The Lawson Trek
  • Home
    • About
    • Interactive Map
    • The Trek
  • Along the Path: Blog
  • John Lawson
    • "A New Voyage to Carolina"
    • The Carolina Colony
  • Talk to us!
  • Store
  • Press

Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

Pictures at an Exhibition

10/9/2019

7 Comments

 
So naturally I want people to read my book, and of course to buy it and enable me to send my sons to college and all of that stuff. And I like telling stories and I like making books and all of that. I liked the hiking and I like the research. But at bottom, if there's one thing I think is really important about this project, it's that it will share the story of John Lawson, which is criminally unknown. I've said a million times: John Lawson should be North Carolina's William Penn, yet he's barely known. 

​Well, now there's an exhibit about him at the City of Raleigh Museum.
Picture
Lots of quotes from Lawson and quotes from me. A big map of where he and I went. Lots of images, and plenty of stuff I plucked up along the way. Even my backpack and shoes!
This all came about because I saw a piece in Outside Magazine about an exhibit created by an Appalachian Trail hiker who had done a lot of drawing. The exhibit had drawings, but it also hung a backpack on the wall, produced the maps the hiker had used, and even a bandanna. The sort of thinginess of the exhibit appealed to me. It just seemed to evoke the spirit of backpacking more than any other representation I'd ever seen. 

So I got to thinking about this Lawson project, and all the maps, and the backpacks, and the shoes, and the stuff -- feathers and rocks and shells and roadside ditch trash -- that along with the writing and the images made the experience so rich for me. So I reached out to a couple museums and almost instantly the City of Raleigh Museum came on board. Their exhibits follow an approach they describe as "then, now, and next," and that's of course been the Lawson Trek's ethos from the drop. So over the last many months we met, wrote, shared images, rethought, rewrote, and came up with something. The first time I saw it was when they sent me a picture of what they had worked up.
Picture
They -- I guess we, actually -- came up with an enormous map of the Carolinas, with 20 spots on it where either Lawson or I, usually both, did or saw something interesting. Each of those spots corresponded to a hanging banner, and each banner had a quote from Lawson, some explanatory text from me, an image from my project, and an image representing Lawson's observation.

In addition, it had my backpack and the pair of trail runners I wore out on the trek, leaning there against a display cabinet filled with objects from my project. There's an arrow given to me by John "Blackfeather" Jeffries of the Occaneechee, and a turkey feather that I found along the way. The arrow has flights made from similar feathers, so I like the two together. There are shards of granite from a quarry that sits today where Lawson described an enormous granite outcropping. There are Sewee pottery sherds from coastal South Carolina and Catawba shards that one of the owners of Ivy Place south of Charlotte dug up simply by scraping his boot heel in the dirt; that's how present the past is even today in the rich Carolina earth. A modern piece of Catawba pottery is in the cabinet too. There are even crushed beer cans, which we saw a lot of.

To be honest, it was pretty amazing to see. It didn't look much like the exhibit Outside Magazine article described, but I think it does a great job of describing the project. More, it does a great job of putting Lawson into modern context, and when I think back on it, that's exactly what I was looking for when I first heard about Lawson and went in search of a book connecting his world to ours.

It opened on Friday, Oct. 4, and it was an enormous charge to watch people go through the exhibit. In the first place, it was just great to see my friends and just regular people actually looking at all this stuff that has been so important to me for about a decade. More, I saw person after person browse around, look here and there, and then go to banner one, then proceed to banner two, and continue on their way.

That reminded me of what I used to call "rooting for the jump" when I wrote for papers and magazines in Philadelphia. I used to not uncommonly find myself on the train or subway, standing in the aisle, and noticing someone reading something I had written. I would watch and wait until they got to the end of a segment of the story, and find the "continued on page ..." line -- journalists call the next part the jump.
Picture
A couple of my friends -- one is Rob Waters, who walked some of this trek -- stand between the map and the display case. You can see the arrow and other artifacts.
And I would sort of root for it: "Don't just read whatever else is on this page; turn the page! Turn to the rest of my article!" And if they did, I would get an absurd jolt of pleasure at having engaged them. Watching people make their way through this exhibit was just like that. They were doing what I had set out to do ten years ago: learning about John Lawson and putting him in perspective in our own time. Book, poster, pins, patches, blog, blah blah blah. The point of this entire enterprise has been, really, to wake people up about the amazing John Lawson. And now for six months the City of Raleigh Museum is doing exactly that. And then, we hope, the exhibit will travel to other museums all over North and South Carolina. I'm no John Lawson, but it feels like that's at least a contribution.
7 Comments

Once More Unto the Breach ...

10/2/2019

1 Comment

 
Picture
A poster! With Lawson's map, and Lawson's portrait, and my images, and maps from museums and God knows what all. Is it not awesome?
It's a weird thing, this business of telling things to people. About ten years ago I got interested in telling people about John Lawson, and a lot has happened since then. 

So A Delicious Country has been out for around six months, and it's been one thing and another since then, almost all enormous fun. I've talked about Lawson and his journey and my own to people at bookstores and colleges, state parks and arts councils, museums and bars. And there's another several months to go in this little parade: I get to go this month to the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, which is as far as I'm concerned the best book festival there is. You can see the whole rest of the schedule here. 

But today I want to tell you about what's above these paragraphs: a poster. From the beginning of this project I've tried to give it everything it needed to succeed. It has its website -- here you are, yes? -- which gives history about Lawson and his journey and updates about me and mine. It got the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT to support it. As the website provided updates on my progress, I also kept a supply of pins and patches to share as I went along, distributing them to people I met exactly as Lawson shared beads and tobacco and other treats with the people who helped him along. 

And of course ultimately out came A Delicious Country, the book distilling everything I learned about Lawson and the Carolinas on my trek. It's been a treat to share that. 

​But from the start I believed this project needed one more thing: a poster. Between Lawson's map and the trail of my own series of campsites and adventures on his trail, between the wonderful images from his book and the stream of Instagram pictures I left in my wake, a little story attached to each and every image, it just seemed like a poster needed to exist. 

So here's the poster. My genius friend Lacey Chylack is a designer, and she worked with me to create this poster. It has Lawson's map with highlights of our journeys marked on it. It has images from my journey and maps and pictures from his book and his time. I'm thrilled with it, and of course it's now available from the store page of this site. 

I'm not sure why I felt this was necessary. But it seemed like a way to summarize this enterprise of mine, and Lawson's, and to put it all together in a way that would look nice on a wall but would also interest teachers and schoolkids. Getting people to know about Lawson has, after all, been at the center of this undertaking from the start.

It's a weird business, this belief that people need to know things and you need to tell them. Once I was on Lawson's trail, everything else seemed to just follow: the website, the pins, the patches, the book. And now the poster is here, and that's just about it. 

Except oh yeah -- Friday, Oct. 4, an exhibit opens up about this enterprise at the City of Raleigh Museum. 

​
Picture
Do you see this stuff? It's all the exhibit designed by the folks at the COR Museum. I worked with them and provided copy and connections with Lawson and things like arrows and rocks and other artifacts, but I'm kinda blown away by what it looks like they've done. I can't wait to see it in real life.

Real life. Again, the exhibit, called A Delicious Country, just like the book (taken of course from Lawson's own description of Carolina) opens First Friday, Oct. 4, from 6 to 9 pm at the Museum, and runs for a few months.

The Museum will have copies of the poster and of course copies of the book, to say nothing of the pins and patches, so if you want you can come home with an armful of every single Lawson thing we've produced for this enterprise. 

I'll be honest -- I'm a little overwhelmed. I'm used to seeing books in print, though that's always a thrill. Then seeing the poster was pretty amazing. Now seeing this exhibit ready to launch, to sort of sound the starting gun for the next few months, probably the last few months of major support for the book, is amazing. I can't wait to see it set up in person, mixed with the artifacts they've prepared for viewing too. Come on out: I'll be there Oct. 4 from 6 to 9, though the exhibit will be on display for months every minute the museum is open. See you there!

1 Comment

    Archives

    January 2020
    October 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    August 2017
    May 2017
    August 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All
    Adventure
    African American
    Angie Clemmons
    Anthropocene
    Apothecary
    Appalachian
    Archaeologists
    Archaeology
    Army-navy
    Art
    Artifacts
    Atlanta
    Backpack
    Banking
    Barbecue
    Barry Beasley
    Bath
    Beaufort
    Beckee Garris
    Beetle
    Beginning
    Ben Franklin
    Berm
    Bill
    Birds
    Blister
    Book
    Bookstore
    Boston
    Botanical
    Boykin
    Breach
    Brent Burgin
    Brownlee
    Buck
    Buffer
    Cabelas
    Cambridge
    Camden
    Camera
    Canoe
    Canty
    Catawba
    Chain
    Charleston
    Charlotte
    Chelsea
    Chocolate
    Chris Judge
    Church
    Cincinnati
    City Of Raleigh Museum
    Civilization
    Coe
    Comment
    Community
    Concord
    Confederate
    Contentnea
    Cornwallis
    Country Music
    Couture
    Crawford
    Creek
    Croatoan
    Cutler
    Cypress
    Danger
    Davis
    Death
    Delightsome
    Delk's
    Denton
    Devices
    Drake
    Drawing
    Drunk
    Duck
    Durham
    Eagle
    Earnhardt
    Earth Day
    East
    Ecologist
    Effron
    Embankment
    End
    Error
    Evans
    Exhibit
    Expeditions
    Facebook
    Feather
    Fern
    Finish
    Fire
    Flag
    Flintlock
    Flood
    Francis
    French
    Gaillard
    Gander Mountain
    Garden
    Geology
    Gimpy
    GIS
    Google
    Great Wagon Road
    Green
    Greenville
    Grifton
    Guerry
    Gun
    Guns
    Haigler
    Hallenbeck
    Hampton
    Hanging
    Hannah Smith
    Harris
    Hartford
    Harvest
    Heat
    Hempton
    Highway
    Hillsborough
    Hips
    Historic Bath
    Hollow Rocks
    Home
    Homeness
    Hortus Siccus
    Hospitality
    Huguenots
    Huntley
    Indians
    Instagram
    Interstate
    Island
    Ivy
    Ivy Place
    Jamaica
    Jarvis
    Jennifer Landin
    Jered
    Jimmy White
    John Jeffries
    John White
    Journalism
    Kadaupau
    Kannapolis
    Katawba Valley Land Trust
    Katie Winsett
    Kayak
    Kershaw
    Keyauwee
    King
    Knife
    Lame
    Land
    Language
    Lawson
    Lawsonians
    Lecture
    Legacy
    Legare
    Legislators
    Leigh Swain
    Lenoir
    Lenoir Store
    Lenses
    Library
    Lichen
    Lies
    Loberger
    Locke
    London
    Longleaf
    Lost Colony
    Lynch
    Lynching
    Magnuson
    Mansplaining
    Maps
    Mass Shooting
    Match-coat
    Mathematical
    Meerkat
    Memorial
    Mental Floss
    Mill
    Millstone
    Miniature
    Monkeyshine
    Moonshine
    Museum
    Museum Day Live
    Musings
    Nancy
    Nascar
    Native American Studies Center
    Natural History Museum
    Nature
    Nesbit
    Netherton
    Neuse
    Newspaper
    Nonfiction
    Notebooks
    Occaneechi
    Orlando
    Pack's Landing
    Palmetto
    Pamlico
    Park
    Patent Leather
    Pedestrian
    Peggy Scott
    Periscope
    Petiver
    Photography
    Physic
    Pig
    Pig Man
    Pittsburgh
    Pocket
    Poinsett
    Polo
    Potsherd
    Pottery
    Preparation
    Presentation
    Press
    Process
    Proofreading
    Property
    Publishing
    Raccoon
    Racing
    Racism
    Racist
    Raleigh
    Rape
    Ray
    Readings
    Reconsideration
    Records
    Revolution
    Richard Smith
    Richardson
    Rights
    Riparian
    Rivulet
    Road
    Roadness
    Roanoke
    Robert Off
    Roland Kays
    Rolling Stone
    Roombox
    Rules
    Salisbury
    Santee
    Sapona
    Sassafras
    Scan
    Sconc
    Seneca
    Seth
    Shakespeare
    Sir Walter Raleigh
    Slavery
    Slime Mold
    Sloane
    Slope
    Small Town
    Smith
    Smithsonian
    Snow
    Sore
    Sounds
    Spanish Moss
    Specimens
    Speedway
    Spencer
    State Fair
    Steve Grant
    Stewart
    St. Mark's
    Suburban
    Sumter County
    Surveying
    Swamp
    Tar River
    Technology
    Textile
    Tide
    Tobacco
    Toms River
    Tool
    Towel
    Trade
    Trading Ford
    Trading Girls
    Trail
    Trap
    Traunter
    Tree
    Tree Farming
    Trek
    Trilobite
    Troi Perkins
    Truth
    Tryon
    Tupelo
    Turkey
    Tuscarora
    Twitter
    Ugly
    Unc
    Val
    Val Green
    Virginia
    Virginia Dare
    Virginia Historical Society
    Walking
    Washington
    Waxhaw
    Weather
    Website
    White
    Writing
    Wrong
    Yadkin
    Yoga

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly