Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

by Margaret Renkl

Overview

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Winner of the 2022 Southern Book Prize
An Indie Next Selection for September 2021
A Book Marks Best Reviewed Essay Collection of 2021
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021
A Country Living Best Book of Fall 2021
A Garden & Gun Recommended Read for Fall 2021
A Book Marks Best Reviewed Book of September 2021

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.

In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.

From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571311856
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	160,605
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Margaret Renkl is the author of Graceland, At Last and Late Migrations, which was a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show book club selection. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. Her work has also appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Proximity, and River Teeth, among others. She was the founding editor of Chapter 16, the daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and is a graduate of Auburn Universityand the Universityof South Carolina. She lives in Nashville.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

 

These essays—and the op-ed column from which they have been drawn—began in grief. I was still mourning my mother’s sudden death when my mother-in-law, who had faced Parkinson’s disease with grace and courage for eighteen years, finally entered hospice care. Grief and dying governed my days, and there were times when I wondered if I would survive.

Two months before my beloved mother-in-law took her last breath, I ran into Clay Risen, a fellow writer and old friend, at a work event. He asked about my family, and I told him how brutal it is to watch someone suffer so terribly. He looked at me for a moment. “Would you ever want to write about that?” he said. I thought he meant that writing about these terrible times would make them easier: writing invariably helps me understand the world, and myself, a little bit better. In writing about something unbearable, I almost always find a way to bear it.

Clay is the acclaimed author of six books, but at that time he was also deputy editor of the op-ed section of The New York Times. His question, it turns out, wasn’t about the psychological benefits of writing. The Times was planning a new series about end-of-life issues, and he thought I might want to submit an essay to the series editor for possible publication. Against my own misgivings—how could I possibly have time to write something, in the midst of so much turmoil, that might never see the light of day?—I decided to try. That essay, published in August 2015, became the first piece I ever wrote for the paper, and in time it also led me to write my first book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.

After my mother-in-law died, my caregiving duties lightened, but my grief deepened. Again and again I found myself turning to nature for solace. A few months after that first essay ran, I submitted another piece, this one about a backyard territorial dispute between bluebirds and a house wren. The Times bought it, too.

And that’s how it started: every few months I would send in a new essay—something about the natural world here in Nashville, about growing up in Alabama, or about how it feels to be a red-state liberal during an election year—and The Times would buy it. In March 2017, the editors offered me a monthly column about “the flora, fauna, politics and culture of the American South.” Nine months later, the column started running weekly.

This opportunity has been a genuine gift. It’s a dream job for any essayist, but for me it has also been a great responsibility. No other region of the country carries so much cultural baggage, from Gone with the Wind to Deliverance to Nashville, and decades of stereotype-driven media have filled this country with people who think they understand what the South is all about, even if they have never so much as visited. But every Monday The Times lets me “tell about the South,” to borrow from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and I am inexpressibly grateful for the chance to confront and complicate the stereotypes about my homeland, in as many contexts as I can.

 

[sb]

 

In the years I’ve been writing for The Times, people have often asked me how it feels to be the “voice of the South.” That’s not a surprising question given the focus of my column. But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either, because in truth there’s no such thing as “the South.” The persistent and pervasive notion of this place as a homogenous region, a conservative voting bloc, is as much a product of the American media’s imagination as any episode of The Dukes of Hazzard.

The legacy of slavery, like the expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands, may well haunt this region for the rest of time, so I understand why people still conflate the American South with the states that seceded to maintain their enslavement of other human beings. That original sin, which didn’t end in the defeat of the Confederacy but continued through decades of Jim Crow laws, persists today in myriad forms, both overt and subtle.

The South is still a place where voters elect leaders determined to suppress the voting rights of Black citizens, the reproductive rights of women, the housing and employment and family rights of their LGBTQ neighbors, and the citizenship opportunities of the immigrants who do the work—in cities and on farms, in factories and slaughterhouses—that drive Southern economies. Such “leaders” are also working assiduously to privatize public education, destroy unions, undercut climate science, weaken the public health safety net, and execute death row prisoners. All at a breathtaking rate.

But the South has always been more than its most appalling truths. Even during the Civil War—what old-timers still called “the War of Northern Aggression” when I was a child—the South wasn’t a monolithic entity. Kentucky, a slave state, officially adopted a position of neutrality during the war. Arkansas joined the Confederacy, but pro-Union residents in Searcy County formed a resistance organization known as “the Arkansas Peace Society.” The citizens of Scott County famously seceded from Tennessee rather than from the Union, declaring themselves the “Free and Independent State of Scott.” I could keep going, but you get the point.

It’s true that the South has some inexcusable and undeniable faults, but it’s not true that those faults are universal. Nor, it’s worth pointing out, are they unique to this region. The political realities of the Southern states hold sway in much of the Midwest, the Plains states, the Southwest, and Alaska, too. And racism, the fault most widely associated with white Southerners, recognizes no regional or international boundary. Just consider how widespread the recent, egregious examples of police brutality against unarmed Black people have been: Louisville but also Minneapolis. North Charleston but also Philadelphia. East Texas but also New York City. Buffalo, Aurora, Cleveland: the list goes on and on.

 

[sb]

 

I don’t mean to sound defensive. The fact that the rest of the country shares in the South’s greatest moral failing doesn’t excuse my region’s brutal history or the way its vestiges still linger. The South, like the United States itself, is in desperate need of change. Politically, in fact, the South is already changing. Virginia and North Carolina are swing states in national elections, not blocs of solid red. Kentucky elected a Democratic governor. To the vast surprise of everyone but the people actually living there, Georgia flipped to blue in the 2020 presidential election.

These are only stirrings, the very beginnings of a course correction and not a groundswell demand for systemic reform. One glance at the final election map of 2020 makes it clear that in many ways the South of the twenty-first century remains deeply rooted in the blood-stained soil of the nineteenth. That much is true, but here is an equal truth: an election map can’t tell you what people are actually like. It doesn’t even tell you what the people who consistently vote for charlatans and scoundrels are actually like. Human beings are always more complex than the way they vote could ever suggest. People can be good and bad, brilliant and hopelessly short-sighted, empathetic and willfully blind. This is both the glory and the tragedy of human nature: we are not simple creatures. If more Americans understood that basic fact, they would not have been so surprised by to learn that more Latinx and Black people voted for Donald Trump in 2020 than in 2016.

It’s not just that red states aren’t confined to the American South, or that the American South itself isn’t reliably red, or that conservative Southern voters are motivated by varied and complex priorities. It’s that there is no one South in the South. The Deep South is as different from the Mid-South and the Upper South as the Mid-South and the Upper South are from each other. The urban South looks far more like its counterparts in the urban North and the urban West than it does the rural counties in its own states. The coastal South and the mountain South might as well be two separate countries. The immigrant South overlaps them all, multifarious in too many ways to list.

I can’t accurately represent every one of these Souths, and I wouldn’t dare try. As an essayist, all I can do is write from my own experience about how complex our homeland is. All I can do is try to make it clear that there is far more to this intricate region than many people understand.

 

[sb]

 

This book will introduce a variety of Southerners: Black and white and brown, urban and rural, religious and anti-religious, conservative and progressive, infuriating and inspiring. Their stories are perhaps more uplifting than enraging because I want this book to give a sense of how many people here are working for positive change.

You will meet an urban shepherd who clears sensitive landscapes of invasive vegetation; a group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter; a journalist who carries on the work of Martin Luther King Jr. in the city where Dr. King was murdered; and a Tennessee Department of Transportation employee whose vision turned the entire state’s roadsides into pollinator gardens. You’ll meet neighbors standing in support of immigrants; nonprofits working to protect the environment; church parishioners sheltering the homeless; and poets and novelists and dancers and songwriters whose work teaches us to see the complicated truth of a place that can be confounding.

Many, many people are trying to make things better here—people who recognize evil when they see it and are working to vanquish it; people who understand that hate is sometimes a carapace for pain and who haven’t given up hope of turning hatred into love. In my column I try to dedicate as many words to celebrating the heroes as I do to calling out those who are making trouble for so many others. People in the South are both damaged and damaging, but they are not only those things.

 

[sb]

 

In putting together this collection, I considered a number of different organizational plans. One followed a narrative arc from roughly the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 to roughly the time of his defeat in 2020. Another grouped essays by approach: personal, reported, and a hybrid of both personal experience and journalistic investigation. A third divided the essays into timeframes: remembrances of the past, reports of life today, and speculations about what the future might hold as climate change reshapes the earth.

     But I decided instead to think of this book as a kind of patchwork quilt, the art form of my maternal ancestors. Quilting is still an art, but today’s quilts tend to be constructed from materials purchased expressly for that purpose, carefully matched and color-coordinated, while the patchwork quilts of old came from scraps of repurposed fabric: clothes so worn out they could not be patched again, flour sacks and livestock feed bags, ragged sheets and blankets, the tiniest bits of material left over from making a new dress. For the Alabama women who raised me, a quilt was a time capsule that brought the past into both the present and the future. Many of the quilts they made now lie in a cedar chest at the foot of my bed here in Tennessee, nearly a hundred years after their creation.

This collection is a patchwork that is both time-inconsistent and made of mismatched parts. It’s impossible to present a single, comprehensive portrait of the American South, and it’s equally impossible to present a single, comprehensive portrait of one writer’s experience—especially when that experience is conveyed in weekly installments over the course of years.

The world has changed so rapidly and so profoundly during the last four years that it often took my breath away to scroll through these columns. Some of what I predicted, like the wholesale betrayal Trump voters would feel when they realized they’d been duped, never materialized—the former president’s base remained firmly behind him even as a mismanaged pandemic wrecked their livelihoods and killed them by the tens of thousands. Some of the fears I wrote about have turned out to be far worse than my own dark imaginings, particularly as the long-predicted climate emergency has become a climate cataclysm. That’s why you’ll see dates on these essays, reference points to the time when I was writing.

In the end, I arranged them by the categories to which I frequently return. There are sections on the flora, fauna, politics, and culture of the American South, of course, but also on the imperiled environmental context in which the flora and fauna are trying to survive, the social justice issues raised by the politics of this region, and the rich artistic life of a widely varied culture.

 

[sb]

 

Running throughout the book, as well, are more personal matters—stories from my own family, questions of faith and community—because kinship and religion have always been fundamental to life in the South. In my childhood, church was the very center of social life because families often belonged to the same congregation for generations. That may be less true for Southerners today, as more people settle far from the places where they grew up, but it’s still impossible to write about the Bible Belt without at least acknowledging the pervasive reach of Christianity.

But I often find myself explaining to people outside the South that the fundamentalists and evangelicals who dominate the conversation aren’t the only Christians living here, and that Christians aren’t the only believers here, either. Christian conservatives are widely known for legislating sexuality and gender issues, but religious people who focus on the social justice message of the Gospels live here, too. They join Black Lives Matter protests; they pray outside prisons on execution days; they defend the rights of their LGBTQ neighbors; they work to protect the environment; they welcome immigrants. They are rarely in the news, so some of these columns describe the work their faith—my own faith—calls us to do.

     Other essays touch on my own family’s history, both because it’s only fair that readers should have some way of knowing how I came to stand where I stand, and because my own life straddles one of this country’s great divides: the one that exists between people who live in tiny towns, or no town, and people who live in diverse cities. Every state in the red South has at least one blue city or college town. Think of Atlanta; think of New Orleans; think of Austin; think of Oxford, Mississippi, and the research triangle of North Carolina. Think of Nashville. These are the proverbial blue dots in a red sea.

Many essays in this book highlight what’s happening in Nashville, and that’s for obvious reasons: I live here, and this is the community I know most intimately. But I never write about Nashville for the sake of writing about Nashville. I write about what’s happening here only when it echoes what is happening across the region, or the country. When the Tennessee General Assembly limits the ability of Nashville leaders to pass progressive laws, you can be sure the same thing is happening in Texas and Georgia and North Carolina, too.

And while I live in twenty-first-century Nashville, a growing and diverse urban center, I come from deeply rural Alabama. That land and those people formed me, and I still feel as much a part of their world as of the city where I have lived for nearly thirty-five years. Visiting the farming community where my parents are buried, or the small town where my husband’s family is from, I feel the same way every time I leave a four-lane highway for a country road: the crunch of tires turning onto a battered back-road blacktop is the sound of coming home.

 

[sb]

 

Finally, the South is more than the people who live here. It is also the unfathomable natural beauty of a place that is still predominately rural and very often wild. This is a gorgeous land shot through with rivers running like lifeblood through ancient mountains and old-growth forests, through limestone bluffs and grassy balds, through black-belt farms and red-dirt wiregrass and salty coastal plains and marshy places fluttering with life. Even now, as the ravages of climate change become more and more evident, much of this land is more beautiful than you could possibly believe unless you’ve seen it with your own eyes.

The South has always been so bound up in both beauty and suffering that it isn’t possible to untangle one from the other. I think that’s why this region keeps giving birth to more than its fair share of writers. To love a person is always to love in spite of the faults that intimacy reveals, and so it is with a place. To love the South is to see with clear eyes both its terrible darkness and its dazzling light, and to spend a lifetime trying to make sense of both.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Flora & Fauna
Hawk. Lizard. Mole. Human.
The Flower That Came Back from the Dead
The Eagles of Reelfoot Lake
The Real Aliens in Our Backyard
Make America Graze Again
The Misunderstood, Maligned Rattlesnake
Making Way for Monarchs
The Call of the American Lotus

Politics & Religion
A Monument the Old South Would Like to Ignore
The Final Battleground in the Fight for Suffrage
The Hits Keep Coming for the Red-State Poor
A Slow-Motion Coup in Tennessee
We’re All Addicts Here
There Is a Middle Ground on Guns
An American Tragedy
The Passion of Southern Christians
Christians Need a New Right-to-Life Movement
Shame and Salvation in the American South
Going to Church with Jimmy Carter

Social Justice
What Is America to Me?
ICE Came to Take Their Neighbor. They Said No.
Christmas Isn’t Coming to Death Row
An Act of Mercy in Tennessee
An Open Letter to My Fellow White Christians
Looking Our Racist History in the Eye
Middle Passage to Mass Incarceration
In Memphis, Journalism Can Still Bring Justice
An Open Letter to John Lewis
Reading the New South
These Kids Are Done Waiting for Change

Environment
America’s Killer Lawns
Dangerous Waters
More Trees, Happier People
I Have a Cure for the Dog Days of Summer
The Case against Doing Nothing
The Fox in the Stroller
Death of a Cat
A 150,000-Bird Orchestra in the Sky

Family & Community
Waking Up to History
Why I Wear Five Wedding Rings
Demolition Blues
The Gift of Shared Grief
Remembrance of Recipes Past
All the Empty Seats at the Table
What It Means to Be #NashvilleStrong
The Night the Lights Went Out
The Story of the Surly Santa and the Christmas Miracle
True Love in the Age of Coronavirus

Arts & Culture
Keep America’s Roadside Weird
Country Music as Melting Pot
John Prine: American Oracle
So Long to Music City’s Favorite Soap Opera
“Beauty Herself Is Black”
The Day the Music Died
After War, Three Chords and the Truth
Proud Graduate of State U.
What Is a Southern Writer, Anyway?
Graceland, At Last

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

07/26/2021

New York Times columnist Renkl (Late Migrations) effectively lifts the lid on Southern culture and challenges its stereotypes in this versatile compendium. Renkl’s essays cover the natural world, local politics, Southern-fried art and culture, and social justice issues from a Nashvillian perspective. Her nature writing shows an impressive predilection for botany and ornithology—in “The Eagles of Reelfoot Lake,” she describes Tennessee’s once-endangered bald eagles and their now-precarious relationship with their local ecosystem, and “Make America Graze Again” describes a local man who takes his itinerant flock of sheep around the city to “manage invasive vegetation.” Her most affecting and passionate writing, however, is on the volatile political climate of her hometown and being a “red-state liberal”—“There Is a Middle Ground on Guns” covers growing up “in a culture where guns are ubiquitous,” and “We’re All Addicts Here” movingly recounts how the opioid epidemic has ravaged her state and casts responses from politicians as “too little too late.” The only drawback to Renkl’s collection is that many of these essays feel like they deserve more long-form elaboration—to break them out of the confines of her column space. Still, this serves as a well-written collection for anyone interested in everyday life below the Mason-Dixon Line. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Joyce Bean's warm, friendly voice is by turns serious and smiling in her excellent narration of Margaret Renkl's insightful new essay collection.… Renkl, who lives in Tennessee, is a detailed observer whether she's watching a flock of sheep "mow" a lawn, considering John Prine's music, or writing an open letter about racism to her fellow white Christians. She blends her private life throughout, giving listeners personal involvement with the essays. Bean's clear, straightforward, and welcoming performance is perfectly in tune with Renkl's mix of intimacy and objectivity.” —AudioFile Magazine

"[Graceland, At Last] is Renkl at her most tender and most fierce . . . Renkl's gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations, is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart . . . What rises in me after reading her essays is [John] Lewis' famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them." —NPR

"In this luminous collection, Margaret Renkl delivers smart, beautifully crafted personal and political observations . . . I keep this book nearby to revisit the humanity and hope in its pages." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Reading the short essays in this book has strengthened my understanding and love for the South, its people, its land, and its complexities. I especially have enjoyed reading Renkl's thoughtful reflections on flora and fauna, and I find myself looking to my changing backyard this fall with a new appreciation." —Garden & Gun, "New Reads for Fall 2021"

"[Renkl] doesn't shy from hard topics but explores them with the careful hand of someone whose heart yearns for healing, growth, and understanding for the region she loves. A must read for those who live and love the South!" —Country Living, "Best Books of Fall 2021"

"Everyone should have a friend like Margaret Renkl: thoughtful, engaged, compassionate and, above all, acutely observant. Since that's not always possible, the next best thing is to share her company in the diverse and consistently stimulating essay collection Graceland, At Last . . . Renkl is both unfailingly honest and deeply empathetic in creating the vivid portrait of her home region that emerges organically from these intensely personal and well-informed essays." —Shelf Awareness

"Margaret Renkl's perspective feels like a guiding light . . . No matter where you're from, column after column, Renkl will make you feel right at home." —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Readers can easily home in on one of the book's wide-ranging six sections, sample an essay or two from each, or barrel through from start to finish, as whim dictates. Renkl's voice is calm, steady and sometimes surprising . . . She celebrates a host of new voices in southern writing and sees in their world the light of justice and hope for the South." —Booklist

"From her home in Nashville—'a blue dot in the red sea of Tennessee'—[Renkl] writes perceptively of the region where she was born and raised (in Alabama), educated (in South Carolina), and settled . . . Renkl vividly evokes the lush natural beauty of the rivers, old-growth forests, 'red-dirt pineywoods,' marshes, and coastal plains that she deeply loves . . . A wide-ranging look at the realities of the South." —Kirkus Reviews

“If you’ve happened upon the poignant and off-road opinion pieces Renkl writes as a contributor to The New York Times, you already know that the natural world is something she closely observes and uses as a springboard to contemplate other, less tangible subjects. . . . Her life story and her life’s passion intertwine, like a fence post and a trumpet vine.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

"Graceland, At Last takes us to Renkl's homeland and shines a light on her life in the South, its complexities and its hopes. In these pages, you will find Black Lives Matter organizers, churches sheltering the homeless, and even helpful sheep. Reading Margaret Renkl is like seeing the world in color for the first time." —Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"

"Graceland, At Last gathers a selection of Renkl's columns from the past four years, inviting loyal readers and newcomers alike to take in Renkl's perspective on the world . . . Whether extolling the wonders of a rattlesnake or lamenting Southern Christians' support of oppressive policies, Renkl engages with her home region's beauty and complexity." —BookPage

"While [Graceland, At Last] is not a how-to, we come away with how to better 'belong to one another' in a time when we desperately need to." —Arkansas International

"In her newest book, Graceland, At Last, Margaret Renkl invites readers—southerners and non-southerners alike—into her homeland, her city, her yard . . . What we discover along the way is a place that is both 'damaged and damaging,' but also full of people who inspire and landscapes too beautiful for words. Through these warm and heartfelt essays, Renkl shows us how to keep on loving this complicated place, how to look right at its 'appalling truths' and gesture, still, toward hope." —Southern Humanities Review

"Renkl is a master prose stylist, her generation's E.B. White. Whatever she writes about comes alive through carefully crafted sentences in which sound and sense harmonize at the highest levels." —California Review of Books

"Renkl is so likable, as a writer and an individual, with her rich family traditions, her concern for justice, and her observant and unsentimental love of nature, that every paragraph feels like a conversation with a friend." —Brevity

"It's heartening to see a columnist for a major American newspaper writing so regularly about nature with a passion the media's chattering classes typically reserve only for politics and entertainment . . . Renkl's columns deserve to be read again, and for years to come." —Christian Science Monitor

"New York Times columnist Renkl effectively lifts the lid on the Southern culture and challenges its stereotypes in this versatile compendium. Renkl's essays cover the natural world, local politics, Southern-fried art and culture, and social justice issues from a Nashvillian perspective. Her nature writing shows an impressive predilection for botany and ornithology . . . [Graceland, At Last] serves as a well-written collection for anyone interested in everyday life below the Mason-Dixon Line." —Publishers Weekly

“Like nothing else in the newspaper, [Renkl’s columns] burst with awareness of the things of nature, awareness that our lives are led in that midst, permeated with and part of the natural world. All is written with an open, joyful, yet steady voice of wonder.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

“In 1956, author E.B. White suggested that newspapers cover nature as eagerly as commerce, having columns devoted not only to the flow of business but also the arrival of birds. Renkl . . . seems like a belated answer to White . . . [crafting] graceful sentences that White would surely have enjoyed. A collection of her Times columns would be a welcome thing.”—Wall Street Journal

“Renkl is a frequent op-ed writer for The New York Times, where she captures the spirit and contemporary culture of the American South better than anyone.”—BookPage

"Margaret Renkl's essays alternate between balm for the soul and outrage at the world with all of its injustices. She makes me think and see things in a different light and for that I'm eternally grateful." —Indie Next List (September 2021), selected by Jayne Gowsam, Mystery to Me

"Margaret Renkl is one of my absolute favorite writers working today. Like Late Migrations before it, Graceland, At Last is a gift—full of sorrow, joy, grief, and yes—hope. I implore you to read her work." —Alex Brubaker, Midtown Scholar Bookstore

"Margaret Renkl is my favorite essayist. Every week I look for her column in the opinion pages of the New York Times. In a time when the country has such deep divisions, I can rely on her writing to be all heart, no snark. I'm so proud to have this fellow Nashvillian's newest collection on my shelf." —Karen Hayes, Parnassus Books

"It's one thing to be a good reporter. Another to be a good writer. And finally, and more rare, a good storyteller. Margaret Renkl is among our best at all three. To see her full powers on display in this collection is truly a gift. We are in a golden age of nonfiction, I feel, and Renkl is one of the brightest reasons why. I love this book." —Chris La Tray, Fact & Fiction

"Margaret Renkl wrote a favorite book of mine, Late Migrations, which was published in 2019. In this collection of essays, she expands upon what being a Southerner means to her, and not surprisingly I loved it. She writes about nature, her Christian faith, politics, systemic racism, musicians, and a variety of cultural influencers that are a rich variety of her reflections being raised in Alabama and as an adult living in Nashville. Through it all she searches with compassion and empathy for common ground so that all people can aspire to and live a better life." —Todd Miller, Arcadia Books

"The only thing better than a Margaret Renkl column appearing in my paper in the morning, is a book of columns that appears all at once! Margaret's grace of language, heart-filled societal goals and appreciation for the natural world fill this collection and give readers ideas, poignant facts to think about, and hope." —Kira Wizner, Merritt Bookstore

"With the same profound observation and sensitivity as in her first book, Margaret Renkl's collection of newspaper columns in Graceland, At Last explores even more aspects of the current American South, going beyond stereotypes and caricatures to reveal the real people, plants, and animals that live there, and how they band together during the dark times of the last few years. From social justice to family recipes, these short columns illuminate all manner of hidden things that often go overlooked." —Ellie Ray, Content Book Store

"It's a punch in the gut and a balm for the soul. Graceland, At Last is Margaret Renkl's collection of essays from the New York Times, and she has assembled a wide range of columns considering everything from birds to country music to social justice. Renkl is a writer who throws her whole self into her observations . . . Her observations on the American experience are hard to take sometimes. She pulls no punches about American failures in race relations, care of the environment, and political life. Yet, she is also a writer full of the wonder about the world, seeing and helping us to see the hope and possibility in humanity." —Sarah Young, Raven Book Store

"Since 2017, Mondays have been redeemed by the appearance of a new column by Margaret Renkl in the Opinion section of the New York Times. By turns humorous, angry, hopeful, or meditative—and always graceful, thought-provoking, and deftly observed—these views of life from Nashville show us our world in ways we may not have thought of it before. Now Renkl has gathered 59 of these bite-sized pieces into a substantial collection. Organized 'as a kind of patchwork quilt'—in homage to her foremothers—Graceland, At Last challenges the notion of a homogenous New South even as it gives a balanced view of the region through its distinctive natural landscape, political and cultural history, and the specifics of Renkl's own life and family. What emerges is a wide-ranging portrait of a place as rich in beauty and tradition as it is blighted by racism and bias. Renkl decries the worst of the South's Red State tendencies while celebrating its effort to face and transcend them with new institutions such as the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. She laments the thoughtless cutting down of trees but finds hope in the sight of purple martins—a bird whose survival depends on human-supplied birdhouses. Other gems include the reminder that a rattlesnake is a gentle, not malign creature, and her donning of five inherited wedding bands as an amulet against her fears—one that works like a charm." —Laurie Greer, Politics & Prose

"Late Migrations is a staff favorite at our store. Not only do we hand sell it to customers, we have been giving copies as gifts far and wide. The author's writing is spare, beautiful, thoughtful and wise, and she captures a Southern life in a way no one else does. For those who relish Renkl's writing in the New York Times, Graceland provides a wonderful opportunity to reread favorite essays, as well as share her writing with others." —Lia Lent, Wordsworth Books

"Margaret Renkl's weekly New York Times columns about culture in the South call out our many failures while describing in beautiful details what makes our part of America so beautiful. Just when I think there's no possible way to capture the tension between the terrible and the special, Renkl's words are there to express what I am feeling." —Sissy Gardner, Parnassus Books

"Margaret Renkl is terrific. I loved dipping in and out of these essays." —Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield's Books

From the Publisher

Joyce Bean’s warm, friendly voice is by turns serious and smiling in her excellent narration of Margaret Renkl’s insightful new essay collection. Drawn from Renkl’s weekly NEW YORK TIMES column, the 60 pieces in this audiobook cover all manner of life in the American South, including animals, culture, plants, and politics. Renkl, who lives in Tennessee, is a detailed observer whether she’s watching a flock of sheep “mow” a lawn, considering John Prine’s music, or writing an open letter about racism to her fellow white Christians. She blends her private life throughout, giving listeners personal involvement with the essays. Bean’s clear, straightforward, and welcoming performance is perfectly in tune with Renkl’s mix of intimacy and objectivity. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2022 - AudioFile

2021-06-24
A Southerner examines a complicated region.

Since August 2015, Renkl has contributed essays about the South to the New York Times, reflecting on nature and the environment, politics and religion, social justice, family and community, and arts and culture. From her home in Nashville—“a blue dot in the red sea of Tennessee”—she writes perceptively of the region where she was born and raised (in Alabama), educated (in South Carolina), and settled. “All I can do,” she writes, “is try to make it clear that there is far more to this intricate region than many people understand.” Of the nearly 60 essays she has gathered in what she calls a “patchwork quilt” collection, some are journalistic, some polemical, and some frankly personal: her son’s marriage during the pandemic, for one, and a long-deferred visit to Graceland. In many, Renkl vividly evokes the lush natural beauty of the rivers, old-growth forests, “red-dirt pineywoods,” marshes, and coastal plains that she deeply loves. As she shows, that land is in peril. The Tennessee River is polluted with microplastics; habitat destruction threatens monarch butterflies; climate change alters the trajectory of migratory birds. Renkl reports on efforts to address these and other problems that beset the region, including opioid addiction, gun violence, and racism. In Tennessee, she writes, tactics to suppress votes include confiscating driver’s licenses, impeding mail-in ballots, and “disqualifying voter registration applications for specious reasons.” Later, she notes that “Election Law Journal ranked Tennessee forty-eighth in ease of voting” (ahead of Virginia and Mississippi). Nevertheless, Renkl finds hope for change. “I know that Southern hospitality is a real thing, and that it isn’t race contingent,” she writes. “I know how very many people here are fighting to make life safer and more equitable for everyone, even for those who keep voting to make life less safe and less fair for everyone else.”

A wide-ranging look at the realities of the South.

Kirkus Reviews