Wofford

Last week I changed jobs. For twenty years I've taught in the English department at Wofford College. Now I'm director of Wofford's Glendale Shoals Environmental Studies Center and half-time teacher in the college's new environmental studies program.

The summer of 1997 I traveled west to Missoula, Montana to take part in a panel on "Southern Nature Writing" at a biennial conference of an emerging academic group called ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment). When I received the invitation the group was new to me, but a little research showed ASLE had met once, two summers before, in Fort Collins, Colorado.

DAVID LAUDERDALE, Island Packet columnist, Hilton Head Island, SC
Published Sunday, January 21, 2007

DAUFUSKIE ISLAND — The "Cornbread and Sushi" tour nibbled its way through the Lowcountry last week, turning every mossy stone for an answer to that bottomless postmodern question: "Has the South done up and died?"

By Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, VA

mdeegan@dailyprogress.com

Saturday, January 13, 2007

The sweet tea at Michie Tavern rated "fair" on Betsi Taylor's scale of Southern authenticity.

We set out on our Cornbread and Sushi road trip to look for the changing South, and driving through Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Roanoke, and Charlottesville we found it-towns changed to edge-cities, farmland changed to suburbs, two-lanes changed to four-lanes, small-scale farming changed to corporate agriculture, mom-and-pop businesses changed to chain stores.

When you read this I'll be in the middle of driving around the upper South for ten days with my colleague Deno Trakas and 12 students in two rental vans. At Wofford we call January "Interim," and it's a chance to be innovative, a chance to focus, to explore one subject in depth for an entire month.

Last week Richard Rankin visited our Rural South class at Wofford. Richard's a headmaster of a private school up in Gastonia, but much of his passion and pleasure is found in the subject of hunting in the South. He's got a PhD from the University of North Carolina in history, has edited an anthology of North Carolina nature writers, and compiled a history of a vast hunt club on Hilton Head Island that survived until vacation development became the chief industry of the island and sport hunting was pushed elsewhere. He's probably thought longer and deeper about hunting than anyone I know.

I'm a Wofford College English professor, and most of my classes are traditional, me in the front of the room, or at the head of a seminar table, writing on a blackboard, with students in rows of desks taking notes. The discussion is about books, and the issues rise from reading sentences, paragraphs, pages.