Book Your Lunch with John Lane December 3, 2011

Meet upstate South Carolina nature writer and poet John Lane, whose 11-day river journey from his home in Spartanburg to the Atlantic ocean inspired his new book, My Paddle to the Sea (University of Georgia, hardcover, $24.95, releases 11/1/11). Books will be available for puirchase at the event. If you are unable to attend the event contact us and we will reserve you a signed copy of the book.

Three months after a family vacation in Costa Rica ends in tragedy when two fellow rafters die on the flooded Rio Reventazón, John Lane sets out with friends from his own backyard in upcountry South Carolina to calm his nerves and to paddle to the sea.

Like Huck Finn, Lane sees a river journey as a portal to change, but unlike Twain’s character, Lane isn’t escaping. He’s getting intimate with the river that flows right past his home in the Spartanburg suburbs. Lane’s three­ hundred-mile float trip takes him down the Broad River and into Lake Marion before continuing down the Santee River. Along the way Lane recounts local history and spars with streamside literary presences such as Mind of the South author W. J. Cash; Henry Savage, author of the Rivers of America Series volume on the Santee; novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winner Julia Peterkin; early explorer John Lawson; and poet and outdoor writer Archibald Rutledge. Lane ponders the sites of old cotton mills; abandoned locks, canals, and bridges; ghost towns fallen into decay a century before; Indian mounds; American Revolutionary and Civil War battle sites; nuclear power plants; and boat landings. Along the way he encounters a cast of characters Twain himself would envy—perplexed fishermen, catfish clean­ers, river rats, and a trio of drug-addled drifters on a lonely boat dock a day’s paddle from the sea.

By the time Lane and his companions finally approach the ocean about forty miles north of Charleston they have to fight the tide and set a furious pace. Through it all, paddle stroke by paddle stroke, Lane is reminded why life and rivers have always been wedded together.

About the author:
Place and wilderness have always been critical themes in John Lane’s poetry, personal essays, commentary, and fiction. A long-time South Carolinian, he’s also lived on a wilderness island off the coast of Georgia, studied crocodiles in Central America, surveyed monkeys in the remote rain forests of Suriname, and traveled extensively in the wild places of the United States. He now lives with his family on a piedmont creek in one of the first sustainably designed and constructed houses in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

A kayaker and place-based educator, John’s outdoor adventure prose has appeared in Outside, American White Water, Canoe, South Carolina Wildlife, and many other periodicals. His long essays, “River Wild,” on paddling 59 miles of the Youghiogheny River, and “Confluence: Pacolet River,” appeared in the anthologies Heart of a Nation and Adventure America, both from National Geographic Books. An essay about Cumberland Island appeared in the widely distributed In Short: Short Creative Nonfiction (WW Norton & Co. 1996). His natural history memoir, A Stand of Cypress, was the runner-up in the AWP creative non-fiction contest in ’95.

In January of 1995, Mr. Lane participated in “Cross Currents: Six Writers on Environmental Ethics,” a symposium at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC. The other five featured writers were Rick Bass, Janet Lembke, James Kilgo, David Romtvedt, and Linda Hasselstrom.

John’s first collection of place-based personal essays, Weed Time, appeared from Briarpatch Press in 1993. In 1999 the University of Georgia Press published The Woods Stretched for Miles: Contemporary Southern Nature Writing, an anthology of Southern nature writing he co-edited with Wofford colleague Gerald Thurmond. His second collection of place-based essays, Waist Deep in Black Water appeared in 2002, and a book-length personal narrative, Chattooga, followed in 2004, both from The University of Georgia Press as well. Circling Home, appeared from UGA Press in Fall 2007 and his gone to a second printing. Hub City Writers Project published The Best of the Kudzu Telegraph in the fall of 2008.UGA published Circling Home in paperback in spring ’09. In the spring of 2011 Mercer University Press released Abandoned Quarry: Selected Poems and Some New Ones. My Paddle to the Sea is his most recent book.

Mr. Lane has been awarded a NEA Poetry Apprenticeship Grant (1979), a Hoyns Fellowship in Poetry from the University of Virginia (1980), a South Carolina Arts Commission Individual Arts Fellowship (1984), and, in 2001, a prose piece about a Girl Scout camp threatened by development was awarded The Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment by the Southern Environmental Law Center. In 2008, his literary papers were acquired by Texas Tech University’s James Sowell Family Collection of Literature, Community, and the Natural World.

John teaches environmental literature and creative writing at Wofford College. He’s the founder, with his wife Betsy Teter, journalist Gary Henderson, and photographer Mark Olencki, of the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, SC

Official Website: http://www.fiction-addiction.com