Coyote Settles The South

The story of Lane's journey as he visits coyote territories: swamps, nature preserves, old farm fields, suburbs, a tannery, and even city streets. Along the way, he gains insight concerning the migration into the Southeast of the American coyote, an animal that, in the end, surprises him with its intelligence, resilience, and amazing adaptability.

After many years of limited commitments to people or places, writer and naturalist John Lane married in his late forties and settled down in his hometown of Spartanburg, in the South Carolina piedmont. He, his wife, and two stepsons built a sustainable home in the woods near Lawson’s Fork Creek. Soon after settling in, Lane pinpointed his location on a topographical map. Centering an old, chipped saucer over his home, he traced a circle one mile in radius and set out to explore the area. What follows from that simple act is a chronicle of Lane’s deepening knowledge of the place where he’ll likely finish out his life. An accomplished hiker and paddler, Lane discovers, within a mile of his home, a variety of coexistent landscapes—ancient and modern, natural and manmade. There is, of course, the creek with its granite shoals, floodplain, and surrounding woods. The circle also encompasses an eight-thousand-year-old cache of Native American artifacts, graves of a dozen British soldiers killed in 1780, an eighteenth-century ironworks site, remnants of two cotton plantations, a hundred-year-old country club, a sewer plant, and a smattering of mid- to late twentieth-century subdivisions. Lane’s explorations intensify his bonds to family, friends, and colleagues as they sharpen his sense of place. By looking more deeply at what lies close to home, both the ordinary and the remarkable, Lane shows us how whole new worlds can open up.

Gathers essays about the southern landscape and nature by eighteen writers with ties to the region

Taking as her starting point the inspiration and wisdom that can be derived from myth, fairy tales, and folk culture, Dr. Sharon Blackie offers a set of practical and grounded tools for enchanting our lives and the places we live, so leading to a greater sense of meaning and of belonging to the world. Enchantment. By Dr. Blackie’s definition, a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world, a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life. Enchantment is a natural, spontaneous human tendency — one we possess as children, but lose, through social and cultural pressures, as we grow older. It is an attitude of mind which can be cultivated: the enchanted life is possible for anyone. It is intuitive, embraces wonder, and fully engages the mythic imagination — but it is also deeply embodied in ecology, grounded in place and community. To live this way is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary.

The New York Times best-selling account of how coyotes--long the target of an extermination policy--spread to every corner of the United States Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A masterly synthesis of scientific research and personal observation." -Wall Street Journal Legends don't come close to capturing the incredible story of the coyote In the face of centuries of campaigns of annihilation employing gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Alaska to New York. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won, hands-down. Coyote America is the illuminating five-million-year biography of this extraordinary animal, from its origins to its apotheosis. It is one of the great epics of our time.

The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South provides a collection of vibrant and multidisciplinary essays by scholars from a wide range of backgrounds working in the field of U.S. southern literary studies. With topics ranging from American studies, African American studies, transatlantic or global studies, multiethnic studies, immigration studies, and gender studies, this volume presents a multi-faceted conversation around a wide variety of subjects in U.S. southern literary studies. The Companion will offer a comprehensive overview of the southern literary studies field, including a chronological history from the U.S. colonial era to the present day and theoretical touchstones, while also introducing new methods of reconceiving region and the U.S. South as inherently interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional. The volume will therefore be an invaluable tool for instructors, scholars, students, and members of the general public who are interested in exploring the field further but will also suggest new methods of engaging with regional studies, American studies, American literary studies, and cultural studies.

Acclaimed writers, family, friends, and more pay homage to the celebrated Southern author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini. New York Times–bestselling writer Pat Conroy (1945–2016) inspired a worldwide legion of devoted fans, but none are more loyal to him and more committed to sustaining his literary legacy than the many writers he nurtured over the course of his fifty-year career. In sharing their stories of Conroy, his fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on literary life in and well beyond the American South. Conroy’s fellowship drew from all walks of life. His relationships were complicated, and people and places he thought he’d left behind often circled back to him at crucial moments. The pantheon of contributors includes Rick Bragg, Kathleen Parker, Barbra Streisand, Janis Ian, Anthony Grooms, Mary Hood, Nikky Finney, Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart, Ron Rash, Sandra Brown, and Mary Alice Monroe; Conroy biographers Katherine Clark and Catherine Seltzer; his longtime friends; Pat’s students Sallie Ann Robinson and Valerie Sayers; members of the Conroy family; and many more. Each author in this collection shares a slightly different view of Conroy. Through their voices, a multifaceted portrait of him comes to life and sheds new light on who he was. Loosely following Conroy’s own chronology, the essays herewith wind through his river of a story, stopping at important ports of call. Cities he called home and longed to visit, along with each book he birthed, become characters that are as equally important as the people he touched along the way.

John Lane continues his exploration of the intersection of the human imagination with the world of other animals in a companion volume to COYOTE SETTLES THE SOUTH (2016) and NEIGHBORHOOD HAWKS (2019). Each of these fifteen pieces--some more formal essays, some journalism, and some stories of Lane's encounters with wild animals in wild places--explores the diversity and the mystery of what's often been called "the more than human world." In each piece there is always animal presence, sometimes central and sometimes peripheral. In one piece the Columbian mammoth comes back to trouble the contemporary political landscape of South Carolina. In another, he ponders the fate of a wing-shot goose finding a last refuge in the Lane family's tiny frog pond. In another, Lane ventures into an abandoned Zimbabwean gold mine alone to check on the status of a common genet, a shy carnivore.