The Good Southern Women Interview with Margaret Renkl
On pinewoods and dumbasses, the mutual aid of Southerners, and honoring the beauty of the world
GSW is a questionnaire-based interview series featured in F I E L D T R I P. It focuses on women-identifying artists of the South. This time, we feature writer and New York Times columnist Margaret Renkl.
I’ve been waiting for this one for a while.
Ladies and gents, Margaret Renkl is representing today at GSW. Margaret Renkl, award-winning New York Times columnist, essayist, passionate advocate for the earth, determined chronicler and questioner of the South.
Last week, in throwing together a few things to make us feel better in late winter, and in thinking about liminal seasons in the midst of life’s seasons, I meant to include some of Margaret’s words from her latest bestseller The Comfort of Crows, which recently won the Southern Book Prize:
“I am ready for the ringing bells of the spring peepers and the dawn chorus of the songbirds. T am ready for leaves to unfold on the branches and on the ground cover of the forest floor. I am ready for the moss to wake into a new green on the fallen trees, fallen so many years ago they no longer resemble trees. Unlike my sons, I am not ready to move past the past, but I am ready for something different, too, something new and urgentt and thrumming with blood and sap and life. I am learning that it is possible to want two contrary things at once. I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.”
So many times I read Margaret’s words and think, Yes, M, yes. Me, too. When I notice the tiniest signs of the seasons, I feel connected to her; I know she’s out there noticing, too, and finding meaning in everything she sees and hears. She is my fellow crow-loving friend, and like them (and like me), she is feisty. “I love the crows not because they are exotic,” she writes, “but because they are kindred creatures. I see in them my own kind.”
Her Southern Book Prize money is going to Homegrown National Park, “a nonprofit that encourages people to convert their outdoor spaces into beautiful and functioning wildlife habitats.” (Which, I have to point out, sounds a lot like what my parents have been doing with their land in Hermitage, Tennessee, for 30+ years. Go mom and dad!)
This first day of March feels like just the right time to have Margaret pay us a quick visit here. It’s gray, damp, and chilly outside my office window, but there are pink blossoms on the tree across the street, and the budded branches I snipped from a tree at my folks’ house last weekend have pressed open into tiny green leaves. I woke up feeling miserable and hopeless about Gaza, and will continue to, but I will also take Margaret’s words to heart: “Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is trembling into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of the ashes.”
How does the South inform your artwork?
Except for one grad-school semester in Philadelphia, where I did not thrive, I’ve lived in the South for my whole life. It’s impossible for me to imagine being who I am, or writing what I write, if I weren’t Southern. I just don’t have any other reference point. I am a creature of pinewoods and running creeks and red-dirt roads. I am a creature of the Bible Belt.
But I also live in suburbia, which I presume is sort of the same everywhere. I also live in a blue city in a red state, which is also sort of the same everywhere. So in that sense I’m not particularly Southern at all.
None of this answers your question, though. I don’t know the answer to your question. I guess maybe the South informs my work because the South made me? That’s as close as I can get.
Tell me about a Southern artist you identify with or admire, and why.
Nepotism alert! The Southern artist I most identify with and most admire is my brother, Billy Renkl. Billy is a brilliant art professor and collage artist. He is also only a year younger than I am, and we grew up more or less twinned. While our mother cared for our baby sister, we were left to our own devices, allowed to go anywhere we could get to on our own power.
Where we generally went was the woods, so we grew up with a nearly identical aesthetic. Billy is just as powerfully drawn to birds and insects and flowers and leaves and light as I am.
What I most admire about his work is the holiness of it. The way it honors the beauty of the world itself and also the beauty of the life the paper had first – as a textbook image, say, or as an advertisement or a greeting card or a school report card or a cotton-gin ledger or a love letter – before Billy gave it a new life in a work of collage art. He is cherishing and preserving something that goes far beyond his own artistic vision. His work is a celebration of creation in all its manifestations.
Growing up, how did you conform to Southern codes of femininity?
I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I was in my 30s before I bought my first lipstick.
Growing up, how did you push back against Southern codes of femininity?
I was taught to push back against nearly everything. My father raised me to be a lawyer. He liked it when I talked back. He loved it when I got into trouble for challenging the status quo.
What is a specific place in the South where you feel at home?
Set me down in any place where the dominant vegetation is white pine, and I’m right at home.
Tell me about a Southern expression that
a. You dislike
b. You love, or
c. That you’ve used in your work
This is not an expression exactly, and I don’t know if it’s exclusively Southern, but the word “dumbass” comes in handier than any other colloquialism I routinely use.
What do you like about living in the South?
Dumbasses notwithstanding, I love the people here more even than I love the extravagantly beautiful landscape. Nobody tells a story like a Southerner tells a story, and Southern hospitality is a real thing. People might talk about you behind your back (c.f. storytelling above), but they’ll pull you up a chair and feed you pound cake too. And if you ever really need help, you have only to ask. Friends and neighbors and total strangers will be lining up all the way down the street to help you.
Margaret Renkl’s website, which includes a link to her appearance on PBS NewsHour.
Her New York Times column archives.
Follow Margaret on Instagram and Threads.
Buy The Comfort of Crows, Graceland, At Last, and Late Migrations.
Congratulations are due!
To GSWer Kim Green, whose book, with Chantha Nguon, Slow Noodles, is out now and receiving the warm praise it deserves. Revisit Kim’s wonderful Q&A here.
Other Good Southern Women Q&As you might enjoy:
One Year of the Good Southern Women Interview Series
So wonderful to read this and hear both of your voices in the conversation!
Thank you so much for this. Margaret is a beacon of hope and I think of her every time I don't rake my leaves.