REGISTRATION REQUIRED. Join Amy, a librarian, and AyoLane, a naturalist, for an outdoor book club that focuses on our natural world. We’ll discuss our all-time favorite nature titles, both fiction and non-fiction. The book club will meet at parks throughout St. Johns County, practically in your own backyard!

This month we’ll be reading Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings at Vaill Point Park.  Originally published in 1942, Cross Creek has become a classic in modern American literature. For the millions of readers raised on The Yearling, here is the story of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s experiences in the remote Florida hamlet of Cross Creek, where she lived for thirteen years. From the daily labors of managing a seventy-two-acre orange grove to bouts with runaway pigs and a succession of unruly farmhands, Rawlings describes her life at the Creek with humor and spirit. Her tireless determination to overcome the challenges of her adopted home in the Florida backcountry, her deep-rooted love of the earth, and her genius for character and description result in a most delightful and heartwarming memoir.

Acclaimed author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1918. She was born in Washington, D.C., and moved to Cross Creek, Florida, at the age of thirty-two. Some of her other books include South Moon Under, Golden Apples, When the Whippoorwill, and Cross Creek Cookery. Rawlings published fiction until her death in St. Augustine in 1953.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. If the weather is sunny, please bring your own camp chair for sitting out under the trees. If it’s rainy, we’ll be sitting in the park pavilion. Feel free to bring your own snacks & beverages! Please notify us at least 3 days in advance if you should need a sign language interpreter. Questions? Please call Amy at 904.827.6942 or email at aackerman@sjcfl.us.