Happy summer! Hope everyone is staying safe -- and finding ways to stay creative. A version of the post below first appeared on Arts Coast Journal, the online journal of Creative Pinellas:
On walks through my neighborhood in South St. Petersburg — a daily ritual I have adopted during this time of corona virus lockdown -- I have been looking more intently at neighbors.
Those things with feathers, for example. Is that an egret, a heron or a pelican? Was that an osprey diving into Tampa Bay? Did I just see a mockingbird attacking a black bird? Is that a woodpecker I hear?
Or the oaks, pines, magnolia and palm trees which, according to environmental scientists, actually form communities and communicate with each other. What messages are they sending to each other? I wonder as I pass by.
When I’m not outside contemplating nature, I find myself inside reading more and more books about nature. Three recently published ones offer a window onto Florida’s natural world: I Have Been Assigned The Single Bird: A Daughter’s Memoir by Susan Cerulean; Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther by Craig Pittman and Voices of Booker Creek, a collection of writings inspired by a nature writing class offered by USFSP professor Thomas Hallock. The latter addresses the intersection of race and nature in St. Petersburg, offering stories about a forgotten waterway and the community on its banks that was also left behind.
Race and nature are also addressed in Remembering Paradise Park: Tourism and Segregation at Silver Springs, which was published by the University Press of Florida in 2015. I got the book from the St. Petersburg Library system (which has begun to distribute books again on a limited basis) when I saw that it was this month's book pick for the St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Arts Virtual Book Club.
I guess I'm not the only one who has been preoccupied by natural Florida lately.
I also ordered a copy of Mary Ann Carroll: First Lady of the Highwaymen (also published by the University Press of Florida in 2014) from the library to remind myself that nature is there for all of us to seek some solace in this time of loss and disorientation. Above is one of Carroll's vivid paintings called Royal Poinciana.
I HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED THE SINGLE BIRD: A Daughter’s Memoir
By Susan Cerulean
University of Georgia Press, 2020
“I Have Been Assigned The Single Bird offers a lament for the precious things that have passed, an elegy for the fragile beauty that remains, and a recognition of the inseparable Nature of all living things,” writes nature writer Joe Hutto.
Its Tallahassee author (shown at left) is a self-described writer, naturalist and earth advocate who has written many books on nature: Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites, UnspOILed: Writers Speak for Florida’s Coast (coedited with Janisse Ray and A. James Wohlpart) and Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change. I Have Been Assigned The Single Bird, a memoir, is her most personal to date. It juxtaposes her role as a caretaker for her father who has dementia and her volunteer work protecting wild shorebirds along the Florida coast on a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge.
In her prologue Cerulean writes, "How can we care for this world? I have tried to reconcile my roles as one daughter caring for one father, as one woman attuned at times to only a single wild bird while the planet is burning. How I long to change the world for the better. Offering care to those we love is closely similar to standing up for our Earth. In all cases, we are required to be fierce and full-bodied advocates, in an endless series of small actions, each as important as the next."
Want to meet the author? On August 19 at 6:30 p.m.Cerulean will be talking about her book with USFSP professor Tom Hallock at a Zoom session sponsored by Tombolo Books, a new independent bookstore in St. Petersburg. You can register for Tombolo event through GOOGLE FORM and a Zoom link will be sent to you.
CAT TALE: THE WILD, WEIRD BATTLE TO SAVE THE FLORIDA PANTHER
By Craig Pittman
Hanover Square Press, 2020
Among panther’s would-be saviors were a grizzled old Texas trapper, a rich scientist, a retired showman, a biochemist who looked like Santa Claus, two former Detroit bootleggers, a veterinarian who collected panther semen and a biologist known as “Dr. Panther” who nearly derailed the effort with faulty research.
It took Pittman, shown at left holding his new book, more than a decade to finish Cat Tale which was published in January. Why so long? He had compiled much of the research for the book while he worked as an environmental writer for the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), but he was waiting for a happy ending to the story, he told CBS Miami in February.
Despite all the bungling and professional rivalries, those seeking to pull the panther -- Florida's official animal -- from the brink of extinction finally largely succeeded. In the 70s, there were about 20 in the state. Today the population of panthers, long thought to be spiritual beings by Native Americans, numbers about 200. In the CBS Miami interview below, Pittman gives us a glimpse of the graceful (and elusive) cat and an update on the fight to preserve its habitats, still threatened by interstate highways.
VOICES OF BOOKER CREEK
Edited by Anna Maria Lineberger, Dylan Furness and Kelly Kennedy
University of South Florida, 2020
Voices of Booker Creek, a collection of essays, poems, interviews, news articles and even a play, is also about a fight for survival — for an almost forgotten waterway and the African-American community that has lived along its banks for decades.
In the 1920s, the waterway, which flowed through Campbell Park and the Gas Plant neighborhood, however, was thriving — as was the racially segregated communities that formed along its banks. But both equally were neglected. As the city grew, at times developers built right on top of the waterway (and, in the case of construction of Tropicana Field, plowing down African-American houses and churches that stood in its way). Part of the creek actually flows under Central Avenue. It then continues around Tropicana Field, beneath I-175 and through Campbell Park and Roser Park, before ending up in Bayboro Harbor.
“Booker Creek tells the story of a city that found progress at the expense of nature and a vibrant, tight-knit community,” writes St. Petersburg City Council representative Gina Driscoll in the book’s foreword. Driscoll represents District 6, which includes part of Booker Creek. “Now, after many years of neglect, there is a growing interest in stronger stewardship of the creek to revitalize and celebrate this beautiful, damaged thread."
The voices heralding that “beautiful, damaged thread” in Voices of Booker Creek are refreshingly diverse. Joe, a homeless man, writes a poem. Shadin Haitham, one of eight Gibbs High School students whose work is included, offers a play called Fighting for Larryisha (who is a frog). A county commissioner (Kenneth Welch), a local historian (Gwendolyn Reese), Bayfront Hospital’s first African-American chief of staff (the late Dr. Paul McRae) and a writing coach (Roy Peter Clark) as well as journalists, graduate students who took Hallock’s nature writing course and other lovers of Booker Creek all provide new perspectives on the waterway.
On the Voices of Booker Creek YouTube page you can listen to the actual voices of some of the contributors as they read their stories: “Jesus Up the Creek” by local writer Jon Wilson, “Paddling Toward Reparations,” by Professor Hallock, “Ghost Houses” by USFSP professor Julie Buckner Armstrong and “Night” by Luke Bilsborough, a recent graduate of Pinellas County Schools.
“Voices of Booker Creek is a testament to St. Petersburg’s black communities,” says Anna Maria Lineberger, a professor of composition at St. Leo University, who edited the volume along with Dylan Furness and Kelly Kennedy. “It serves as one piece of a vast story stretching before and beyond itself. It bears witness to something far greater than what we can contain in one volume.”
REMEMBERING PARADISE PARK: TOURISM AND SEGREGATION AT SILVER SPRINGS
By Lu Vickers and Cynthia Wilson-Graham
University Press of Florida, 2015
During the era of Jim Crow in Florida, even nature was segregated.
In Remembering Paradise Park, Lu Vickers and Cynthia Wilson-Graham chronicle the story of this leisure spot where Black and White families shared the same river but rarely crossed paths.
Blacks were admitted to Silver Springs in 1967; Paradise Park was officially closed in 1969.
MARY ANN CARROLL: FIRST LADY OF THE HIGHWAYMEN
By Gary Monroe
University Press of Florida, 2014
Of course, the state couldn’t segregate all of nature.
In the 1960s and 1970s Carroll was part of a band of African-Americans painters who traveled in around the state to capture Florida’s natural beauty on canvas and then sold their landscapes door-to-door and by the roadside. Carroll was the only female and her story tended to get lost in all the later paeans to the Highwaymen as the moniker to these painters belie.
“Life is not about being a male or a female,” she told Monroe, “It’s about surviving.” Carroll died last December at the age of 79.
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