Writer Profile
Books & Essays
-
Title:
Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing
Date Published:
(edited volume) University of Georgia Press 2004Description:
The essay by Jim Kilgo is entitled "Black Drink."
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:
"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 #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:
"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 #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
-
Title:
Ossabaw: Evocations of an Island
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 2004 (with Alan Campbell, Jack LeighDescription:
A wild paradise of woodlands, beaches, and tidal marshes off the Georgia coast, Ossabaw Island is a heritage preserve that will forever remain undeveloped. Visitors rarely leave untouched by its tranquillity and mystery. Many are struck by the sense of solitude it imparts?even though Ossabaw lies just twenty miles south of Savannah.
The book?s three creators have powerful connections to Ossabaw: Jack Leigh?s photography and James Kilgo?s nature writing have led them there, while Alan Campbell has taken part in the artists? retreat known as the Ossabaw Island Project. This retreat has been a source of inspiration and rejuvenation for such attendees as the writer Annie Dillard, architect Robert Venturi, composer Samuel Barber, and sculptor Ann Truitt. Leigh?s black-and-white photographs, Campbell?s watercolor and oil paintings, and Kilgo?s essay offer three highly individual interpretations of a similar experience?that of deep personal connection with Ossabaw?s timelessness and beauty.
In ?Place of the Black Drink Tree? Kilgo?s meditations on the yaupon holly tea used ritually by Ossabaw?s aboriginal inhabitants lead to other thoughts about the island?s natural and human history. Leigh and Campbell?s images depict scenes of the contemporary Ossabaw that evoke a landscape as it may have appeared to its Native American, and even its earliest European, inhabitants: deserted beaches strewn with massive pieces of driftwood, palm trees tilting toward the water?s edge, an alligator lounging on the bank of a sandy creek, a flock of seabirds winging across a marsh.
Book Review #1:
"This handsome book captures the magic of Ossabaw Island. Jack Leigh's startling photographs, the engaging paintings of Alan Campbell, and the spirited essay by James Kilgo bring to life the island's mysteries and untouched beauty."
?Donald Keyes, former curator of paintings at the Georgia Museum of Art
Book Review #2:
"Here, a triumvirate of artists catches the strange elegance of Ossabaw, one of Georgia's little-known barrier islands?its layers of history and grand wilds, its reckless stillness and stirring shadow, its mystery and manners. In a collaboration of ink, color, and film, these gifted artists show how a place can spark human genius. Think of this book as a shrine of imagination to Ossabaw. All and yet nothing is revealed. May Ossabaw ever remain so beautifully untouched."
?Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt
-
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. Jim Kilgo's chapter is entitled "Actual Field Conditions."
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
-
Title:
Deep Enough for Ivorybills
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 1995Description:
Deep Enough for Ivorybills is a powerful, thoughtful collection of autobiographical writings about James Kilgo?s hunting and fishing excursions in the woods, fields, and swamps of South Carolina and Georgia. Portraying a world both visceral and majestic, Deep Enough for Ivorybills establishes Kilgo not only in the sporting lineage of Robert Ruark and William Faulkner but also in the naturalist tradition of Annie Dillard and Loren Eisley.
Book Review #1:
"Kilgo's powerful memoir does justice to the finest literature in the southern tradition. . . . The book is the late-coming-of-age journal of a mature man who, reviving his childhood fascination with the woods, projects himself back into the wild country as he reaches into his family's past to understand its relationship to the land he hunts. . . . It should be consumed in small portions, a chapter or less at a time, and savored by the moment."
?New York Times Book Review
Book Review #2:"This is a book not just for hunters, birdwatchers, or naturalists. It's for everybody who senses, or perhaps remembers, that the woods have more to offer than a splotch of shade on a deck in the suburbs."
?Atlanta Journal-Constitution
-
Title:
Inheritance of Horses
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 1994Description:
Reconciliation and remembering are the forces at work in Inheritance of Horses. In these essays, James Kilgo seeks the common ground between his roles as a man, as husband and father, and as heir to his family legacy. Pausing at mid-life to make an eloquent, understated stand against our era's rootlessness, he honors friendship, kinship, nature, and tradition.
In the opening section, Kilgo focuses on the tension between his need for ritualistic male camaraderie and his familial obligations. Searching the woods for arrowheads, sitting around the dinner table at a hunting lodge, or careening down an abandoned logging road in a pickup, he seems ever-prone to the intrusions of domesticity and civilization: a sudden memory of miring the family station wagon in the sand on a beach trip, an encounter with a couple on their sixtieth wedding anniversary, a stream littered with trash and stocked with overbred hatchery trout.
Restlessness and responsibility converge and again clash in the second series of essays, in which domestic themes are explored in settings that range from Kilgo's own living room to Yellowstone Park and the deep waters off the Virgin Islands. Through such images as a hornet's nest, a gale-force storm, a grizzly bear, and a marlin, Kilgo gauges the strengths and vulnerabilities of his family and moves toward an existence that is part of, not apart from, the women in his life.
The long title essay composes the book's final section. Reading through a cache of letters exchanged between his two grandfathers, Kilgo recovers and revises his memories of them. What he learns of their open, passionate friendship reveals an essentially feminine aspect of their patriarchal natures, enriching, but also confusing, Kilgo's earlier understanding of who they were. As some of the more unhappy or unpleasant details of his grandfathers' lives come to light, they first heighten, then assuage, Kilgo's ambivalence about a family heritage built as much on myth as on truth.
The manner in which Kilgo makes such intensely personal concerns so broadly relevant accentuates what might be called the "told," rather than the "written," quality of Inheritance of Horses. He is foremost a storyteller, working in a style that is classically southern in its pacing and its feel for the land, but all his own in its restrained humor and lack of self-absorption. Guided by a storyteller's respect for common people and common feelings, Kilgo never prescribes or moralizes but rather brings us to places where principled choices can be made about what we need and value most in our lives.
Book Review #1:
"This is mighty fine writing. . . . These essays are made of the real stuff of life, movingly portrayed, deeply touched with humor and dignity and sadness and, above all, the joy of life. There is great eloquence here."
?Larry Brown, author of Fay
Book Review #2:
"Kilgo's Inheritance of Horses is a remarkable book. The prose has a deep and abiding grace married to a strikingly original candor, more classic than confessional, more mainstream than au courant."
?Jim Harrison