Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home

This account of rediscovering her Georgia home and its landscapes is “another must-read book” by the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Tulsa World). Seventeen years after she’d left “for good,” Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story, by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and ambitious, of the adventures of returning home. For Ray, a naturalist and an American Book Award–winning author, it is a story of linking the ecology of people with the ecology of place—of recovering lost traditions as she works to restore the fractured ecosystem of her native South. Her story is filled with syrup boils, quilt making, alligator trapping, and the wonderful characters of a place where generations still succeed each other on the land. But her town is also in need of repair, physical and otherwise. This memoir recounts Ray’s journey as she works to save her local school, sets up a writing group at the local hardware store—and struggles with whether she can be an adult in a childhood place. “Alive with good imagery and colorful characters.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “This is nature writing at its best . . . Her book will make you long for home.” —St. Petersburg Times