Showing results by author "Janisse Ray" in All Categories

You need two things to write great stories. Craft. And magic--real magic, meaning access to the mysterium. Are you called to write? Do you have stories that need to be told? Do you feel the magic in great writing and desire to harness that same power and energy? Do you re-read what you've written and wish it were more shiny? Do you worry that you should have studied writing with better teachers? If this is what you feel, then we offer you "Craft and Current," everything you need in one neat package about the size of a bank bag--affordable, accessible, activating, altering.

Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along US Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound vacationers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars and stacks of blown-out tires. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation and steeped in religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South.

In the fall of 1945, eight children, all brothers and sisters, vanished from a small rental house in Morganton, Georgia. The oldest was ten and the youngest was a newborn. They were taken by mule and wagon to a shack on a remote mountain in the Blue Ridge foothills of Fannin County, up where it hugs the North Carolina line.