Margaret Renkl writes about Southern Culture and the Natural World

Bloodroot photographed at Audubon Acres, Chattanooga.

“Far more urban, far more ethnically and culturally, and politically diverse, the South is no longer a place defined by sweet tea and slamming screen doors, and its literature is changing, too. ‘It is damn hard to put a pipe-smoking granny or a pet possum into a novel these days and get away with it,’ the novelist Lee Smith once said.”

Those words come from a New York Times essay by Nashville author Margaret Renkl. That essay also appeared in her book Graceland at Last, a collection of New York Times pieces that address Southern culture and backyard nature.

Renkl began as a nature writer, and pieces about nature and the environment comprise two of the six sections in Graceland at Last.  She split the two sections, with the “Flora and Fauna” section being a “love letter to the natural world” and “Environment” as a section dedicated to environmental threats and actions.

In the title essay, “Graceland at Last,” in the final section titled “Arts and Culture,” she describes a long-delayed trip to a famed mansion. Other portions are devoted to “Family and Community” and “Social Justice.” The “Politics and Religion” section seems a natural pairing these days.

In a recent PBS interview, she discusses this book and her writing career. She speaks of nature, the environment, politics, and the stereotypes of the American South. She describes Nashville as a “Blue dot in a red state.”

Renkl’s earlier book, Late Migrations, solidified her career as a nature writer. She combined nature writing and family history to give readers a dynamic read. She described how the family left her childhood home in lower Alabama when she was seven. That family migration was necessary when her dad began working in Birmingham.

My favorite essay from this book was “The Wolf I Love.” In it, she describes visiting her extended family in rural Alabama, where she shared a room with her great-grandmother. She awakened, terrified of a snarling wolf outside the house, only to learn that the snarls were her great-grandmother’s snores.

She states that she missed the natural world in rural Alabama after the move to Birmingham but was too young to understand the social upheaval of those days. After college, graduate school, marriage, and a move to Nashville, she brought nature home to her suburban residence. Like many nature writers, Renkl is a gardener. In this YouTube video, she gives readers a tour of her garden.