Evan Peacock and Donald C Jackson signing event

Overview

Join us for a signing with DONALD C. JACKSON and EVAN PEAOCK for their books, RESTLESS WINDS and RETURN TO ELKINS CREEK.

Donald C. Jackson’s newest book of outdoor essays, Restless Winds: Memoirs of an Outdoorsman, takes the reader on a journey from America’s Deep South out into the world. Jackson’s essays explore landscapes, waters, and cultures that have defined Jackson’s career and life. Hunting and fishing stories from his Mississippi farm blend with stories from Africa, Alaska, Asia, Australia, Europe, and South America.

As a fisheries professor at Mississippi State University, naturalist, conservationist, and former pastor for a small rural church in Kentucky, Jackson injects deeply personal and spiritual experiences into his writings. From the desert of Central Australia, into remote jungles of Malaysia and Vietnam, through the Nepalese mountains, to long walks during misty nights in Uganda, Jackson shows readers how to recapture their humanity in a rush-away world. Whether he is recounting his experience during a military coup in Paraguay or the magic of training a puppy to become a good retriever, Jackson’s encounters rediscover how simple things bring life in the present tense into sharper focus.

Return to Elkins Creek combines a series of fishing stories, descriptions of changing cultural norms, and the peculiar history of freshwater fishing gear. Beginning with subsistence fishing in very rural Mississippi at a time “when the poorest among us in the Deep South still took our water from holes in the ground and high school was considered an optional step along the career path,” the stories continue chronologically, with descriptions of learning to fish with rod-and-reel combos and artificial lures; coming-of-age angling misadventures with dubious backwoods characters; swapping fish for toilet paper during the Pandemic; a cheerfully inept expedition to a Florida bay where things were enlivened by a hurricane; and a return to where it all began, alongside a small creek in the hills of the Choctaw County backwoods, cane pole and bait jar in hand.

Part memoir, part cultural history, and part historical vignette, Return to Elkins Creek is held together by the common thread of fishing as a touchstone in changing times. One need not be a fishing enthusiast to appreciate the stories or descriptions of the many colorful characters therein, including the clever and eccentric inventors of modern fishing gear.