“Craft & Current: A manual for magical writing” by Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray could have taken the easy way out. She could have produced a manual for writers that offers up her secrets of scene-building, dialogue, narrative tension—the usual stuff. She could have stuck to the basics, and her legion of fans would have eaten up this book, anyway.

Ray, however, did not take the easy way out. She dove deep. In her usual thorough fashion, Ray leaves no leaf unturned in exploring the essentials of a writer’s life. Craft & Current (Trackless Wild 2024) is a carefully researched, genuinely felt guide to the art of creating literature. Ray’s goal is clear. She’s urging authors—whether aspiring, accomplished, or anywhere in between—to show up and do the work she calls “life-giving, even sacred.” She sees writing not just as a craft, but as a mission. As an example, she uses her own career: “Every single paragraph I’ve written is a call to action and an attempt to shine a spotlight on a better path forward.”

In this book, Ray pulls back the curtain to reveal even more of herself and her “colorful but crippling” history than she did in her bestselling debut memoir, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. She does this to show us that even an “underdog” such as herself, a kid reared on a junkyard in the backwoods of southern Georgia, can find refuge, and a calling, in the literary arts. “That I would become a writer seems unlikely,” she says in the preface to Craft and Current. “By all odds, I shouldn’t have become an author.”

Not only did she become a writer, she became something more: a writer’s writer. She’s a person who creates community among writers, someone who generously shares with others what she has learned over the course of her career—not only about the act of stringing words together but also what she considers other crucial aspects of the writing life: how to stay afloat in the choppy waters of the ever-evolving publishing industry, how to take care of oneself physically and mentally, how to open to that all-important element Ray calls “the mysterium.”

In recent years this prolific author—she has published several works of Southern-themed nonfiction, two volumes of poetry, and most recently a novella—has turned more and more to the pedagogy of writing. Ray offers online classes and workshops in some of her specialties: memoir, lyrical essay, nature and place-based writing. She also publishes two subscription newsletters (tracklesswild.substack.com and rhizosphere.substack.com) that brim with weekly inspiration on living and writing as an advocate for the Earth.

Craft & Current is a stylish compendium of all that knowledge. It’s the flowering of Ray’s lifetime love affair with language, her gravitational pull toward books and reading and words. Over and over she circles back to the theme that storytelling is powerful. It’s transformative for both author and reader. Stories can change us and the world around us, Ray declares, and they’re needed now more than ever:

“I believe that the highest purpose of story is to reconcile ourselves with what we know to be true, what we believe is true, or what could be true, despite what we are told. Story reconciles us with our mythic and heroic capabilities.”

Ray has packed this book with an astonishing wealth of practical advice. There’s no shortage of hands-on instruction: voice, style, vocabulary, metaphor, Latinate versus Anglo-Saxon words, revision. She even shares the famous “Kittredge schema” of essay structure that she learned from an esteemed instructor in her MFA program at the University of Montana.

But Ray also addresses more personal things that can bedevil the writer: rejection, self-doubt, money woes. She is honest about her own evolving attitude toward the business of book publishing (as evinced by her decision to self-publish Craft & Current, and to launch it on the crowd-investing platform Kickstarter).

Another standout feature of this book are her exercises and prompts at the end of each chapter. These are not the stale prompts you often find in a writing manual. They’re more like the questions a therapist might ask, someone who’s helping us pan our psyche for gold. What are you most afraid of as a writer? Ray asks us. When do you lie? When are you silent? What is your power? What is true greatness to you?

Then there’s her concept of magic, that invisible and ineffable energy, and its role in helping a writer soar. This mysterious ingredient, she says, is essential to all great writing: “…a good writer has one foot set firmly in the ink of the page and the other in the clouds.” How to access the mysterium? Ray says the key is to “rewild” ourselves, and she wrote a whole chapter plus an appendix of specific, concrete tips on how to do that. (Examples? Honor the ancestors. Listen to trees. Pray. Meditate. Divine. Spend time with people who are deeply trustworthy, deeply loving. Sleep on the ground. Study animal tracks. Learn birdsong.)

As she wraps up Craft & Current, Ray comes fully into the role of mentor. Her enthusiasm, her deep-seated belief in the power of writing to transform our world, comes through loud and clear. “Being a good writer may not happen fast,” she says, “but incrementally, piece by piece, you can claim your voice, refine your craft, immerse yourself in magic’s current, and build a body of important work.”

That’s exactly what Janisse Ray has done, in her own body of work and in this sparkling book that aims to inspire writers. We’re fortunate to have her as a pathfinder.

Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray is an award-winning American author who explores the borderland of nature and culture. Her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, is an environmental memoir that tells the story of growing up in the disappearing longleaf pine flatwoods. It was a New York Times Notable and is credited with bringing attention to a critically endangered ecosystem and starting the movement to restore this iconic landscape. That first book was followed by eleven others, including The Seed Underground, which looks at heirloom seeds, as well as two volumes of eco-poetry and a 2022 novel, The Woods of Fannin County. She has won an American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, Southern Booksellers Award, Southern Environmental Law Center Writing Award, Nautilus Award, and Eisenberg Award, among many others. Her collection of essays, Wild Spectacle, received the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, which carries a $10,000 prize. Her books have been translated into Turkish, French, and Italian.

Ray leads workshops on writing, where she teaches not only writing technique but how to access the mysteries that make writing great. She lives on an organic farm inland from Savannah, Georgia. She loves dark chocolate, the blues, and anything in flower. Find out more at her website, janisseray.com or subscribe to her free Substack newsletter, “Trackless Wild.”