Best known for her award-winning 1938 novel The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings would go on to write an equally beloved memoir, Cross Creek, in 1942, chronicling the challenges she faced as a newcomer to farming and her growing admiration for the landscapes and people of this remote part of central Florida. An enthusiastic cook, Rawlings also compiled a cookbook entitled Cross Creek Cookery in response to readers’ requests for the recipes that appear throughout her memoir. We will explore Rawlings’ Cross Creek in the pages of this beautifully written series of stories and recollections and take a virtual tour of Rawlings’ cottage, now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. Students who are interested in viewing the film adaptation of Rawlings’ memoir are invited to participate in a gathering at the end of the course to enjoy many of the recipes that Rawlings herself made while she was a resident of the region.

Required: Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. New York: First Touchstone Edition (Simon & Schuster, 1996), ISBN: 978-0-684-81879-5 (pbk)., available in the Calvin University Campus Store or online.

Subject: literature

Christina Triezenberg holds a PhD in English from Western Michigan University and has taught at Grand Valley State University, Morningside College, and Michigan State University.  She is currently compiling an anthology of contemporary Detroit poetry, as well as revising a full-length study of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller, Gone with the Wind, tentatively titled Reading toward Scarlett: Tracing the Texts that Helped to Shape Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.