Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home

By Janisse Ray

Seventeen years after she'd left home "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, 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. Ray 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Apr 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781571318510

Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray is a naturalist and activist, and the author of seven books of nonfiction and poetry, including The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River, and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which won the American Book Award. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and journals, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Nautilus Book Award, and numerous other honors. Ray lives on an organic farm near Savannah, Georgia.