Writing my academic book has been quite a joy, I must admit. One reason I enjoy it so much is that I get to use my creative juices to redefine how to tell a story in academic prose.
I write with a different purpose.
I will say that my inventiveness in telling this story is driven by my love of nature, most notably birds, but also all the things that help birds thrive. Which include a vast array of flora and fauna. This book allows me to tell a history that is deeply layered, complicated, with disparate source materials.
I knew I did not want to turn the book into a who’s who of antebellum naturalists, those works have been excellently recorded as it is. And the roadside museums in the Lowcountry of South Carolina help to tell those stories as well.
What I want to do is to determine how to tell a very human experience distilled through human actions (Black folk in particular) with birds.
****featured image is a screenshot of a portion of my manuscript draft. (documents a disturbing experience where enslaved people’s calloused feet from walking barefoot in most seasons was a nocturnal feeding opportunity for the Marsh Rice Rat)
