"The fabulous ordinary [is] still out there"

Exploring the wonders of the South with writer Georgann Eubanks

Apr 01, 2025

I spent the past few weeks assigning writers for the inaugural issue of Southlands—and it’s a really phenomenal line-up. I’m excited to share it soon.1

The process put hunting and fishing on my mind. I knew I had to get both into the issue, in part because hunting and fishing are some of the more prominent ways that Southerners get out in nature. And, yes, perhaps there’s some overcompensation; I’ve written plenty about hunting and fishing, and feel a kinship with the hook-and-bullet conservationists I know, but I don’t (yet) hunt and I’m a pretty mediocre fisherman at best. My time in nature is more likely to feature a paddle or a backpack. And sometimes I just go walk in the woods for no reason but the walk itself.

So I was charmed to find a pair of new books that offer a reminder: Southern nature is out there and beautiful, and to enjoy it you don’t need any equipment beyond your eyes, and perhaps a bit of planning. I’ve just started Andrew Furman’s essay collection Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness, and I’m charmed from the first page. Florida is at once a wild, tropical garden, as John Muir once called it, and a sprawl of suburbia. What a world we live in!

Georgann Eubanks’ The Fabulous Ordinary: Discovering the Natural Wonders of the Wild South, meanwhile, takes a region-wide approach: Over three years, accompanied by photographer Donna Campbell, Eubanks

intentionally sought out common events that we had never experienced up close: the annual migration of a half-million purple martins roosting on a tiny island in a freshwater lake in South Carolina, the peak blooming time of thirty acres of dimpled trout lilies in a remote south Georgia forest, the few weeks in spring when gnat larvae grlow like stars in the dark on the dripping rock walls of an obscure canyon in Alabama, and the overnight accumulation of dozens of elaborately patterned moth species on the side of a mountain cabin in North Carolina.

The result is a gorgeous book, in words and spirit—and physically, too—and some mixture of a guide and an inspiration: Go out there and see what we’ve got. The Fabulous Ordinary is out today, and to celebrate its release, I spoke with Eubanks about her work and about this region. You’ll find our conversation below the fold.

—Boyce

In season

🪻 Wildflower season is about to kick off at Great Smoky—but beware, too, that staff shortages mean not all campgrounds are open.

🐔 Egg prices got you thinking about backyard chickens? Country Roads has six tips.

Going deep

🎣 T. Edward Nickens on Lefty Kreh—the fly fisherman who taught generations.

🤠 Life is cheap at the Houston Rodeo, Hamilton Nolan reports.

🐴 Sarah Mock contemplates a surprisingly complex question: Whither the horses?

🌊 Navigating North Carolina’s deadliest inlet.

🐽 A pig fight on the Texas coast.

The lowdown

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has been saved from the chopping block. // Sharks are in peril, and The Marjorie has gone three stories deep on how Florida—and its fishermen—are involved. // Touring the country in a Louisiana shrimp boat. // The legal loophole for Texas “ghost deer.” // A Congressional push for OcMulgee National Park—again. // Big Sugar has lost its lawsuit against a contentious Everglades reservoir. // Amid population declines, new restrictions on South Carolina turkey hunting.

The Southlands Q&A: Georgann Eubanks

Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to start with a question that underlies this whole publication: Do you think there’s something that sets Southern nature apart? And if so, what is it?

Absolutely there is. Our biodiversity is amazing—and it's different in every state. There’s a book of essays by Joanna Brichetto, This Is How a Robin Drinks. She lives in Nashville, and she calls herself an urban naturalist, and she goes around looking at what comes up in the cracks in the sidewalk or in the dead mall parking lot. That's part of where we are now in the South, this development gone bad. But the plants persevere. It matters that the South was not developed as quickly as some other parts of the country. So it has taken longer to ruin the South than some other places, and the biodiversity still persists, to an extent.

In the introduction to The Fabulous Ordinary, I read what felt like an implicit criticism of “thick regional magazines” here in the South. As someone making one of those thick regional magazines, what do you think is left out?

I don't think so much it's what's left out; I think it's the thickness—or maybe the glossiness. Without naming any names, it’s the gorgeous Bourbon drinks, the leather knife holders, the whole sort of Southern schtick made very expensive. In some of these magazines, you can find great stories by great writers who are naturalists, people who care about the environment. But then there's hunting and dogs and an amplified version of the ostentatiously wealthy South that is not quite balanced, in my view. But it works for advertisers, I guess.

[Laughs.] I’m learning that’s definitely a part of it.

But there are other parts of the Southern experience, too. The plants in the Nashville sidewalk. Or the kinds of things in this book—going and watching the wood storks and the sandhill cranes on their migrations. I think paying attention to those visitors can help us expand our notion of the South.

That leads into what I see as the core idea of this book—which is right there in the title—that there's so much “fabulous ordinary” that is so important and powerful here in the South. I think it’s important to recognize that; we need to see things, and then love them, to protect them. But how do you hold that celebration against the need to be vigilant against the fact that we were losing more of that fabulous ordinary all of the time?

I met a lot of really wonderful biologists and botanists who talked about how we love things to death. I'm making a book about destinations that could be overrun—some of them already are. We do have in the South this tourism; it’s particularly egregious in Florida, going to see alligators, or in the North Carolina mountains, bears in captivity, all that sort of thing. We do love our nature to death. But I think it's becoming more and more apparent that now we're dealing with disjunct pieces of wildness that must be preserved so that we know where we've come from. We lose our identity if we lose this biodiversity. That's part of my thesis for this book—and my last book, too, Saving the Wild South.

You call the trips you made for this book, together, a “pilgrimage.” I know you’ve been on other pilgrimages for other books, but I’m curious if anything changed for you after this one?

I came more and more to trust the documentary process. I've now used this process for three books: I come up with a framework for things I hope to find, and then I go hunting for them. The stories I found about each of these places in the South were much more than I bargained for. I’d been thinking about the wood storks in South Carolina as a chapter, and I knew I wanted to start with a quote from Drew Lanham—who's an African American man, a poet, a birder, an ornithologist, a Clemson professor—about how much is layered under the land. “Our landscapes … are open wounds,” he says.

We don't necessarily know the history of the land. That particular part of South Carolina is home to what has been called the most environmentally damaged place on Earth. There’s a plant where materials were fashioned for nuclear bombs. There’s a plantation that was owned by a South Carolina governor who had to resign in infamy because it was found that he was not only having children by his enslaved women on the plantation, but also abusing his nieces. And then some land was donated to Audubon to create a quail farm; quail have been in trouble, and are much beloved species in the South. The bomb plant called the quail people at Audubon, and said, ‘Hey, can you make some habitat for wood storks? Because we're getting ready to relaunch one of our nuclear reactors, and they've been coming and feeding in the cooling ponds, and we don't want them on our campus.”

It's like, “Oh, my God, I didn't know any of that, when all I wanted to do was, for the first time in my life, see a wood stork.” And then the storks are coming farther north now because of climate change… And that's just one chapter! The complexity, the layered quality, the stories that are embedded in stories in each of these chapters—it just kind of delights and horrifies me.

Oh yes, I’ve experienced that, too. Once you pick a topic and burrow down, anything and everything turns fascinating. This might be an obnoxious question, but I’m wondering if you have a favorite site of fabulous ordinary, whether it’s in this book or not.

I went on a guided trip to see blue ghost lightning bugs. It was with a fellow who knew how to find them. They only come out for an hour at first dark in particularly damp places. We had to swear ourselves to secrecy, to protect them.

These blue ghost lightning bugs look like to me characters in the old Wolfman movie, when the townspeople go out with torches and they're looking for the monster in the woods—these bugs are glowing blue, and they look like they're bearing torches, and they stay lit for a minute at a time. They're looking for the females who are on the ground and can't fly.

So that was unbelievable. I'd never seen anything so incredible. I have a cabin in the mountains that's about five miles from where I went to see these. And a few weeks later, I was sitting in my yard, and I suddenly saw them coming up: They were there on my own property, property that I had owned for 30 years, and I’d never seen [MOU6] them. It makes me think of all the things that we don't see—that we don't sit down long enough to find.

I’ve also got new branding materials, which you’ll see if you click through this email to the Substack website…