Customer Reviews

Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (The World As Home)

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Janisse Ray is passionate about the environment, most specifically that part of it in southeast Georgia. Her environment is mostly the natural world--the longleaf pine forest (the remnants thereof), the Altamaha River--but also the human world in the small town of Baxley, her family farmstead, her father's junkyard. She left these surroundings to go to college, first in north Georgia and then in Montana. She "took a chance on home" (the book's subtitle) when she returned to Baxley with her young son, determined to make a life for them both. She demonstrates that ability to observe, think, and then put into words those observations and thoughts is a far greater treasure than glitz and glamour.

What a beautiful testament to the importance of community and place. Wendell Berry must have cheered when he read this book. From the story of working together to save the local school, to the inspiring beginning and growth of the Altamaha Riverkeepers, to the successful Nature Conservancy purchase of the Moody Forest Janisse Ray describes the power of ordinary people working together to save their community and it's gifts of nature.

In a description of a community that has been torn apart but still has people fighting for it, Berry writes, "Madie now lives not far down the road from the ghost town of Osierfield in the renovated schoolhouse. Milton is in the old depot. A marble column that held up the post office is part of another house nearby. It is as if the residents of the disappearing town are hanging onto pieces of it, because that's what you have left when a community falls apart, pieces, and between all the pieces, you have the ghosts who knew the place when it was less rudimentary and more whole, who are eternally present, inhabiting the town's hollows like wind and weeds. Each morning early Madie drives her old truck to the lone business left operating in Osierfield, Georgia, and opens her doors one more day."

May we all learn to treasure our small towns and communities.

I read the book straight through after getting it. But did not read it in the same order of the chapters. It is written like a quilt allowing you to read what you want, randomly as you would look at a quilt's intricate details. Yet no matter how read, you end up with a larger perspective and pattern that gives you much greater meaning and understanding.

It is nice for Janisse to allow the reader the freedom of finding ones own perspective and interests when reading the book. It also makes sharing the experience of the book with friend and family easier.

My friend read the chapter of the writing group, right after coming from her own writing group. In a stone faced way she put the book down after reading the chapter, and burst out laughing. There was a part I read about Janisse's father and her in a big fight that made me cry at a moment in the interchange.

It would make good reading for someone contemplating going home to a rural community, or for someone who never dreamed of doing so. It is a poetic story of family and home and geography.

Janisse weaves very different personal yet universal experiences with family and friends, rural community, and natural and cultural landscapes into a geographic quilt, giving an emergent property of perspective, that is difficult to see without being layed out in full view like a picture - and with the benefit of context in time and space and emotion.

There are many reasons that a person goes back to their origins.

Janisse goes back much like a wild animal that has been expatriated from a geographic area. She comes back to rediscover the origins if birth, and fill to fill gaps left in her imagination and community.

What is nice is that she finds a niche with intelligence, and sensitivity to community and region. I can imagine native species like panther and wolves having a more difficult time rediscovering their original landscapes, even though they might play an equal or more important role. Reintroducing fire to the pineland landscpae is also difficult, but necessary.

Janisse comes back as quite as she can, and slowly finds a role. Not a dominant role but one which fills a gap. She is more like the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker than a panther or wolve or fire, being sensitive and fragile; and having an infinity for home and old growth and wild romote places. At the same time providing intelligence and energy that those in the rural communities and cities can benefit from.

Rural communities in the south need natives, especially those that can fill important roles. Too many rural areas export not only there natural resources, but also their most valuable human resources. They become vulnerable to exotics who completely transform and exploit the community without consideration of the integrity of local community or ecology and its needs. They come without understanding place. Much of what remains is remanents of a highly exploited cultural and ecological resources.

What is nice is that, like the coming home of an Ivory Billed Woodpecker Janisse helps facilitate the rediscovery of interest in rural community assets like schools and remenants of wild places, like pines and rivers that are critical assets of the geography.

Janisse uses her skills with those of the locals to reclaim geography and recreate the imgination of place. She comes not like a conquering hero, but like wild card pattern in quilt that catches your eye, without dominating your thought. She makes you think about important things. She offers an alternative future senaarios for geography that preserves and rediscover inherient values, while helping to create new values. This is in harsh contrast to to those that exploit rural landscapes without the imagination of cultural and ecological values that have existed, but have been largely surpressed.

Wild card quilt

"You can't go home again" (Thomas Wolfe) - or can you?. Maybe not to the actual house that you grew up in, not move back in with your parents, but go back to the greater home of community and small town and nearby family. In her memoir, Wild Card Quilt - Taking a Chance on Home, Janisse Ray goes home to rural Georgia at the age of 35. She moved into her grandmother's farm house, empty these 5 years since her death,

"after Grandmama died... I sat in her swept yard, listening to stories while neighbors brought chicken and dumplings, pans of rolls, pound cakes..."

Janisse gives us a delightful collection of stories - of life in the small town of Baxley, Georgia, of life on the farm, stories of family and community, of her passion for saving the forests where she grew up. The chapter titles themselves give great insight into the story - Calico Scraps, Log Trucks at the Crossroads, The Bread Man Still Stops in Osierfield.

I was first drawn to the book by the quilt references. Janisse and her mother together make a quilt, the ritual of going through the calico scraps and finding the perfect matches to tell her quilt story, of layering the quilt and batting and back - "it was like making a pie - crust, filling, crust" - of trying to set up the quilt frame (and hearing her ghostly Grandmama laughing every time it fell):

"a ghost is like a quilt in that both are made of stories, both are made to wear out, both represent a life spent, and those parts left behind"

But more often is mentioned the importance of the stories that bind together the neighbors and family, stories to collect and tell and pass down through the generations. She tells of preserving the old ways, of saving seeds from the garden for next year, alligator trapping, making quilts, and having a cane-syrup boiling:

"In south Georgia our sweetener is cane syrup, boiled from the pressed juice of sugarcane... we sop it up with hot biscuits and pour it over griddle cakes and wet our cornbread with it."

I love these stories of rural Georgia, I can identify with so many of them, well except for maybe this one about catching a gator that made me laugh out loud:

"This is more fun than eating boiled peanuts naked on the courthouse lawn."

Her beautiful descriptions take me back to my childhood, reminding me once again what a beautiful place we live, uncrowded, acres of forest all around, reminded me of the importance of community and family and history and of course the stories. We must preserve the stories.

"Perhaps stories keep us as a people in place glued together. As the stories vanish or are lost - as people depart homeplaces, as the landscapes are destroyed - no new stories form to replace them. Without the stories that fasten us each to each, the web that is community commences to unravel, its threads flapping in the wind, finally tearing loose completely and wafting away."

Beautifully written book that appeals to a wide range of people--so it would be a great gift for Father's Day or for anyone's birthday. I laughed out loud many times.

Had I realized the anti-Christian sentiments and strong socialistic view points of this author I would not have purchased the book. It is good to hear what other opinions are, however, I do not like to purchase - there by promote - ideas I strongly disagree with.

If you are really interested in learning more about rural Southern Georgia, this book might be for you. The author tells individual stories about experiences with the school board, animals, family, and other things that are important to her. I enjoyed the first part of the book best because I could relate to the author's wonderings about what home really means. I think the author's views on community and nature are interesting, but not for everyone. More towards the end, the author complains about all the logging going on, but she doesn't give any advice for what average people can do about it. The author meant well I'm sure, but it was not the kind of book that I had trouble putting down.