Beneath Our Feet and Above Our Heads

By Augusta Scattergood

"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet."

— Willa Cather

I started my short speech with that quote. I was speaking to my publisher’s publicity team about my inspiration for writing my first book. The sales people in charge of the book’s future wanted to know about me, why I chose to tell this story, and set in this place. They wanted to know where it came from and was it true?

Since the topic for this season’s blogging is Nature and Writing, I’ve been thinking about the “nature” parts of my book that are true.

My middle-grade novel is set where I grew up, in the Mississippi Delta. Some of the story is not true to my experiences, but it’s all true to history. The place, however, is a part of me. 

I wanted to get it right.

When I lived in that small Delta town, my grandmother’s take on the annual spring flood was “Whoever built the drainage system here ought to be tarred and feathered.” During the spring of my junior year in high school, the front page of the local paper ran a picture of our English teacher being rescued by the Civil Defense team in a flat-bottomed boat. My friends who lived near Fireman’s Park had sandbags protecting their houses. For the grownups in our town, like my grandmother, it was a nightmare. For the kids, it was sheer joy. Thankfully, we never had to worry about being swept away because of backed-up drains or overflowing bayous. For us, spring floods meant tromping all over town in water up to our knees. Missing school or skipping church.

A great scene for a kids’ book, right? So I wrote it in, muddy water and all.

I also tried to write what it felt like in July to sleep under ceiling fans with only minimal help from window air-conditioners. How the sun baked the sidewalks. How a cooling summer storm felt to kids.

I keep reminding myself that some of my readers will never have slept under a ceiling fan or walked barefooted across a park’s dry grass. They may only know a mimosa tree’s pink blossoms from the way I choose to describe them.

I have this hanging above my desk. Both the quote and the friend who made it help remind me that my vision counts:

My friend’s talented like that. We collected the sea glass together. We often talk about getting the writing right. She wrote something on the razor clam that’s worth paying attention to.

Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.
Eudora Welty

From the description of those hot July days when my characters sit still under a big pecan tree and listen to the mockingbirds fussing, to getting the moon in the “right part of the sky” as Miss Eudora warned writers—I'm always asking myself did I write it true? After all, I didn’t spend those too-many-to-count years as a school librarian only to have my first book— historical fiction with an emphasis on historical—criticized as unreliable.

And perhaps even more importantly, did I write it so that young readers who’ll never plant a zinnia can imagine a row of them blooming along a white fence.

Putting the natural world into your writing seems simple enough. But writing it well, taking your readers’ collective breath away, making it true- now that’s a harder task.

Augusta Scattergood first middle-grade novel, Glory Be, will be published in January 2012 by Scholastic. You can follow her slow and steady progress on her blog http://ascattergood.blogspot.com.

The Nature of People

This months wonderful topic is how nature plays into our writing. I've been looking forward to this for so long, waiting for my day because nature in my fiction weighs in loud is remarkable and redemptive ways. Lightning crash, thunder roar, hurricanes abounding. From moonlit magical nights to breathless sunrise the good Earth plays itself out full of Glory.

But then I realized my most recent offering has been one of a very, different. type. The book I never meant to write. A non-fiction memoir that surrounds itself in nature of another kind - the human heart. In December of 2008 I had the strangest idea for a resolution - to say a silent prayer for a stranger I passed in life every day for the coming year. A different stranger each day.
2009 revealed a landscape and side of nature that I had never dreamed would be something that I would capture by putting pen to page. I met the lonely, the hungry, the famous, the broken, and the beautiful - all thirsty for a touch from a stranger that surprised me day after continuing day.

What I discovered was that the nature of the world is that it seems to be so dry, so thirsty for a good word, for a prayer , for a stranger's touch that time and time again my whispered resolution brought a smile, a respite, and a story.

The stories of these short but amazingly, meaningful and lasting encounters, and of how they affected my life are captured in Praying for Strangers: An Adventure of the Human Spirit which just debuted Tuesday. As such, I am currently on the road reading, speaking, and discussing how this ongoing adventure has continued to play such a major role in my life. I completed the resolution at the end of 2009. But I never stopped praying for strangers. It's two years, and four months later, and the adventure continues.


Thank you for visiting the new Praying for Strangers website, and sharing with friends. It continues to be an honor to be here at A Good Blog is Hard to Find, to have the privilege to write the stories that find us, and to be in your good company.

River Jordan is a critically acclaimed novelist and playwright. Her fourth novel, The Miracle of Mercy Land, a southern mystical work set in 1938 features a protagonist full of moxie and a ‘backbone of worthy’in this suspenseful story about love, mystery, and the choices we make. Jordan’s first non-fiction
narrative, Praying for Strangers, An Adventure of the Human Spirit arrived from Penguin/Berkley in Hardcover April 5, 2011. She speaks around the country on the “Power of Story,” and produces andhosts the radio program, Clearstory on 107.1 FM from Nashville, TN where she makes her home.

Richland Balsam Epitaph

by Pamela Duncan

High in the Blue Ridge stands a graveyard, one of many on these mountaintops, eerie aeries where the dead stand erect, monuments to themselves. Richland Balsam does not sound dead or dying. Words rich and land and balsam ring full and heavy with sap and life: verdant, aromatic, green words. But only ghosts abide here now, ghosts of greenness, straight and sharp as needles, rising from the mountain, accusing the sky. Hollow white bones deny the sun with silvery glint. Falling corpses lean together, cry and tremble above decaying brothers. Richland Balsam mourns.

Before death, light lived here, thousands of feet above sea level, a sacred cathedral, hushed and quiet and cool. Sunlight filtered gently through evergreen mesh and tended earth swollen soft and full with blessings of rain. Mosses, lichens, ferns, shrubs – so many living things thrived beneath the sheltering canopy of Red Spruce and Fraser Fir. Inviolable and pristine, it seemed. Perhaps then, as now, merely a dream: secluded haven for fragile things.

Then the killers came, invisible, insidious, launched by millions unaware of their power to ravage, in a war instigated by ignorance and waged by apathy. Now acid rains, and where nature reigns, one law exists: survival of the fittest. This holocaust appears irreversible.


A few years back, some friends and I followed the Blue Ridge Parkway from Boone to Cherokee, NC. Although I'm a native North Carolinian, it was my first real trip on the Parkway, and I wanted to see it all, every mountain, tree, leaf, and hawk. One friend, a botanist, raved about the incredible beauty of a particular trail on top of a mountain called Richland Balsam (short for Richland Mountain of the Balsams). At 6,410 feet, it's the highest peak in the Great Balsam Range separating Haywood and Jackson Counties.

"You won't believe how lovely it is," my friend told me. "It's so green and perfect and pure, shadowy and cool. It's like stepping into a fairyland, a magical place."



At milepost 431.4, however, the fairyland is gone. The 1.5 mile nature trail still loops around the top of the mountain, and it is still a beautiful place, but now it winds through weeds and the rotting remains of Red Spruce (Picea rubens Sargent) and Fraser Fir (Abies fraseri [Pursh] Poiret). Defenders of Wildlife lists this type of forest as the second most endangered ecosystem in the United States. My friend told me that, although there is no concrete proof, scientists believe acid rain is responsible. It weakens the trees' resistance to the aphids which literally suck the life from them.

"But there must be some way to reverse this, to save these trees, this habitat," I said.

"No, there's really nothing anyone can do. All of these trees are dying now, and that means the fragile plant, animal, and microbial life that can only exist in their shelter will die too."

Later, excited by a mini-nursery of spruce seedlings apparently flourishing beneath a huge tree, I asked, "But won't these grow and replace the dead trees?"

"That tree is dying and, without its protection, the seedlings will die too. This forest may never grow back, and even if it does, it probably won't be in our lifetime."

In the silence that followed, the wind pushed pale dead trunks against one another and, as they moaned, I felt a raging inside myself at the needless loss of this small forest, or any part of the environment that humankind has damaged or killed.


I cannot accept feeling helpless. The only way to cope with my anger and sorrow is to do something. Whether or not Richland Balsam is lost, I must do something. I'm not a scientist, a leader, a crusader, or a reformer. The steps I take are small, but important to my peace of mind. Everyone can recycle, conserve, and protect, and there are numerous resources available to tell you how to do these things.

The point is to DO them. Every day. For the rest of your life. I've been as guilty as anyone of forgetfulness, laziness, or blatant indifference, but Richland Balsam changed my attitude. I saw one real result of apathy, and realized my responsibility. It's like voting. You may think, "What good can one individual do?" But the combination of every individual effort amounts to an incredibly powerful force that may just keep what's left of this planet, our habitat, alive.

Writer Robert McKee says, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” I believe that has always been the case and always will be. So, as a writer, there’s something else I can do. I can tell the stories of places like this in our Appalachian mountains, places that are dying or disappearing at a terrifying rate. I can tell the stories of the people who live there, too. I can put the idea into the world that they are part of our history and our future, and that they are worth protecting.


(Novelist Pamela Duncan is the author of Moon Women, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award Finalist, and Plant Life, which won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. She is the recipient of the 2007 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third novel, The Big Beautiful, was published in March 2007. Visit her website at http://www.pameladuncan.com/.)