Still Upright & Headed Downstream

When John Lane was a young poet, a magazine editor asked him to leave the comfortable eddy of verse and contemplate in paragraphs why he was a kayaker. The resulting essay, "Why I Love Falling Water," began what would become a thirty-five-year stream of published poetry and prose about rivers and river people. Gathered here after decades, scattered individually throughout a dozen published books and many magazines, newspapers, and journals, are essays and poems about paddling and floating rivers all over the Southeast and beyond. Settings range from the Nantahala in North Carolina to the Tiburon in Mexico. This collection encompasses all John Lane's river writing outside his two book-length narratives CHATTOOGA: DESCENDING INTO THE DELIVERANCE RIVER and MY PADDLE TO THE SEA: ELEVEN DAYS IN THE RIVER OF THE CAROLINAS. Put in anywhere among this wealth of literary reflection and insight and you won't be disappointed.