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Tim Homan
At first, writing was just a tedious means to an adventurous end wrapped in the respectability of entrepreneurial enterprise. Later, I became far more interested in the everyday beauty and extraordinary diversity of the southern mountains than in making or writing about miles. The more I learned, the more I wanted to share my knowledge. After my first book, I included a nature notes...
Interview
Susan Cerulean
ROBERTA: Authors sometimes dream that a current event will dovetail with their book's launch and bring it to prominence. This is not the case for Susan Cerulean, the co-editor of Unspoiled: Writers Speak for Florida's Coast, a collection of thirty-six essays and poems contributed by writers including Connie May Fowler, Janisse Ray and many others. For Cerulean and her co-authors, the BP oil disaster on April 20 occurred just as...
News
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The Spat King
The Spat King
Former businessman Justin Manley is revolutionizing Georgia's oyster industry one waterman at a time.
By Andre Gallant (reprinted from the Atlanta Journal)
Justin Manley backed up his University of Georgia work truck to a dock that dipped off Tolomato Island into McIntosh County's Crum Creek. The engine quit with a rumble. He unlatched the tailgate and dragged six neon-green mesh sacks to its edge.
Nearby, under a canopy of slash pine and live oaks, Rafe Rivers, an organic vegetable farmer, arranged eight-foot lengths of rebar and four-foot sections of PVC pipe into piles near his dock.
Together, they had the makings for a farm in the water. Rivers contributed the trellises; Manley brought the seed: oyster seed, baby bivalves not yet large enough to eat.
Manley motioned the farmer to join him at the truck and loosed a rope that bound the sacks. He'd already sorted three sizes of oysters (small, medium, large) into compartments. The oysters had matured from microscopic mollusks Manley collected from one of Georgia's many intertidal rivers earlier in the summer. Under his care, the tiny bivalves grew to...
Who We Are
To be fully human is to be engaged with our natural surroundings. The Southern Nature Project is founded on the conviction that writing, like the kinds gathered here, can help us lead more human, profound, and courageous lives, thereby conserving our southern environment for generations yet to come.