GRACELAND, AT LAST

A Southerner examines a complicated region.

Since August 2015, Renkl has contributed essays about the South to the New York Times, reflecting on nature and the environment, politics and religion, social justice, family and community, and arts and culture. From her home in Nashville—“a blue dot in the red sea of Tennessee”—she writes perceptively of the region where she was born and raised (in Alabama), educated (in South Carolina), and settled. “All I can do,” she writes, “is try to make it clear that there is far more to this intricate region than many people understand.” Of the nearly 60 essays she has gathered in what she calls a “patchwork quilt” collection, some are journalistic, some polemical, and some frankly personal: her son’s marriage during the pandemic, for one, and a long-deferred visit to Graceland. In many, Renkl vividly evokes the lush natural beauty of the rivers, old-growth forests, “red-dirt pineywoods,” marshes, and coastal plains that she deeply loves. As she shows, that land is in peril. The Tennessee River is polluted with microplastics; habitat destruction threatens monarch butterflies; climate change alters the trajectory of migratory birds. Renkl reports on efforts to address these and other problems that beset the region, including opioid addiction, gun violence, and racism. In Tennessee, she writes, tactics to suppress votes include confiscating driver’s licenses, impeding mail-in ballots, and “disqualifying voter registration applications for specious reasons.” Later, she notes that “Election Law Journal ranked Tennessee forty-eighth in ease of voting” (ahead of Virginia and Mississippi). Nevertheless, Renkl finds hope for change. “I know that Southern hospitality is a real thing, and that it isn’t race contingent,” she writes. “I know how very many people here are fighting to make life safer and more equitable for everyone, even for those who keep voting to make life less safe and less fair for everyone else.”

A wide-ranging look at the realities of the South.