“This is about Solace and Opportunity”: A conversation with Georgann Eubanks https://ift.tt/MYk2hwa
Georgann Eubanks is a living Lorax. She not only speaks for the trees, but for all the wild flora, fauna, and dazzling wonders of the natural world that she compels us to respect and preserve through her sensory-rich verse and prose. After leading the Duke Writing Workshop for twenty years, Eubanks started Table Rock Writers Workshop in the mountains of North Carolina.
We met on Zoom on a Tuesday evening: me, shivering in a corner of my bedroom – we’re still in winter in Michigan – she from her office in Carrboro, North Carolina, where spring is taking a stand. On our agenda were her two new books: Rural Astronomy, a poetry collection that reflects a lifetime of work – many pieces focusing on her Southern upbringing and her rootedness in the natural world, and The Fabulous Ordinary, a collection of adventures to the Southern Wilds in which Georgann witnesses creatures in their native habitats, some only recently brought back from the brink.
I could have talked to Georgann Eubanks all night. She is a consummate storyteller.
Wow. I am so excited to have this opportunity. And thank you for sending me both Rural Astronomy and The Fabulous Ordinary. They are, of course, different books from Saving the Wild South, which I’ve previously reviewed [for SRB], but it felt so delightful to step right back in there with you. It’s such a special and unique experience to read your work, Georgann.
Thank you.
That’s wonderful. So, are you living in the mountains now? Did I see that?
I have a cabin three miles from the retreat center where we hold the Table Rock Writers Workshop. It’s a very precious place to me. I bought it in 1990, the same year I became the director of the Duke Writers Workshop. And we got really walloped last fall by the hurricane.
It wasn’t a disaster like so many people experienced, but we lost a lot of trees, and the whole landscape has changed. It’s been a very painful reckoning with what’s happened there.
I’m sure the landscape is as precious, if not more, than the structure itself. I can tell from your writing that you are drawn to the natural world.
Oh, it’s been a huge inspiration. There’s something very powerful and painful about having this book come out. Everything is not the same. I’m sure I’ll write about it. But I’m not there yet.
It is so painful to interrogate those things when you’re grieving them.
I think that speaks to Rural Astronomy, you know, some of those poems are 40 years old. I’ve been writing these poems and putting them in the drawer. I have made my living as a writer, writing consultant, and teacher. And so the poems are not revenue-generating. And they’re very time-intensive. So after a certain point, I quit sending them out. And I just kept putting them in the drawer.
After reading your poetry, I feel that I have a sense of your childhood. Many of the poems feel like memoir. How much of the stories of Bomer, Ruby, and Stella are also the stories of Georgann?
So Bomer and Stella, my grandparents, lived three miles down the road from me in a house they had built before my parents built the house I occupied as a very small child.
My mother worked, so my grandmother would take me after school. But even before I started school, I spent time with Bomer and Stella.
Bomer died when I was six. But I have all that material about him. I mean, he made a world for me. I hold on to all that. So it was a joy to create those pieces about him. Stella was in my life for 30 more years after he died, and she was a quieter, but no less persuasive presence in my life. She was really the anchor as my parents’ marriage fell apart. I had an aunt and uncle who lived next door to her, who were also major anchors for me as a child. I was the youngest grandchild in my family, in my father’s family. So there were three boys, all within a few years of each other. And then I was 11.5 years later. They were delighted to have a girl.
You didn’t spell it out, but I did get the feeling in many of the poems that the child is the only child in this adult world. I’m wondering how many of the memoirs, the young childhood memoir poems, were down at the bottom of the drawer of verses?
They were pretty much in the drawer. The way this collection came about was when I finished The Fabulous Ordinary and turned it in, I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to pull this stuff out.’ I’d had a lot of encouragement from Darnell Arnoult, who’s a good friend and a member of the faculty at the Table Rock Workshop. So I pulled them out and I threw them all together. Having never put a collection together before, I really felt at a loss about how to order or shape the manuscript. And so Darnell took a look at it, and she said, I think you have a book. And I think these are some of the ways you could play with the affinities of these poems. Then, I was invited to submit it to Eastover Press. And Denton Loving – I’ve learned so much from him about how poems can connect and seeing things in the work that I didn’t see.
Yes. When somebody else points out the connections you made.
And so my tendency would have been to clump together all those grandparent poems. But his sensibility was to piece them together as a spine to the collection and have them resonate with more contemporary poems as we went along. I’m just totally in awe and gratitude to Denton for seeing how this collection made sense. I can’t take any credit for it except the sort of unconscious creation of these pieces that did, in fact, fit together, but I couldn’t quite figure that out. I was way too close to them, even though some of them are 60-year-old stories.
When I consider The Fabulous Ordinary as well as Saving the Wild South, I find myself appreciating how much of your prose has a poetic sensibility.
I was reading the “River Otter” chapter today and was hooked on the first line. You describe the river water: “clear as a fine goblet.” This is the kind of writing that exemplifies what we mean when we say creative nonfiction. And just the name of that river, the Ichetucknee River, is amazing.
Well, you know, Rachel, I used to think I wanted to write fiction. Then I met Donna Campbell, my life partner and a longtime filmmaker for public television, about 27 years ago, and had the experience of joining her to do video interviews, document stories, and invite people to tell me their stories. Donna has a brilliant way of putting the stories together and going for the heart. I’ve learned so much from her. And so the approach to these books, these nature books, is very much a documentary approach.
We called our company Minnow Media because we consider ourselves the bait. We go fishing – we don’t know what we are going to learn. And so part of the process of creating a documentary is being open to the story and talking to all the people you can to get the pieces of the story, and then the images that support the story.
In doing the books, which are infinitely easier and cheaper than doing a film, we are also going fishing. We’ll see what we get. We hope it will be good. It may not be every time, but there are always these surprises along the way. Little anecdotes, little moments, little scenes. Something somebody says that is just priceless. And you feel like you’ve gathered this gem. And then you want to do honor to that gem.
Another question – this is both for Saving the Wild South and The Fabulous Ordinary – you do so much research. One thing that got me thinking as a writer is how you organize your thoughts. Your work is very interdisciplinary. And so I’m wondering about your process.
You have so many different threads. And part of that is having lived in this region my whole life and having been to some of these places when I was much younger, with that sort of child’s eye of paying attention and wanting to revisit them and to see them both old and new, see what’s changed. When I go to some place I’ve been before, I’m already arriving with stories.
And so I tell myself: you don’t have to tell everything, but there’s room to tuck this in, tuck this in, and tuck this in, which is kind of what I do as I make notes.
As it has gone, the book I’m working on suggests the next book somehow. And so I’m able to keep pulling threads.
I can absolutely see how Saving the Wild South suggested The Fabulous Ordinary. This was absolutely the next logical step to make.
Yes. And including animals, you know, Saving the Wild South was all about plants. And of course, it wasn’t really about the plants because I couldn’t interview them, but I could interview the people who championed them. Actually, when we were driving back from visiting the Miccosukee Gooseberry, we got a word from somebody, “don’t miss the trout lilies in Thomasville, Georgia.”
So we went to see the trout lilies, and we were just blown away by the view of these 30 acres of yellow flowers blooming for a few days. And I thought, wow, I wonder how many other things we could find like this. And of course, there were lots of other things to find like that, and stories to tell. And that’s a kind of public policy story where these citizens saved this piece of land to create an identity for the region and to celebrate their natural resources and assets.
That’s amazing. How do you then find the right people to talk to?
Pure luck. I mean, really pure luck. But in this field of work of conserving, protecting, and taking care of nature, the people are great, and they want to share their stories. I mean, it’s not investigative journalism, right?
Right. It’s not an exposé. They’re probably delighted to have the flora and fauna that they care so much about highlighted in a book.
We hope so. And, you know, as it’s turned out, at this moment in time, launching a book like this–I’ve told myself this is about solace and opportunity. There are a couple of stories, including the alligators and the otters, who were brought to the brink and then saved. And they still have a commercial value to some people, but they are prospering in a way that they were not. These are pretty good stories to tell. There are sad threats, but there are also good stories to tell.
And I think we all need those stories of hope, opportunity, and solace to just go see these places. And that’s what I hope–parents and grandparents will take their kids to see some of these places and phenomena that are so dazzling.
Thank you, Georgann Eubanks. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. Your work is really impactful. And I hope everybody reads it.
NONFICTION The Fabulous Ordinary
By Georgann Eubanks
University of North Carolina Press
April 1, 2025
POETRY Rural Astronomy
By Georgann Eubanks
Eastover Press
June 3, 2025
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