was transported to some of my own experiences that I had filed to memory and got to see them again with maybe fuller perspective.

[Jenny Giarratano · Rating 5 out of 5]

So love this book! Love everything about what Janisse explores about place, family, heart.
It answered a longstanding quilting question for me, too. Something my husband mentioned his grandmother used to do. I copied the paragraph into my quilt journal.

[Barbara Bretherick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This surpasses ‘Ecology of a Cracker Childhood’ with its scope and depth and breadth of passion for Janisse Ray’s beloved South Georgia landscape, both what has gone before her and what she can and does work to preserve for the future.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Ray's work. Excellent book.

[Amber Bettis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written memior. Ray was able to perfectly prose what's always been in my head as an earth lover that grew up around people that maybe hasn't always felt the same way about our home.

[Jeff Garrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Ray’s “Ecology of a Childhood Cracker†so much I sought out more of her books. She ends her first book with having left home for college in the Georgia highlands. Now, seventeen years later, Ray returns, moving into her deceased Grandmother’s “heart pine†home, a place that might fall in had not the termites been holding hands (19). She’s a single parent with a young son. She has a Master’s Degree and has lived in Montana and Florida. Through essays, Ray gives us a glimpse of her life as she tries to prove Thomas Wolfe wrong and show that one can come home again. But it’s not an easy trip and at times Ray is ready to throw in the towel and strike out for more promising lands.

This book is multi-faceted. On the one hand, it’s about the role “place†plays in our lives and stories. I love her idea of how we learn place from light (275) and how she describes the passing of time by the shadows and the rising and setting of the sun (160f). Reading this, I recalled winters in the longleaf forest that use to be behind the home where I grew up and how the trees would casts such long shadows. The book is also about relationships and Ray writes honestly about her relationship with her parents, her deceased grandmother, Uncle Percy, her son, and a sister who is estranged from her family but who is reunited with them at Janisse’s wedding. The book is also about longing for relationships as Ray mentions going out with another single woman in search of a man (80f), and how she finally found her “man†reading a book at a folk music festival (287f). Some of the stories are a little sappy for my taste, almost like chick-lit, but I enjoyed them anyway. Throughout the book, one learns of the loss the rural south and what it means for the ecosystem. I hope she keeps writing, we need more voices that understand the interconnectedness between the human race and nature.

One senses grace in Ray’s life. I love her story of judging a pork cooking contest. She had not eaten pork in 20 years, but finally agreed to be a judge. A pot of Brunswick stew took first place. Concluding the essay, she writes:
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From the pork-cooking contest I learned that many things are above dogma. Respect, for example. Love. The requirements of our place in a community may land us in the middle of odd, funny stories we never schemed for ourselves. What we are asked to contribute may lie outside the lines of what we imagine. Some of our participation we can’t design. (273)

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Many of these essays elicit a personal response from me. I felt a tinge of guilt when she laments over those Southerners who love the wild having fled the South (189). I’m one of them (although I’ve been adopted by the intermountain west). Thinking back, I was most involved with the Sierra Club when I lived in the South, at a time when the group wasn’t popular, but it seemed to me that they were the only ones in the late 70s talking about the need to preserve ecosystems. I also became nostalgic reading about wire grass and long leaf pines, two species that played an important role in the worlds in which Ray and I had been “raised up.†She speaks of coming into a longleaf forest that “stood out like the Kingdom of Heaven, suddenly tall and very green, praising the sky†(116). Finally, melancholy swept over me when I learned that she discovers her “soul-mate†while he’s reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ve read that book several times, the first being back in the 70s and never found a nature loving woman with a southern drawl that was interested in the book. If one said anything about me reading the book, it was probably about how motorcycles are dangerous or that Zen is some kind of pagan religion.

I've also published my review in my blog.

[Chandler Kuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing, I have to admit I am partial to it because it reminds me so much of my own hometown, childhood, family, and life. I think anyone would find it a great read however.