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:
John Lane's essay is entitled "Keowee."
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:
Papers of Author John Lane Acquired by Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University
Date Published:
May 13, 2008 -
Title:
Circling Home
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 2007Description:
fter 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.
Book Review #1:
"Two verbs: to roam, to home. Nature writers, going back at least to the great T'ang Dynasty poets, have wrestled with these two urges. John Lane spent the first half of his life roaming and writing about life on the move. Now comes Circling Home, his big-hearted account of settling down with a family and homing in on the richly textured landscape that surrounds his new hearth. Like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson before him, John Lane superbly demonstrates the virtues and the obstacles of becoming native to one place." ?Erik Reece, author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness
Book Review #2:
Circling Home John Lane Discovering home ground in the tradition of Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard 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. John Lane's writing has been published in Orion, American Whitewater, Southern Review, Terra Nova, and Fourth Genre. His books include Waist Deep in Black Water, The Woods Stretched for Miles, and Chattooga (all published by Georgia), several volumes of poetry, and Weed Time, a gathering of his essays. Lane is an associate professor of English at Wofford College. November 2007 ISBN 082033040X cloth ? $24.95 224 pp. ? 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in. ? 1 map A volume in the seriesA Wormsloe Foundation Nature Book "Two verbs: to roam, to home. Nature writers, going back at least to the great T'ang Dynasty poets, have wrestled with these two urges. John Lane spent the first half of his life roaming and writing about life on the move. Now comes Circling Home, his big-hearted account of settling down with a family and homing in on the richly textured landscape that surrounds his new hearth. Like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson before him, John Lane superbly demonstrates the virtues and the obstacles of becoming native to one place." ?Erik Reece, author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness "John Lane puts a saucer down on the topographical map of his homeplace and finds within that circle 'a theory and practice of settlement.' Circling Home recounts the 'adventure travel' he does within that one-mile radius. Whether building a sustainable home with his new wife, kayaking the flooded creek with his stepsons, walking the golf course with his naturalist's eye, or unearthing local history in conversation with his neighbors, Lane writes with beautiful care and attention. This book makes very good company for anyone trying to live a more intentional life." ?Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Writing the Sacred into the Real
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Title:
As the World Around Us Sleeps
Date Published:
Briarpatch Press 1992. Reissued by Holocene Publications 2006
Title:
Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 2004Description:
Before the novel and the film Deliverance appeared in the early 1970s, any outsiders one met along the Chattooga River were likely serious canoeists or anglers. In later years, untold numbers and kinds of people have felt the draw of the river's torrents, which pour down the Appalachians along the Georgia-South Carolina border. Because of Deliverance the Chattooga looms enigmatically in our shared imagination, as iconic as Twain's Mississippi--or maybe Conrad's Congo.
This is John Lane's search for the real Chattooga--for the truths that reside somewhere in the river's rapids, along its shores, or in its travelers' hearts. Lane balances the dark, indifferent mythical river of Deliverance against the Chattooga known to locals and to the outdoors enthusiasts who first mastered its treacherous vortices and hydraulics. Starting at its headwaters, Lane leads us down the river and through its complex history to its current status as a National Wild and Scenic River. Along the way he stops for talks with conservation activists, seventh-generation residents, locals who played parts in the movie, day visitors, and others. Lane weaves into each encounter an abundance of details drawn from his perceptive readings and viewings of Deliverance and his wide-ranging knowledge of the Chattooga watershed. At the end of his run, Lane leaves us still fully possessed by the Chattooga's mystery, yet better informed about its place in his world and ours.
John Lane's writing has been published in American Whitewater, Southern Review, Terra Nova, and Fourth Genre. His books include Waist Deep in Black Water (Georgia), several volumes of poetry, and Weed Time, a gathering of his essays. Lane is an associate professor of English at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Book Review #1:
"John Lane has brought us a haunting review, thirty years later, of how Deliverance, the book and film, have affected the river corridor, its surroundings, and the people who live near its banks, and those who come to ride its keen white edges. . . . John Lane treats the landscapes of the Chattooga River as places that exist not only in the mathematics of hydraulics and geomorphology but also in the aqua incognita of our imaginations. His writing is charged, alive, a little threatening, as he guides us down unexplored waters. His accounts of the people, the politics, the rapids, and the changing environments of the Chattooga flicker insistently like a flashbulb afterimage in the mind long after the book is tucked away. If any author has come close to cracking the code to the enigma of why folks are drawn to the black-rocked dangers and the white magic of fast, free-flowing water, it is John Lane." Richard Bangs, author of The Lost River and founder of Sobek Expeditions
Book Review #2:
"Having previously explored the river, Lane returns to journey the entire length of it, describing its natural beauty and danger as well as pausing to view it through the prism of Dickey's book. . . . Lane artfully applies his poetic sensibility to the river itself . . . Lane's own writing and observations are good enough to stand outside of Dickey's considerable shadow." Publishers Weekly
Book Review #3:
"Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River is a highly original blending of landscape description, environmental history, and memoir. John Lane evokes the impact upon a remote, beautiful region and its people that was caused by James Dickey's best-selling novel and the movie based on it. By including himself in the audience for such myth-making, and by integrating accounts of his own kayaking down the Chattooga, Lane creates a stirring tale of adventure as well as a reflection about the impact of mass media on a rural community. The precision and humor of his writing, as well as the many deft characterizations along the way, make his book engrossing from the first page to the last." John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home
Book Review #4:"Lane?s book is a personal narrative that skillfully navigates the contemporary cultural and ecological history of its subject. . . . A writer who would obviously rather paddle first and theorize later, Lane prefers to let the river speak for itself."
?Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Title:
Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing
Date Published:
(edited volume) University of Georgia Press 2004Description:
John Lane has three poems -- "Hounds Chasing Deer in the Suburbs," "The Bottomland," and "First Spring Flood" -- and the essay "What the Creek Teaches" in the anthology.
Writing with a sense of southern place. 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:
"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 #5:
"Contains poetry and prose that is deeply philosophical, richly textured, arresting."
?ISLE
Title:
Noble Trees of the South Carolina Upstate
Date Published:
Hub City Writers Project 2003
Title:
Waist Deep in Black Water
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 2002Description:
John Lane has scaled a granite dome in the Suriname rain forest and waded past cottonmouths in the heart of a Florida cypress swamp. He has shadowed crocodiles in a Yucat?n mangrove thicket and paddled the rapids of North Carolina's Tuckaseegee River in search of a drowned kayaker. Waist Deep in Black Water offers a collection of Lane's own writings that range from wilderness exploration, to conservation issues, to explorations of family history in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Lane's trek to the Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark in Wyoming becomes an occasion to draw connections between religion, sexuality, and mountain lore. A hike into Kentucky's Red River Gorge prompts a meditation on the words and spirit of Wendell Berry, who helped prevent the gorge from being dammed. Some of Lane's writings are set closer to home, where the South Carolina hills meet the Blue Ridge. In "Something Rare as a Dwarf-Flowered Heartleaf," Lane recounts his campaign to stop the development of a woodland area within Spartanburg's city limits. Family issues also surface, as in "Confluence: Pacolet River." Here Lane kayaks through country where his family has lived for generations as he reckons the distances between himself and his farming, millworking forebears. Something is always at stake wherever Lane takes us: a stand of old-growth trees, a primate population, a friendship, a soul. Lane bestows loving attention on the places and people he visits in this collection and, in the process, goes beyond the traditional concerns of nature and travel writing.
John Lane has been published in American Whitewater, Southern Review, Terra Nova, and Fourth Genre. In addition, he has been anthologized in The Heart of a Nation and A Year in Place. His books include several volumes of poetry and Weed Time, a gathering of his essays. Lane is an associate professor of English at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Book Review #1:
"John Lane writes with equal measures of wit, wisdom, passion, and humor about natural places that matter to him-a medicine wheel in the Big Horns, a cypress swamp in Florida, a rain forest in Suriname, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, not to mention the priceless woods and rivers near his home in South Carolina. Like all good nature writers, Lane explores himself as he explores the landscapes that inspire him, and this book is a wonderful account, written with clarity and depth, of his travels within and without. John Lane takes the land seriously. His essays matter." Christopher Camuto, author of Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains
Book Review #2:
"Any life worth living is full of friction, contradiction, and errancy. John Lane has led a life worth living. He accepts its difficulties and open-endedness with remarkable equanimity. He does not dramatize, advertise, or accuse himself. His narratives are always excursions, which may be into the exotic outback of Suriname, up a local mountain road, or down a suburban creek. They produce knowledge that is never final, momentary illumination of what cannot be systematically elucidated. The stories have real drama and real grief, yet a musing and bemused detachment is their dominant tone. That, and a serenely implacable resistance to the psychological and ecological atrocities that are committed in the name of what is sold to us as the American Way of Life." Franklin Burroughs, author of The River Home
Book Review #3:
"Let this author take you away from the cacophony of the modern world to the wild places-eons-old settings that remain unchanged. . . . John Lane's collection of eighteen outdoor essays features exquisite descriptions that recall the beauty and mystery of the earth as it must have been in raw and unfettered times. . . . For those seeking escape from the crush of contemporary times, this book leads to sanctuary." Eric Chaney, Southern Living
Book Review #4:
"Intriguing and well-wrought essays from a southern boy who is a collector of stories, each like a pretty rock gathered from some high place. Lane's pockets are full. His informants are wind and sage, storms and dark water, a love of land, the strange muteness of history. This is a book of searching, traveling through the uncharted territory where the human psyche meets wildness, to glean what lies in the depths of life. Lane's adventures carry us down many unknown and beautiful roads; like the best of journeys, they bring us back to ourselves."
?Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
Book Review #5:"Lane has a fluid eye in a 'world where time moves in more than one direction and no landscape holds steady for long,' and it's energizing to see through that eye, open as it is to both light and darkness."
?Kirkus Reviews
Title:
The Once-Again Wilderness: Following Wendell Berry into Kentucky
Date Published:
(edited volume) Holocene Publications 2000
Title:
The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South
Date Published:
(edited volume) 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. 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.
John Lane is an assistant professor of English at Wofford College in South Carolina. He has published several volumes of poetry and essays and has edited two previous anthologies, Hub City Anthology and Hub City Christmas. Gerald Thurmond is an associate professor of sociology at Wofford College.
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
Book Review #3:
"These writers are careful and accurate observers of both emotion and place... the language is exceptional." Library Journal
Title:
Hub City Anthology : Spartanburg Writers & Artists
Date Published:
(edited volume) Holocene Publications 1996
Title:
Weed Time: essays from the edge of a country yard
Date Published:
Briarpatch Press 1993. Reissued by Holocene Publications 1995
Title:
My Paddle to the Sea: Eleven Days on the River of the Carolinas
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 2011Description:
Three months after a family vacation in Costa Rica ends in tragedy when two fellow rafters die on the flooded Rio Reventazón, John Lane sets out with friends from his own backyard in upcountry South Carolina to calm his nerves and to paddle to the sea.
Like Huck Finn, Lane sees a river journey as a portal to change, but unlike Twain’s character, Lane isn’t escaping. He’s getting intimate with the river that flows right past his home in the Spartanburg suburbs. Lane’s threehundred-mile float trip takes him down the Broad River and into Lake Marion before continuing down the Santee River. Along the way Lane recounts local history and spars with streamside literary presences such as Mind of the South author W. J. Cash; Henry Savage, author of the Rivers of America Series volume on the Santee; novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winner Julia Peterkin; early explorer John Lawson; and poet and outdoor writer Archibald Rutledge. Lane ponders the sites of old cotton mills; abandoned locks, canals, and bridges; ghost towns fallen into decay a century before; Indian mounds; American Revolutionary and Civil War battle sites; nuclear power plants; and boat landings. Along the way he encounters a cast of characters Twain himself would envy—perplexed fishermen, catfish cleaners, river rats, and a trio of drug-addled drifters on a lonely boat dock a day’s paddle from the sea.
By the time Lane and his companions finally approach the ocean about forty miles north of Charleston they have to fight the tide and set a furious pace. Through it all, paddle stroke by paddle stroke, Lane is reminded why life and rivers have always been wedded together.
Book Review #1:
"One needn't be a canoeist or even outdoorsy to appreciate the insights of modern-day river voyager John Lane as he chronicles his downriver journey from the Upstate to the Atlantic Ocean. . . . His overwhelming desire to 'rewild' South Carolina's disappearing natural places is presented less as environmental activism and more as a means to a somewhat idealistic end: ultimate preservation of our common heritage. Because for Lane, maintaining the integrity of our watershed is as much about holding on to the stories that have been born and died there, as it is about the river itself."
—Heidi Coryell Williams, Town Magazine
Book Review #2:
"More than a mere travelogue, My Paddle to the Sea is a celebration of life, friendship, river travel, and the natural world. Like Lane's previous books of nonfiction, Deep in Black Water, Chattooga: Descending Into the Myth of Deliverance River, The Best of the Kudzu Telegraph and Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea is written in crisp yet intimate prose that is both poetic and layered, while never losing sight of the author's urgent desire to communicate the depth of his love for the natural world."
—Jeremy L.C. Jones, Spartanburg Herald-Journal
Book Review #3:
"I love John Lane's work. Before I picked up My Paddle to the Sea I was reading another book, a classic I am told, that was putting me to sleep. Then I turned to Lane's book and—zook—I was wide awake and floating down the river. Three qualities exist in his writing that are rarely compatible in an author: an intense readability, a deep thoughtfulness, and a largeness of spirit. 'Largeness is a lifelong matter,' said Wallace Stegner. John Lane has taken that to heart. Join him on this beautiful trip—full of contemplation and life-and-death, and humor and derring-do—and you will find yourself growing larger."—David Gessner, author of Return of the Osprey
Book Review #4:
"John Lane knows that traveling on a river is the best way to see the land, to remember our history, and to face ourselves. This fine writer’s journey down his own southern waterway is an adventure that can inform and inspire us all."—Tim Palmer, author of Rivers of America, Lifelines: The Case for River Conservation, and Youghiogheny: Appalachian River
Book Review #5:
"In graceful, richly detailed prose, John Lane captures the dynamics of a complex watershed, where droughts, dangers and historical narratives flow as seamlessly together as the tributaries of the Santee."—Catherine Reid, Warren Wilson College, author, Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst
Book Review #6:
"Countless readers across the South, and well beyond, will profit from trekking right along with John Lane, who is a very gifted natural teacher and a great literary companion."—Bland Simpson, co-author with Scott Taylor, The Coasts of Carolina