July 26, 2021
New York Times columnist Renkl (Late Migrations) effectively lifts the lid on Southern culture and challenges its stereotypes in this versatile compendium. Renkl’s essays cover the natural world, local politics, Southern-fried art and culture, and social justice issues from a Nashvillian perspective. Her nature writing shows an impressive predilection for botany and ornithology—in “The Eagles of Reelfoot Lake,” she describes Tennessee’s once-endangered bald eagles and their now-precarious relationship with their local ecosystem, and “Make America Graze Again” describes a local man who takes his itinerant flock of sheep around the city to “manage invasive vegetation.” Her most affecting and passionate writing, however, is on the volatile political climate of her hometown and being a “red-state liberal”—“There Is a Middle Ground on Guns” covers growing up “in a culture where guns are ubiquitous,” and “We’re All Addicts Here” movingly recounts how the opioid epidemic has ravaged her state and casts responses from politicians as “too little too late.” The only drawback to Renkl’s collection is that many of these essays feel like they deserve more long-form elaboration—to break them out of the confines of her column space. Still, this serves as a well-written collection for anyone interested in everyday life below the Mason-Dixon Line.
July 15, 2021
A Southerner examines a complicated region. Since August 2015, Renkl has contributed essays about the South to the New York Times, reflecting on nature and the environment, politics and religion, social justice, family and community, and arts and culture. From her home in Nashville--"a blue dot in the red sea of Tennessee"--she writes perceptively of the region where she was born and raised (in Alabama), educated (in South Carolina), and settled. "All I can do," she writes, "is try to make it clear that there is far more to this intricate region than many people understand." Of the nearly 60 essays she has gathered in what she calls a "patchwork quilt" collection, some are journalistic, some polemical, and some frankly personal: her son's marriage during the pandemic, for one, and a long-deferred visit to Graceland. In many, Renkl vividly evokes the lush natural beauty of the rivers, old-growth forests, "red-dirt pineywoods," marshes, and coastal plains that she deeply loves. As she shows, that land is in peril. The Tennessee River is polluted with microplastics; habitat destruction threatens monarch butterflies; climate change alters the trajectory of migratory birds. Renkl reports on efforts to address these and other problems that beset the region, including opioid addiction, gun violence, and racism. In Tennessee, she writes, tactics to suppress votes include confiscating driver's licenses, impeding mail-in ballots, and "disqualifying voter registration applications for specious reasons." Later, she notes that "Election Law Journal ranked Tennessee forty-eighth in ease of voting" (ahead of Virginia and Mississippi). Nevertheless, Renkl finds hope for change. "I know that Southern hospitality is a real thing, and that it isn't race contingent," she writes. "I know how very many people here are fighting to make life safer and more equitable for everyone, even for those who keep voting to make life less safe and less fair for everyone else." A wide-ranging look at the realities of the South.
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August 1, 2021
This collection from Renkl (Late Migrations, 2019) was borne from grief after her mother and her mother-in-law died. As Renkl tried to wrest meaning amid loss, she began to write these essays, first published in the New York Times. This book explores her love of tradition, her interest in politics and the environment, and her legacy as a daughter of the South who both cherishes the way it welcomes strangers and mourns the way it treated enslaved people. Readers can easily home in on one of the book's wide-ranging six sections, sample an essay or two from each, or barrel through from start to finish, as whim dictates. Renkl's voice is calm, steady, and sometimes surprising. She wears five wedding rings; she drives to Georgia to hear Jimmy Carter teach Sunday school; she celebrates a host of new voices in southern writing and sees in their work the light of justice and hope for the South. And finally, after more than two decades of aborted attempts with balky children, she gets to tour Graceland.
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