Being at home in your ‘place’
“Tell me where you’re from and I’ll tell you who you are.”
— Wallace Stegner
I have just finished reading a book that was like taking a class by an enlightened professor. In this case the “professor” is award-winning author Janisse Ray and her book is titled “Journey In Place: A Field Guide to Belonging” (Amazon, 2025, 231pgs).
The book is like no other I have ever read in that it is organized in chapters and subheadings like a college course on the environment, community, literature and writing, with a little bit of Ray’s memoir thrown in to ground and personalize her messages and assigned activities. It is arranged in a way that has mirrored short sub-chapter sections in each chapter but with new and different comments, questions and projected results using the monikers of “Tiny Essay,” “Feet on the Ground,” “Writing Prompt” and “Further Study” in that order in each chapter; and with chapter headings such as “Claim Your Place,” “Boundaries and Bioregions,” “How We Bond With Place,” “Sense of Place,” “Placelings — Not Earthlings,” “Climate,” “Place Names,” “Be a Steward of the Land,” “Place Language,” “Scent of Place,” etc.
You get the picture. In this sense, the book is a formalized outline or what she calls “explorations” of environmental activism — a carry-it-with-you assignment over the course of a potential year-long weekly timeline that will only be graded by your own perception, and personal revelations either brought to mind or written as part of the suggested writing topics at the end of each chapter.
Ray is someone who knows her place, having spent more time there than anywhere else — in this case in southeastern Georgia, where she has written several books on the subject of this part of the American landscape in relation to appreciation and preservation and is an original member of the Southern Nature Writers Group based in Athens, Georgia, that also includes Franklin Burroughs, Jim Kilgo, John Lane, Jan DeBlieu and Wendell Berry. What makes this particular book so inviting and promising is Ray’s personalized prose that is like a physical conversation, yet structured to make it formal enough to be coherently organized and to work while keeping you engaged and wanting more. From a literary and/or academic perspective, just taking in the quotes she offers by such well-known writer-teachers as henry David Thoreau, Rachael Carson, Charles Frazier, N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Gary Snyder, Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Muir and others is practically a contemplative course in itself, a kind of eco-sophical meditation.
So, generalities aside, let’s dive deeper into “Journey In Place.” In the chapter “Boundaries and Bioregions,” she sets the tone for the rest of the book, where she writes: “The boundaries of a place are often fluid, inexact, fuzzy, ever-changing. They change because the past informs the present, the present informs the future, and in the end, everything affects everything else.” She then quotes the poet Rumi, who says “Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.” Then, in the chapter “How We Bond With Place,” she writes: “I believe that part of being fully human and fully alive is to bond with our places, to develop a conscience so strong that we do our level best to prevent violence to Mother Earth. Disconnection from place is a soul wound.”
Related Items
‘I wanna know what love is…’
City Lights presents ‘The Accident Report’
Close the screens, leave home, enjoy an adventure
Disappointing reads, or ‘Lit in the Pits’
In the chapter on “Displacement,” about how our capitalistic society has removed us from our native places, she asks the reader to respond to the following questions: “*Who were the indigenous people in your home ground? *What do you know of their culture? *What artifactual evidence of them remains? *Are their descendants still present in the area? *Who else settled in your place? When? Where did they come from?”
Ray’s “Writing Prompts” for this chapter are twofold: 1) I can never go home again, and 2) Other people called this home. In the chapter, “Sense of Place” and the section, “Feet on the Ground,” Ray states: “I have a strong belief that where and how we place our attention is game-changing. Attention is healing. When you place your attention on the exact spot where you feel a longing for connection to land, you can heal.” I know what she is saying, here, is valid, as I have had this exact experience when returning, here, to my boyhood home in the Southern Appalachians after living in Pennsylvania, Indiana, California and France as a young adult.
Eventually, Janisse Ray delves deeper and deeper into the idea of “community” and in the text gives more and more attention to nature and natural history. In the chapter, “Scenery,” and her section on “Writing Prompts,” she asks some pertinent questions of her participating reader/student: “What do you love about the scenery in your place? What attracts you to it? Write about that place.” This exercise is kind of a response to Edward Abbey’s quote at the beginning of the chapter: “There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.” Finally, here, from the chapter on “Placelings, Not Earthlings,” Ray posits something of a final conclusion: “We are earth-dependent every minute of every hour of every day. I say we can’t survive without nature, but really we can’t survive without place.”
(Thomas Rain Crowe is aauthor of more than thirty books, including the award-winning nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods,” and is a longtime resident of Jackson County.)
