The Woods Stretched for Miles

New Nature Writing from the South

Edited by Gerald Thurmond and John Lane

Title Details

Pages: 256

Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 04/01/1999

ISBN: 9-780-8203-2088-5

List Price: $25.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 04/01/2017

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5276-3

List Price: $88.95

Related Subjects

NATURE / Essays

The Woods Stretched for Miles

New Nature Writing from the South

Edited by Gerald Thurmond and John Lane

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Contributors

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.

This is an important book—the first of its kind exclusively on the Southeast. It should appeal to general readers who wish to read about the genre in the Southeast, about the long and complex relationship between American culture and nature, and also about controversial environmental issues in the region.

—John Murray, editor of American Nature Writing

I am delighted with the very concept of this anthology of Southern nature writing. There are dozens and dozens of recent scholarly books on environmental literature and anthologies of nonfiction nature writing, nature poetry, and environmental writing in general, including a number of regionally oriented collections. But, so far, other than Molly Westling's ecocritical studies of Southern fiction, few of these recent publications are explicitly devoted to Southern environmental literature. For this reason, there is a significant void that the The Woods Stretched for Miles is intended to fill—and I think it fills the void quite well.

—Scott Slovic, author of Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers

The Woods Stretched for Miles is by turns lively, enchanting, provocative, amusing. It will be a great gift, and a great anthology for classroom use.

ISLE

These writers are careful and accurate observers of both emotion and place. . . . The language is exceptional.

Library Journal

Marilou Awiakta

About the Author/Editor

JOHN LANE is professor emeritus of environmental studies at Wofford College. A 2014 inductee into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, his books include Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea, and Coyote Settles the South (all Georgia). He is also coeditor of The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (also Georgia), and he has published numerous volumes of poetry, essays, and novels. Coming into Animal Presence is his most recent work. He lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.