Rediscovering place in Southern Appalachia
As author Thomas Rain Crowe discovered during his own long journey from Western North Carolina to California to Europe (and with due respect to another Western North Carolinian, Thomas Wolfe), you can go home again. Crowe did.
In previous contributions to the eco-literature canon (he wrote the acclaimed books “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods” and “The End of Eden” and edited Katuah: The Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians), Crowe in those projects provided vividly rendered insights from his journey across the world and his return to Appalachia. He is known for compelling prose and poetry that articulate hard-won wisdom regarding how we humans might live humbly in harmony with the natural and cultural history of our given/chosen place on earth.
The burden of this latest book, “New Natives: Becoming Indigenous in a Time of Crisis & Transition,” is to try to unburden people from dispiriting feelings of rootlessness they are enduring in this fraught moment in history. “New Natives” both consolidates the wisdom present in those previous books and elaborates on that wisdom, providing deepened understanding of the need for rootless humans to implant themselves in some place and in some community promising physical, psychic and spiritual renewal.
Substack author Joe Napora (who translated “Walam Olum,” an epic New World poem of alleged Native American origin) positioned Crowe’s new book as constituting an important contribution to the body of literature springing from acute integration of environmental and social consciousness.
Wrote Napora, “Gregory Bateson warned us more than fifty years ago that ‘if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.’ Since then, much has been written about how necessary it is to bring forward the intimate relationship between language and landscape: the writings of Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder and Robin Wall Kimmerer come easily to mind. Add Thomas Rain Crowe’s poetry and essays in ‘New Natives: Becoming Indigenous in a Time of Crisis & Transition.’ He has taken to heart Gary Snyder’s words to him to do ‘the wild work.’ Do it and write it. Learn it. Love it. Live it. Crowe quotes Thoreau: ‘All good things are wild and free’ and shows what that means to him: ‘It’s not the money — it’s the wilderness that turns me on.’ … Crowe doesn’t seem interested in the Modernist demand to ‘Make it New,’ which is little more than a slogan to buy and buy more again. His writing takes us back, way back, where we need to go, like Snyder says of it, the wild work, to love work when ‘work and play are one.’”
“New Natives” emerged as a project idea at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva on April 13, 2025. During a poetry reading there for my new poetry book, “Blue Moon,” I publicly praised Crowe and photographer Simone Lipscomb (the former was a reader while the latter was in attendance at the reading) for their 2011 book “Crack Light,” and I wondered aloud if there might be a further collaboration. Not to take credit for “New Natives” other than to confess gratification that Crowe’s varied and always thought-provoking writings — emerging from his lifelong commitment to do “the wild work” and gathered from both previously published and unpublished sources — have been collected to meet the present moment when environmental protections of wild places are under siege. At one level, “New Natives” will serve in the defense of one place and its people (Appalachia), but the book will ultimately inspire people in other bioregions to engage deeply into their own place, whether native or adopted, and “Learn it. Love it. Live it.”
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In the striking cover photograph to New Natives — one of several inspiring images contributed to the book by photographer Lipscomb — a climbing trail offers a rugged but clear path to the crest of a steep hill. Metaphorically, this suggests one of the ways “New Natives” will be of considerable value to readers: this book can serve as a sort of guidebook to help weary travelers find their way through the gap in the mountains ahead to the other side where, like Daniel Boone’s settlers, they may find a place in which they will be feel whole and free, like new natives.
(Ted Olson lives in Johnson City, Tennessee, where he teaches Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University.)
