In this episode of Carrying the Fire, host Hal Herring sits down with New Orleans-based journalist and author Boyce Upholt. Boyce is the author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, which Amazon calls, “Rich and powerful… a startling account of what happens when we try to fight against nature instead of acknowledging and embracing its power―a lesson that is all too relevant in our rapidly changing world.”
While teaching school in the Mississippi Delta, Boyce took an assignment to write a magazine story about legendary guide and riverman John Ruskey. Ruskey took Boyce into a world he had not imagined- hidden behind the levees, lost beyond the green thickets that wall off the river. “I was entranced by the landscape I found there: a wilderness, threading through the heart of the nation. I began to write more stories about the Mississippi, in part just for the excuse to get back out there.” He would eventually paddle the river from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico and spend years collecting the stories and history that became The Great River.
Boyce Upholt also is the co-founder and editor of the bi-annual magazine Southlands “A magazine about the wild South, in all its forms. Take the low road.” He lives in New Orleans with his wife and new baby.
This interview explores the deep, tangled history of the continent's most legendary waterway, tracking the river from its ancient, indigenous past to its highly engineered, precarious present.
Hal and Boyce discuss the hubris of trying to "freeze time" on a dynamic river, the dark environmental and social legacies of the Delta's plantation economy, and what it truly means to "think like a watershed." Boyce shares the inspiration behind his latest venture, Southlands magazine, a new print publication dedicated to honoring the nature, outdoor culture, and rich literary heritage of the American South.
The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt
A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown
Meant to Be Wild: The Struggle to Save Endangered Species through Captive Breeding by Jan DeBlieu
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth
Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
The Bear by William Faulkner
Southlands – Boyce Upholt’s twice-yearly print magazine focused on nature, outdoors, and how the people of the South relate to the natural world.
The Bitter Southerner – The digital publication where Upholt published his very first profile piece on canoeing guide John Ruskey.
Mountain Gazette – Legacy outdoor print magazines referenced as regional benchmarks that Southlands looks to complement.
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