Writer's Museum to host Hall of Fam author

EATONTON — Georgia Writers Museum will host Georgia Writers Hall of Fame honoree Janisse Ray, who will be the “Meet the Author” presenter on June 4 at the Plaza Arts Center at 7 p.m.

The event will feature sweets from the wild and décor themed around her lauded book, "The Woods of Fannin County." Following her presentation, Ray will sign copies of her book. Admission is $20. Contact Georgia Writers Museum (www.georgiawritersmuseum.org) to register and preorder a copy of The Woods of the book.

In the fall of 1945, eight children — brothers and sisters ranging in age from three months to 10 years — vanished from a rented bungalow in Morganton, Ga. They were taken by mule and wagon to a remote shack in the Blue Ridge foothills of Fannin County, near the North Carolina line. For the next four years they would live mostly alone, without mother or father, roaming the mountains and valleys of what had been Cherokee Territory, scouring for food and scrambling to take care of themselves and each other.

“I first heard about the story from my father,” Ray said in a recent interview. “He introduced me to one of the surviving siblings. I would eventually interview three other siblings and the wife of another. While the story is completely true, its central character — who died before I heard about the story — is a mixture of the siblings I interviewed.”

Ray, a naturalist and ecology activist, is the author of a half-dozen books, including the widely acclaimed "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood," "Wild Spectacle," "Wild Card Quilt." Her newest book, "Craft and Current, A Manual for Magical Writing," will be released this summer. She has received an American Book Award, a Southern Book Critics Circle Award, a Southern Booksellers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Green Prize for Sustainable Literature, a Nautilus Book Award, an Arlene Eisenberg Award, and many others.