The Southern Nature Writers Project, Writing and Thinking About the Southern Landscape.

Critical Description of Work:

Any time spent with children illustrates that every person is born with a creative spark, a sense of wonder, and a desire to participate in the world’s plenty. Often this spark is snuffed out by the cares of the world, but for me, when I’m writing, I’m engaged and alive. I love to discover the contour of a sentence just as I might hike into a new cove of poplars, amazed by the beauty, but also curious to see what lies further on. So writing is like hiking into the mountains, into the interior wilderness of the self and the land which sustains us. But to not use this gift of words to speak out in defense of these many threatened places is ultimately a sin. So to not write — for myself and for the love of the world — is to not live, that simple.

Contact Me:

Phone: 540-831-5179 or 5614

Email: jminick@radford.edu

Website:
http://

Address:
Jim Minick
315 Ward Branch Rd.
Rural Retreat, VA 24368

Books & Essays

• All There is to Keep

  Published: Iris Press and Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative 2008
  
  Jim Minick served as the editor for this collection of poems by Rita Sizemore Riddle.

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• Finding a Clear Path

  

  Published: West Virginia University Press 2005
  
  Finding a Clear Path intertwines Appalachian literature, agriculture, and ecology as author Jim Minnick describes everything from the changing seasons to the beneficial black snakes. He takes the reader on many journeys, including a walk and a "drive". He also allows the reader to float, fly, gather, and grow. Using his background as a blueberry farmer and his own personal life experiences, Minick adds a touch home that will truly be enjoyed by those interested in the Appalachian region. Having studied ecology, Minick also introduces information that can be appreciated from a scientific point of view. Reading this collection of essays will allow you to relax into some armchair exploration of Appalachia or perhaps spark you to start some journeys of your own.

  
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  • Read Reviews
  • Book Review:
    In FINDING A CLEAR PATH, Jim Minick maps the trails, real and metaphorical, that twine through the ancient Appalachian hills and through the hearts of those who love them, gracefully uniting the land, the wildlife and its people." -Scott Weidensaul, author of Mountains of the Heart
    
    
  • Book Review:
    "In Finding a Clear Path, Jim Minick walks woods, gardens, and fields with a poet's eye; his seeing is sharp, his knowledge deep, his sentences tough and lean. And he is as practical as a farmer's almanac, too, offering not only observations and reflections, but advice on country matters of all kinds. Minick knows that on this lovely, flawed planet of ours, much is well." -Richard Hague, author of Ripenings and Milltown Natural
    
    
  • Book Review:
    Another shining writer has emerged straight ouf of the Southern landscape. Here Jim Minick has written a simple and exquisitely beautiful book consecutively about the Appalachian farm he inhabits and his engagement in a life that makes sense. In impressive vignettes, Minick sketches one man's movement through his life in Rural Retreat, Virginia, and his desire to know the depths of it. "I need to name what I love," he writes. In exhilarating language and iwth merry deftness, Minick tells of making a birdhouse for his wife, picking wineberries, counting osprey along the river, growing beans, and finding box turtles, but beyond the immediate, his subjects outline a formula for a good life: community, rootedness, history, family, the beauty of nature. Minick has discovered wholeness. This book I highly recommend. It will surprise and delight and satisfy you to the last page; like his love of life, Minick's writing never flags. The Virginia mountains are lucky to have this new voice: would that every place find such a singer of praises. -Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land