2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview Jennifer G.

Cuthbertson Published in Arts & Letter: Journal of Contemporary Culture, Spring 2004

Janisse Ray created a stir in 1999 with her story of growing up in a junkyard in Baxley, Georgia. Her book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, had an impact in the Southeast and beyond receiving the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Southeast Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction, the American Book Award, the Southern Environmental Law Center Award, and it was selected as one of the books every Georgian should read by the Georgia Center for the Book. What attracted me to Ecology was the wonderfully quirky title, but once I started reading I found myself mesmerized by Rays story of her childhood and by the ecology of South Georgia In April of 2003, I found an advance copy of Rays Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home in my mail stack at the quilting magazine where I edit copy and write stories. I excitedly stuffed the public relations materials from Milkweed Publishers into the back of the book and took it all home to read that very night. After losing myself in Rays story of her return to Baxley, Georgia, I glanced through the press releases and found an offer to interview the author. Here I am a few months later caught in the inevitable Atlanta morning rush hour made worse by a sudden summer down pour. I am inching my way toward Channel Five where Janisse Ray and I have agreed to meet. At last I see the sign for the television station and I find Ray, only to learn there is no place at the station to meet, so we head to the Starbucks in Little Five Points, order Chai Lattes and stake out a corner of the shop to talk.

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview Janisse Ray: Connecting Lives and Landscape Through Story

Both of your books are creative nonfiction, but are hard to classify beyond that. Theyre memoir, but not traditional memoir because they also tell the story of the South Georgia landscape. How difficult was it to find a publisher willing to take a chance on your books?

My agent sent my first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, out to the traditional publishers in New York. Several of them were willing to publish it, if I took out the natural history. I couldnt do it. I am telling the story of the pine tree and using my life as a metaphor. Emily Buchwald at Milkweed understood that. Milkweed is willing to publish new voices, non-traditional voices from new places.

How did you come up with Ecology of a Cracker Childhoods unique structure?

I would literally put the chapters down in the floor and cry as I looked through them trying to decide what went where, trying to decipher the narrative arc. Luckily my editor, Emily Buchwald, took the manuscript on vacation with her and shaped it. She suggested the longer personal narrative split by the shorter nature narrative, which has been praised as well as criticized.

At the beginning of Wild Card Quilt, you said, I knew by then I had to write. When did you first hear this voice urging you to write?

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview

I grew up in a different time than most of my contemporaries. There were televisions, but we didnt have one. I wasnt allowed to watch it period. I was allowed to go to the library and bring home stacks of books. Books introduced me to the possibilities of this amazing world that in my isolation I didnt know existed. I say books saved my life because they saved my spirit. I knew what stories meant to me and I wanted to be a part of that tradition and of opening up the world for others, and I knew this at an early age.

Describe your earliest writing successes.

Dad was very supportive of my writing. He said poets and saints, the greatest people on this earth, would inherit the world. I wrote a poem about Thanksgiving and gave it to him. He read it and folded it and put it in his safe. I received a lot of praise and support from him. The summer before 8th grade my teacher went to a training that described journaling, so he assigned us to write daily journal entries for one month. After we turned them in and he read them, he took me out in the hallway and told me, You have a gift. Keep writing. He was the first person outside of my family who praised my writing. I still see him in the grocery store from time to time and I always go up to him and thank him.

What books captivated you the most?

I loved books by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. I felt, I feel, they honored me by honoring

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview where and what I knew. I remember reading a book by Rawlings where she talks about a chameleon; you know the lizard that puffs it throat out? She talked about watching a chameleon sit and puff its moneybag in and out. I could relate to that. She was writing about my life, and no other books wrote directly to me and honored my way of life.

What kind of reception have you gotten as you have traveled to promote your books?

A lot of people relate to what I am writing. They feel I am honoring their life. A lot of older people, especially, experienced poverty, and they remember the long leaf pines and the swamps. They understand the religious fervor and all that entails, and even the mental illness, the bi-polar disorder; they understand that.

Has your writing life changed with the publication of two books?

Writing and publishing a book changes your life. I used to struggle to send out queries to magazines. Then people started calling me after my first book came out. I finally stopped sending out queries because I didnt want to write what the magazines wanted me to write. They might want me to write about laughter and how its important, which is an interesting topic, but Id rather write about sea kayaking on the South Georgia coast or the Okefenokee Swamp. I have also had the experience of a magazine wanting to change so many things in the article that I felt like saying its not mine, take my name off.

Creative nonfiction and personal narrative have become very mainstream reading

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview selections. They rate shelf space along side Fiction at Borders and Barnes and Noble. Why do you think this is happening?

I believe its the amount of commercialism in our lives. The average adult sees 3000 messages a day between television, magazines, and billboards, t-shirts. This (pointing to coffee cup with Starbucks emblazoned on it) is an advertisement. We see ads everywhere, and we know that most of them are lies. I think we are desperate for the truth about other peoples lives. Our global industrial culture takes us so far away from our humanity, and creative nonfiction, the telling of our personal stories, takes us back to our humanity.

Books about nature and the environment are also taking their place in mainstream literature. What do you think accounts for this trend?

We are watching wild things and nature hemorrhage. I think this is especially true for older people. When I do readings, especially at small public libraries near home, the audience members talk about the forests from their youth and they weep recalling what it was like when they were growing up. In Georgia, and in other places, we are turning the forests into other things. We are stripping them, so they can become something else. I also think everyone wants a better life, and we are learning this doesnt necessarily translate into material possessions. Its part of why I went back to South Georgia. I wanted a life that made better sense for my son and I. I wanted a life supported by landscape, family, history, community.

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview

What was it like returning home as a grown up?

It was hard going home to a rural community. After World War II there was a rural exodus. People went to work for industry, which meant leaving the family farm, so many farms were lost and, I dont want to demean small towns, but in many instances cultural poverty as well as economic poverty was left behind. Going back to Baxley, Georgia as a progressive, liberal-minded person who ate health food and was environmentally conscious, was a shock. Not just for me, but also for my son. I went to pick him up at a friends house, this was 2-3 years after we moved back, and he was crying. He kept saying I want to go back to Tallahassee or Missoula. I kept asking him, why? What dont we have in Baxley that he could have in another place? I kept thinking if it was soccer, I could drive him to Savannah. What he finally told me we were missing in Baxley, was imagination. I remember Barry Lopez saying that fundamentalism is a sign of a failed imagination. I think for many rural places, the exodus after WWII left them with a failed imagination. I dont mean to be disparaging. I love my life in a small town, but it is our mentality that youre a failure if you do go back to the small town you left, so people havent gone back home. I think, though, with computers the trend is to go back, to leave cities, and were not talking about moving to a suburb. I mean truly going back to places like Odom, Georgia returning to a different life, a life supported by family, history, and community.

One of the many memorable people you introduce us to in Wild Card Quilt, is Miss

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview Elizabeth. Would you give us an update on her forest?

Everyone in South Georgia knows it as Moody Swamp, but it is now named the Moody Forest. The Nature Conservancy came through and bought all 3400 acres. Were talking old growth forest with two to three miles of river running through it. This was a real coup. I am spiritual, not religious, but very spiritual. At a time when I thought the land would be lost, I prayed and fasted. I even prayed promising that I would give up publishing another book, if we could just save this precious land. Fortunately, we saved the forest and I got to keep publishing.

How did the idea for your second book, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, come together?

The quilt came to symbolize the fragmentation of our landscape and of our society. I flew over the largest clear cut in the Southeast in Tracey City, Tennessee. In ten years, ten thousand acres have been erased. Its been done in little pockets here and there, but ten thousand acres in ten years. You can drive this area and go for thirty miles with complete clear cuts and just a few young pines that have been planted. You know how when you fly and look down you see a quilt? Patches of field and earth broken up by buildings and houses and an occasional forest. But the earth is meant to be a comforter stitched by trees. The earth is not meant to be scraps of beautiful pieces. Its meant to be continuous, like a comforter, which again goes back to why I moved home to South Georgia. It was a place with family that I couldnt, cant, get out of my body. The quilt my Momma and

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview I made became a metaphor for trying to put my life back together and trying to put the earths landscape back together. It symbolized the restoration of putting my heart of pine house back together. It was built in the twenties by my grandparents. Now, my family has been put back together. My parents and I are back together, and I have a family again. My husband and son and I are organic farmers, and we grow much of what we eat. We have pigs and chickens in addition to the fruits and vegetables we grow. Were returning our lives to a way that makes sense. We even planted a butterfly garden outside of our bedroom window and every morning I find its amazing to wake up to hummingbirds, and songbirds, and butterflies.

How did your family react to the telling of your story?

Thats a good question, because I give some dark details about my father in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. I talk about his bout with mental illness, with bi-polarism. We had an argument after I finished writing Ecology. I told him I would change anything that made him uncomfortable. He ordered me to leave his house. I stood in front of him chanting, Youre my father. I love you. Im not going anywhere, over and over. We came to terms. His discomfort only lasted a few days. I put in a portion of an essay he wrote about his illness, and that was the end of it. In fact when the Milkweed catalog came out with the book, my father went around town with the catalogue. He went to the doctor who delivered me, to the cashiers at the grocery store, to everyone he could. He pre-sold 250 books in our little town of Baxley, Georgia. He was more conscious of the need to market than I was. Daddy ended up selling 1200 copies. When I would read at a

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview little library where books werent being sold, Daddy would come along and sell them. He still operates his junkyard, and he even sold some there. There was a man, a chairman or president of the board of directors of a fast food restaurant that was building in town, who came to the junkyard to buy something, and Dad sold him a book. The man was from Atlanta, and he came back and bought twenty-five copies to give to the members of his board. As I said, Dad was very attentive to the marketing aspect. He said you never knew which book would be the golden bullet that pushed you to success. Someone might buy it and then pass it on to some critical person. Word of mouth counts a whole lot when youre trying to sell a book. It took some time for that to sink in. You have to do promotions. It will wear you out, but it has to be done. I hope new writers are aware of this. I would love to be like Flannery OConnor and to write a book and then stay on my farm tending peacocks and have the book sell. It just doesnt happen. There are still a few exceptions. Authors like Cormac McCarthy who resist most efforts at promoting a book and are still successful.

Youve been on the road since the spring promoting your book. Whats it like to travel around the country meeting people who because theyve read your words feel like they know you?

I feel like books are meant to heal and project people on to the path where their dreams lie. People feeling like they know me doesnt bother me. I meet lots of wonderful people who share my interests, and who I would love to get to know. I see people, who come to reading after reading, and I love to see them again and find out how they are, but I

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview know I cant have relationships with every one I meet. I do protect myself at home. After Ecology people would get my number from Directory Assistance and call me at home. After Raven and I got married and he moved to the farm, I got a business line with a message on it.

You talk about the fragmentation of the landscape and of humanity. What is there that still connects us?

Stories. Were made of stories. We each have important stories to tell. These stories used to be rural. People would sit on the porch at sundown talking about the cow they had to chase down and how in the process they discovered a giant hornets nest. Theres the story of the three trees at the corner of my house. My Uncle Percy found a small magnolia in the woods one day, and he dug it up and brought it home and planted it at the corner of the house. His father, my grandfather, told him it wouldnt live. It was a shade-loving tree, and it grew slow, and even if it lived Percy wouldnt be around to sit underneath its shade. So Percy went out into the woods and brought back a maple and a pine to give the magnolia shade. Not only did the tree live, but it has thrived and both my grandfather and Percy got to sit under its shade. This story connects my family. Quilting is like that. Momma and I told stories as we quilted. I told her about the batik fabric with a Swallow-tailed Kite on it that I used to make pillowcases for a friend who was writing about the swallowtail. I made her pillowcases, so she could dream about them every night. Momma told me about the bag of fabric that Frank, my father, found in a dumpster and brought home. Some of those pieces are in our quilt. She told me stories about the

2 CuthbertsonJanisse Ray Interview scraps and what the larger pieces were used to make. These are stories about who we are, about working with our hands. Thats all we have. We have breath and emotions, but who we are to each other is made of stories. Creative nonfiction is taking stories about life and putting them in an order that illuminates something. An essay is merely a way of thinking about yourself and your relationship to something.