Working under the online name Trackless Wild, Janisse Ray is an American writer, naturalist, and environmental activist. Just about everything she does speaks to me of the largest meaning and importance of what it means to be a capital G Gardener in our world.
A moving storyteller, speaker, and teacher, her book titles include Ecology of A Cracker Childhood (1999), a memoir; Wild Spectacle, Seeking Wonders in A World Beyond Humans (2021), a collection of essays; Red Lanterns (2021), a collection of poems; The Woods of Fannin County (2023), a novel, and many more. Her most recent title is based on her many years teaching writing, particularly place-based creative non-fiction: Craft & Current, A Manual for Magical Writing.
“it bears out every day that the actions of us humans are destroying what we love most in this world, and my job is to change that dynamic and change that relationship. So to do that I am a writer, I believe that stories are transformative, and my entire body as a writer is tilted toward finding the stories that can change the narratives that have become dominant so that we replace those with narratives that actually function for people and for wildness.”
Her acclaimed work has earned Janisse a Pushcart Prize, an American Book Award, the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature, a Nautilus Award, and the Arlene Eisenberg Award for Writing that Matters, among others. All well deserved.
For me the most striking aspect of her talents (expressed ardently across genres) is the precision with which she lovingly gives voice to her own place, specifically her home ground of rural South Georgia’s uplands and coastal plains – and from there, the greater U.S. Southeast generally. The climatic and seasonal fluctuations and moods of the flora and fauna across mountains and meadows, roadside verges, and meandering creeks, Janisse is always documenting the lives and ground out of which places grow people.
Her work Seed Underground, A Growing Revolution to Save Food (2012), was one of a handful of books about the poetics and politics of seed and seed people in their places that inspired me in my writing of What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023) (along with the likes of Henry David Thoreau’s posthumously-published writings on seed dispersal under the title Faith In A Seed, and Gary Nabhan’s Enduring Seed).
While very much rooted in the Southeast, Janisse, like all great nature writers, gives voice to the importance of all places through her devotion to her singular place.
Janisse’s teaching (online and at various universities across her career) focuses on encouraging the practice of place-based, heartfelt observation and writing as a way to grow better people, and therefore as a way to durably tend to all places.
Janisse joins Cultivating Place this week to explore what it means to be devoted to place - in word, action, and spirit.
Enjoy!
You can follow Janisse's work on line at:
and Instagram:
HERE IS THIS WEEK'S TRANSCRIPT by Doulos Transcription Service:
All photos courtesy of Janisse Ray, all rights reserved.
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JOIN US again next week, when we’re in conversation with Tim Johnson, Executive Director of the Native Plant Trust, based in the New England. He and I talk about some of the newest outreach efforts of the Trust, including the Northeast native plant seed network, but also about the physical and existential path of gardeners in our world That’s next week right here listen in! That's right here, next week.
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Thinking out loud this week...
Last week I had the great fun of hosting the next in our Cultivating Place Live episodes filmed and recorded by EM EN’s Myriam and Khoa in person on location at Gaining Ground Farm and Thoreau Farm in Concord, MA. In conversation over two days, we got to learn so much more about no-till mid-scale farming, about volunteer-supported ecological farming for the past 30 years with the goal of giving all of the hundreds of 1000s of pounds of gorgeous healthy fresh vegetables, fruit and flowers away to neighbors and neighboring communities in order to help address food insecurity and the roots of food insecurity.
We were on land once farmed by Henry David Thoreau’s family, we recorded our episode in the room where Henry David Thoreau was born, with the booming sounds of planes taking off from nearly adjacent Hanscom Airforce base … the physical and intellectual crossroads of past, present, future and the many different paths we choose for ourselves and our places was never far from mind.
You will be able to read more about all of this in my next CP LIVE update out on our next new moon August 4th. Follow the links under over at Cultivating Place.com under the CP LIVE tab.
And....thinking out loud about this conversation with Janisse Ray, interfacing with my goals for CP LIVE, Janisse’s nature writing and teaching of nature writing and tending to her farm animals and plants and her environmental activism all leaves me with this renewed sense of how important our Garden stories are.
How, maybe – and in my mind definitely - our gardens are analogues of nature writing and our own memoirs – individually and collectively.
Our gardens are the physical narratives demonstrating what we value and how we value it.
Good to remember, don’t you think?
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