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between the living birds and a fried drumstick or two ecstatic bites of deviled egg.” Luce also demonstrates that the children’s desire to kill chickens “for entertainment” is both “mean” and unsustainable (25). Frazier calls Luce’s interest in local sustainability “vegetable lore,” which for her is informed by Native American agricultural practices: “Luce explained that she planted like Cherokee people did. One corn kernel and two beans to a hill. The cornstalk makes the
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trellis for the bean vines to grow up, and some magic love between corn and beans keeps them from stripping the good out of the soil.” Luce further explains to the children that a garden requires a steward; otherwise, “you end up with green life running wild” (27). Luce’s suggestion here is that people must be mentally disciplined in order to control their destructive impulses; thus, stewardship of interior human nature is analogous to and indeed can be learned from stewardship of outer nature.
In Cold Mountain and Nightwoods, the audiences present in the narratives – Ada and Ruby for one another, and Dolores and Frank for Luce – parallel the readers of these novels, and Frazier uses this platform to articulate an approach to the natural world that incorporates both empirical experience and intellect. The academic endeavor of reading or studying about an encounter with the natural world may prove cold and overly cerebral without engaging with the natural world firsthand. Likewise,
John Lawson (1674–1711), Nature Writer, inducted into the North carolina literary hall of fame excerpted and adapted from presentation remarks by Phillip Manning Weymouth Center, Southern Pines, NC, 14 October 2012 Lawson. One writer that Lefler didn’t mention is Mark Catesby, who was open about his plagiarism of Lawson; in fact, he freely confessed it in his book Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (published between 1731– 1743). But, as it turned out, he didn’t plagiarize enough of it – which is one reason why Lawson’s book is still in print and Catesby’s is not. But having a long shelf life and being widely plagiarized do not, by themselves, make a first-rate book. To find out if Lawson’s book meets the standards of good nature writing, I consulted The Sierra Club Nature Writing Handbook by John A. Murray.2 Murray parses nature writing into discrete elements and gives examples of what he considers to be good writing. I chose three of those elements – the opening, the closing, and the writer’s style – to help judge the merit of Lawson’s writing. Lawson begins the story of his expedition with “On December the 28th, 1700, I began my voyage (for
1
Hugh Talmage Lefler, Introduction, A New Voyage to Carolina, by John Lawson (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1967) lii; subsequent Lawson quotations are cited parenthetically from this edition.
courtesy of digital collections, J.Y. Joyner Library, ECU
from the collection of w. keats and elizabeth sparrow
I consider John Lawson to be one of our country’s great nature writers, in the same league with William Bartram and Henry David Thoreau. An important indication of his talent is that three hundred years after he took his journey through the Carolina back country, his 1709 book, A New Voyage to Carolina, is still in print. Of course, one reason Lawson’s book is still around is because he was the first European to write about the Carolina hinterlands. But Lawson was more than just a first; he was a fine writer. One indication of his literary skills is how often his work has been copied. If the most sincere form of flattery is plagiarism, then Lawson should be quite flattered. “Many writers have copied Lawson without giving the proper credit -- or any credit at all,” writes Hugh Lefler in his introduction to the UNC Press edition of Lawson’s book.1 The real author of William Byrd’s Natural History of Virginia was, according to Lefler, not William Byrd but John 2
John A. Murray, The Sierra Club Nature Writing Handbook: A Creative Guide (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995).