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Tuckasegee’s Crowe wins statewide award
A local author has won a statewide award.
The N.C. Literary and Historical Association has chosen Tuckasegee’s Thomas Crowe’s “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods” to receive the Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction.
Presented annually since 1953, the prize recognizes the year’s best volume of nonfiction by a North Carolina resident. Crowe’s book was selected from among 30 books for this year’s award.
The Ragan Award honors the late poet/journalist Sam Ragan and is the oldest state-sponsored award of its kind in the United States.
Tuckasegee author Thomas Crowe reads from his most recent book, “Zoro’s Field,” at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. Crowe’s book has been named winner of the Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction, which is given annually by the N.C. Literary and Historical Association to the year’s best volume of nonfiction by a North Carolina resident.
Published by the University of Georgia Press, “Zoro’s Field” is reminiscent of Thoreau’s “Walden,” and is based on Crowe’s years of self-sufficient wilderness living in Western North Carolina from 1978-82. The book has been praised in reviews since its release in May.
“This book will appeal to anyone (and we are many) who has imagined unhinging from the cumbersome structures of ‘progress‚‘ and consumerism in order to know the rhythms of quiet work and nature,” wrote Alison Deming, author of “The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture.”
“I have always respected Thomas Crowe‚s work and dedication as someone who has truly found both his place and his work, and recommend him highly,” wrote poet and scholar Gary Snyder on the back cover of “Zoro’s Field.”
Crowe has appeared on television, National Public Radio and in feature articles in The Sylva Herald and other newspapers. He has given talks and readings across the Southeast and appeared at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., in September at the invitation of the Thoreau Society.
“This was like the icing on the cake,” Crowe said. “To take ‘Zoro’s Field’ to the place that gave birth to Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ is, for me, the stuff of dreams. His book was, and continues to be, one of the major influences in my life, both in terms of how and what I write, and in terms of how I have lived my life.”
After a long absence from the southern Appalachians where he grew up, Crowe returned to the area. “Zoro’s Field” is Crowe’s chronicle of a time when he survived by his own hand without electricity, plumbing, modern-day transportation or regular income. He made his home in a small cabin on what was once the farm of mountain man Zoro Guice (the father of Judge Zoro Guice Jr. of Henderson, County). As the reader absorbs Crowe’s observations on southern Appalachian natural history, we also come to know Zoro and the others who showed Crowe the mountain ways that saw him through those four years.
Paced to nature’s rhythms and cycles, Crowe writes of many things: digging a root cellar, being a good listener, gathering wood, living in the moment and tending a mountain garden. And he explores questions on wilderness, self-sufficiency, urban growth, and ecological overload.
“Thomas Crowe’s phrasing of the voices that resound throughout the hill country of Western North Carolina echoes the mutually enhancing presence of humans and the earth, which is the high experience to which we are called,” said Greensboro author and ecologist Thomas Berry.
A resident of Jackson County for 20 years, Crowe has lived in Tucksegee for the past 12. He continues to write, garden and heat his old farmhouse with wood. Author of 15 books of original and translated work, he has also been instrumental in the establishment of the Sylva Farmers Market and is one of the founding members of the Canary Coalition – a grassroots organization focusing on the issue of air pollution in WNC.
“I’ve been writing and publishing for 30 years now, and this is the first time that anything I have written has gotten this kind of formal recognition,” Crowe said when contacted about his recent award. “I’m very happy that this watermark event comes in recognition of this particular book. In other words, I’m happy, not for myself but for ‘Zoro’s Field,’ a book which so many people here in Western North Carolina have embraced and supported.”
Presentation of this year’s NCLHA literary awards will be Nov. 18 in Raleigh.
For further information, contact the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources or Joe Newberry at (919) 807-7391.
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