Writer Profile
Books & Essays
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Title:
Bartram's Living Legacy: The Travels and the Nature of the South
Date Published:
Mercer University Press 2010Description:
Jan DeBlieu's essay is entitled "Vanishing Islands, Vanishing Homes: In Search of a Single Happy Ending."
Bartram?s Living Legacy: the Travels and the Nature of the South reprints Bartram?s classic work alongside essays acknowledging the debt southern nature writers owe the man called the ?South?s Thoreau.? The book was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award.
The anthology includes contributions from sixteen of the South?s finest nature writers: Bill Belleville, Kathryn Braund, Dixon Bynum, Christopher Camuto, Thomas Rain Crowe, Dorinda Dallmeyer, Doug Davis, Jan DeBlieu, Whit Gibbons, Thomas Hallock, John Lane, Drew Lanham, Roger Pinckney, Janisse Ray, Matt Smith, and Gerald Thurmond, strikingly illustrated with Bartram-inspired landscape paintings by Philip Juras.
Book Review #1:
"The ecosystems that once defined the southern landscape have disappeared, as though some cataclysmic geological event had simply obliterated them. We know of them chiefly through William Bartram's Travels published in 1791. It would be about two centuries before a group of southeastern writers/naturalists/activists began to survey the landscape that we are left with, and to think about the consequences of what has been lost, and the power, beauty, and richness of what remains. Dorinda Dallmeyer, the editor of this wonderfully conceived volume, has been at the center of that group. Her idea of combining the text of the Travels with reflections by contemporary southern writers is a brilliant one. Bartram remains an indispensable writer, whose work has been neglected for too long. Now at last he, his book, and the land he describes have their champions. Some of the essayists here focus on Bartram the man, some on Bartram the naturalist, some on Bartram the writer and artist. And some focus, as he himself had done, on the landscape and ecology of the South as it now is, and as it once was.
Some of the essayists in this book I have known and admired for years; some are entirely new to me. They do not speak with one voice, or on behalf of any preconceived agenda. But their contributions, taken all together, indicate that the South now has its own distinctive tradition of environmental literature. Bartram, not Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, or John Burroughs, is its progenitor, and this book, I believe, will come to be seen as its cornerstone."
?Franklin Burroughs
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Title:
Wind: How the Flow of Air Has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land
Date Published:
Shoemaker & Hoard 2006 (reprint edition)Book Review #1:
"This is the kind of writing that transforms the reader's experience of nature." Verlyn Klinkenborg, Audubon Magazine
Book Review #2:
"A stunning view of the Earth"--Los Angeles Times
Book Review #3:
"The stuff of a literary tour de force." Raleigh News and Observer
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Title:
Year of the Comets: A Journey from Sadness to the Stars
Date Published:
Shoemaker & Hoard 2005Book Review #1:
"For anyone who has ever cared about an astronomer or a victim of depression . . . Year of the Comets is both the clearest and most moving book I've read on either topic. . . . Books about black holes and galaxies abound. Much rarer are books that show how the cosmos touches our innermost lives. By interweaving her family's struggles with exceptionally lucid ruminations on stargazing and astrophysics, Jan DeBlieu makes plain what many stargazers no doubt feel but do not say--that looking skyward at night satisfies a deep need to escape the trials of life by day." Joshua Roth, Sky & Telescope Magazine (Nov. 2005)
Book Review #2:
"DeBlieu, an award-winning natural history writer, skillfully folds the scientific information she has had to master--neurological as well as astronomical--into a memoir of toughing out hard times with help from the heavens." Boston Globe (August 2005)
Book Review #3:
"Certain scenes will hit readers in the gut and the heart . . . . (DeBlieu) gives readers a way to hitch our lives to the stars, a way to see patterns of light and dark against those of the world, whether they be in the sky, the ocean, the mountain or the garden." Elizabeth Simpson, Norfolk Virginian Pilot (June 2005)
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Title:
Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing
Date Published:
(edited volume) University of Georgia Press 2004Description:
Jan DeBlieu contributed the essays "Into the Dragon's Mouth" and "Claim Staked."
Nature writers know that to be fully human is to be engaged with our natural surroundings. Elemental South is a gathering of works by some of the region?s best nature writers?people who can coax from words the mysteries of our place in the landscape and the human relationship to wildness.
Arranged by theme according to the basic elements by which many cultures on earth interpret?earth, air, fire, water?the writings consider our actual and assumed connections in the greater scheme of functioning ecosystems. As we read of bears, ancient magnolias, swallow-tail kites, the serenity of a country childhood, the pleasure of eating real food, the remarkable provenance of ancient pottery shards, and much more, these works lure us deep into the southern landscape, away from the constructs of humanity and closer to a recognition of our inextricable ties to the earth.
The writers are all participants in the Southern Nature Project, an ongoing endeavor founded on the conviction that writing like the kind gathered here can help us to lead more human, profound, and courageous lives in terms of how we use our earth. Some of the featured writers are originally from the South, and others migrated here?but all have honed their voices on the region?s distinctive landscapes.
Book Review #1:
"Provides a chorus of voices that blend harmoniously despite their different geographies, backgrounds, and styles. By tracing the fault lines and fractures of southern landscapes, society, and spirit, this anthology helps the South begin to heal stronger in the broken places."
?Will Harlan, editor of Blue Ridge Outdoors
Book Review #2:
"Published 150 years after Thoreau's book, it is another Walden. I shall urge each of my grandchildren to read it." Southeastern Geographer, November 2006
Book Review #3:
"This lush collection of works by members of Southern Nature Project showcases the idiosyncratic impact of our region?s natural surroundings on its writers, arguably a stronger influence than the predictable Southern Gothic theme of family secrets."
?Atlanta Magazine
Book Review #4:
"If you like to curl up with a good book on cold winter days and you also love the outdoors, read Elemental South. Each leads us to broader truths through careful observations of our natural surroundings."
?Southern Living
Book Review #5:"Contains poetry and prose that is deeply philosophical, richly textured, arresting."
?ISLE
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Title:
The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 1999Description:
The Woods Stretched for Miles gathers essays about southern landscape and nature from nineteen writers with geographic or ancestral ties to the region. Jan DeBlieu's chapter is entitled "Hurricane."
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.
Book Review #1:
"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
Book Review #2:
"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
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Title:
Hatteras Journal
Date Published:
John F. Blair Publisher 1998 (reprint edition)Description:
n 1985 Jan DeBlieu moved to Hatteras Island and took up residence in the old home of one of the Outer Banks' most historic families. For more than a year she explored the island's dunes, marshes, waters, and towns to study its complex natural cycles, its fragile ecosystem, its bird, plant, and marine life, and the seasonal routines of its stoic residents.
In Hatteras Journal she writes evocatively of a harsh but alluring worlds, where "in summer the sea oats explode with tawny seeds, the black skimmers glide over Pamlico Sound, the loggerheads heave themselves ashore on silent nights."
Along with her perceptive observations about the natural life she encounters, she describes the futility of former government policies such as dune construction, the dangers of peat mining to the sounds and bays, the efforts to protect loggerhead turtles on Bald Head Island, and the evolution of Hurricane Gloria and its effects on the barrier islands.
This is a vividly rendered account of the rigors and rewards of dwelling in a habitat where only the most resilient forms of life--natural and human--manage to prevail.
Book Review #1:
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution "DeBlieu has written a book that skillfully combines scientific research, history and astute observation. It is emotionally satisfying as well as educational."
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Title:
Meant to be Wild: The Struggle to Save Endangered Species Through Captive Breeding
Date Published:
Fulcrum Publishing (reprint 1993)Book Review #1:
From Publishers Weekly -- DeBlieu here offers an important entree into the highly politicized, often ill-managed programs meant to protect the mounting number of endangered species. Reporting on projects concerning the California condor, the Florida panther, the North Carolina red wolf, Arabian oryx and Puerto Rican parrot, she presents news that is mostly unpleasant and seldom encouraging. Readers glimpse an elaborate system of life-support tools, ranging from radio-controlled collars with tranquilizer darts to in vitro fertilization. Personality rifts and philosophical controversy emerge in the programs. Although DeBlieu notes that successes occur, she keeps aim on her target: humankind. Our ruinous legacy of greed, she charges, is destroying animal habitats and eroding whatever good work is achieved through captive breeding. Nature Book Society main selection. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Review #2:
From Library Journal -- While renewed interest in protecting the environment has given us a new surge in materials on this topic, DeBlieu's book is noteworthy for being meticulously detailed, yet very readable. Concentrating on wildlife conservation measures in North America, the author begins with a moving account of efforts to protect the red wolf and then chronicles attempts to preserve other endangered species through captive breeding and release. Although definitely biased on the side of conservation, DeBlieu's arguments are unemotional and factual. She makes a strong plea for commitment of money, resources, and time, but reminds us several times of the more pressing need to preserve whole ecosystems and to change lifestyles and attitudes. The book's organization is scattered but doesn't detract from DeBlieu's clear purpose or message. This is highly recommended.-- Edell Marie Peters, Brookfield P.L., Wis.