Q&A with John Lane, author of STILL UPRIGHT & HEADED DOWNSTREAM: COLLECTED RIVER WRITING

By Pressley Bear

John Lane celebrates the release of his new book, Still Upright & Headed Downstream, released on March 1, 2022, from Mercer University Press. Gathered here after decades—scattered individually throughout a dozen published books and many magazines, newspapers, and journals—are essays and poems about paddling and floating rivers all over the Southeast and beyond. 

Lane is emeritus professor at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he taught creative writing, environmental studies, and directed the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. An award-winning author, he has been named one of seven regional Culture Pioneers by Blue Ridge Outdoors and has been honored with the Water Conservationist Award from the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, the Clean Water Champion by South Carolina’s Upstate Forever, and was inducted in 2014 into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.

Enjoying his recent retirement from academia, Lane took a break from a recent hike to meet up with Pressley Bear out on the trail to answer a few questions.

Describe your new collection for us.

The collection is focused on my river writing. It serves as a sort of curatorial volume for one aspect of my literary career— with 28 river poems and 26 pieces of river prose covering over forty years of writing and publishing.  

Have all the pieces in this collection been previously published?

Not all, but most. Three of the prose pieces weren’t published in either a periodical or essay collection. More of the poems are unpublished. I love the story this mixture of poetry and prose tells of a particular late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century sort of literary life. 

You say (admit?) that some of the later poems you pulled straight “out of the Notes function on your iPhone.” Say a little about that.

I write a great deal on my iPhone with one finger. 

So, many of these poems might not have had a home anywhere else if not in this collection? 

Exactly. One of my favorite Gary Snyder collections has always been “Left Out in the Rain”— his gathered unpublished, passed over poems. Some of the poetry here feels a little like that. I’d love to see what poetry is in Gary Snyder’s iPhone notes!

I noticed this collection moves mostly chronologically and alternates between poetry and prose. 

Yes, the earliest piece is a poem written in 1976, and the earliest prose dates to 1984, so a reader sees a growth I think, with more adrenaline-driven river writing earlier on.

How does this collection contribute to the long tradition of outdoor writing?

Donald Hall had a fun theory of sports writing— “The smaller the ball, the better the writing.” Well, I’ve formulated a similar theory about what I would call adventure writing— the slower the pace the better the writing. Walking probably has the best writing, and rock or mountain climbing, good as well, onward toward canoeing and kayaking. Adrenalin is hard to process on the page with literary language.

What is relevant today about this river writing? 

Good question. As we know, lots has changed over the decades and sometimes I do wonder how much there is that would interest even a literary paddler under, say, the age of fifty. I do write about social justice in one essay in particular; and then environmental justice is explicitly addressed in a few others. So, I feel in some ways the collection goes beyond the “enraptured (paddling) male” genre that one might see in an adventure magazine. There’s lots about community here too. 

You were a professor for more than thirty years. In what way does that impact the collection?

There are a few essays in the collection that describe exactly how I taught about rivers during my thirty-two years at Wofford College. For twenty years or so I was on the English faculty, and I taught a freshman class called “River Narratives.” We started with Huckleberry Finn and read forward (or downstream) in fiction and nonfiction narratives with rivers at their center. Each student had to complete a research project about their “home stream” which included some first person contact with the stream itself.

Then, for almost a decade, I co-taught a freshman learning community called “The Nature and Culture of Water” with biologist Ellen Goldey. Later, when I helped found the environmental studies program, we put direct contact with local streams and rivers at the center of our teaching. We had a huge Cargill grant to fund a program called “Thinking Like a River.” All ENVS majors go paddling on the local streams, Lawson’s Fork Creek, or the Pacolet River. 

What is the difference in this collection and say, John McPhee’s writing about rivers?

I have both resisted and embraced formal reporting through the years. I think it held me back in some ways particularly if I wanted a commercial publisher. Not finding a way to go deeply into subjects through more traditional journalism, I mean. But it also freed me up to write more in contrary directions. I was mostly self-employed as a writer. 

So, you would not call this collection journalism?

There are three or four pieces of the 26 essays in this collection that have some of the informational research hallmarks of a reported piece, but most are just straight narratives—heavy first person with an excursion, some “characters,” some reflection, and some lyricism of description dappled with some natural and cultural history research. That’s sort of become my hallmark I think—this kind of hybrid. 

Who is the primary audience for this book? 

I made a joke last night to my wife that this book appeals to some very small, overlapping circles— the full-on literary circle, then the nature writing circle, and then river writing circle. By the time you get to the literary paddlers it’s an intimate audience for sure! 

What do you mean by this term ‘river writing’?

My mind and body have been most creative when they came into contact through language with rivers. That’s one of the primary places where, I think, my imagination shows most fully.

And where has your river writing landed you? 

I’m a life-long river rat. After reading Terry Gifford’s “Muir’s Fourfold Concept of the Mountaineer” I came up with “John Lane’s Fourfold Concept of a River Rat”:

1. The compulsion to engage rivers, no matter what the hardships and challenges.

2. Approaching the river like a scientist—making observations about rivers as systems.

3. The ability to be at home on or near rivers. 4. The need to be near rivers and have the moral quality of one’s life shaped by your contact with one’s relationship with them

Will you write more about rivers or are you finished with that topic?

Oh, there is more for sure! I could never give up trying to write about my love of rivers.

— Pressley Bear reads and writes from his den at Mercer University Press in Macon, Georgia. He is especially interested in learning new things, meeting authors, and traveling with MUP staff to events across the country.

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