John Lane
History
Personal information
- Biography
Place and wilderness have been critical themes in John Lane's poetry, personal essays, and fiction. The North Carolina native has lived on a wilderness island off the coast of Georgia, studied crocodiles in Central America, surveyed monkeys in the remote rain forests of Suriname, and traveled extensively in the wild places of the United States. An expert kayaker and place-based educator, Lane's outdoor adventure prose has appeared in Outside, American White Water, Canoe, South Carolina Wildlife, and many other periodicals. His long essays, "River Wild," on paddling 59 miles of the Youghiogheny River, and "Confluence: Pacolet River," recently appeared in the anthologies Heart of a Nation and Adventure America both from National Geographic Books. An essay by Lane about Cumberland Island appeared in the widely distributed In Short: Short Creative Nonfiction (WW Norton & Co. 1996). His natural history memoir, A Stand of Cypress, was the runner-up in the AWP creative non-fiction contest in '95.
In January of 1995 he participated in "Cross Currents: Six Writers on Environmental Ethics," a symposium at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC The other five featured writers were Rick Bass, Janet Lembke, James Kilgo, David Romtvedt, and Linda Hasselstrom.
In 1999 the University of Georgia Press published The Woods Stretched for Miles: Contemporary Southern Nature Writing, an anthology of Southern nature writing he co-edited with Wofford colleague Gerald Thurmond. His first collection of personal essays, Weed Time: Essays from the Edge of a Country Yard (Briarpatch Press, 1993), described his year living in a cabin near Great Smoky Mountains. Lane has also published a book of personal essays, Waist Deep in Black Water (2002), and a book-length personal narrative, Chattooga (2004), both from The University of Georgia Press as well.
In 2001 a prose piece about a Girl Scout camp threatened by development was awarded The Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment by the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Also a poet and playwright, Lane teaches environmental literature, creative writing & film at Wofford College is a founder of the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, SC.