Pinhook

Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land

Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray, award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, writes an evocative paean to wildness and wilderness restoration with an extraordinary journey into southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp.

Pinhook Swamp acts as a vital watershed and wildlife corridor, a link between the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together Okefenokee, Osceola, and Pinhook form one of the largest expanse of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River. This is one of America's last truly wild places, and Pinhook takes us into its heart.

Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to protect it, spending the night in the swamp, tasting honey made from its flowers, tracking wildlife, and talking to others about their relationship with the swamp. Ray sees Pinhook through the eyes of the people who live there-naturalists, beekeepers, homesteaders, hunters, and locals at the country store. In lyrical, downhome prose, she draws together the swamp's need for restoration and the human desire for wholeness and wildness in our own lives and landscapes.

Listen to an audio clip of Janisse reading from her book.

Read Janisse Ray's essay Earth Work, that appeared in the Washington Post on Earth Day, April 22, 2005.

About the Author

Janisse Ray is a writer, naturalist, and activist. She is the author of the bestseller Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Milkweed, 2000),which won the American Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Southeastern Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction, and the Southern Environmental Law Center Award, and was chosen as “The Book Every Georgian Should Read” by the Georgia Center for the Book. She also the author of Wild Card Quilt (Milkweed, 2003). Ray is a native of Georgia and now lives in Vermont.

“Janisse Ray knows that her region’s story and her own story are inseparable; in many ways they are the same story. To tell that story as well as she tells it…is at once to show what has gone wrong and to light the way ahead.”

—Wendell Berry

“Every endangered ecosystem should have such an eloquent spokesperson.”

—Bailey White, author of Sleeping at the Starlight Motel