book interweaves short pieces on nature and the natural world with family stories and memories from Renkl's life. Renkl had not planned to turn the material into a book, considering the blog a way to process her grief. "I found that I took a lot of comfort from watching the natural cycles in my yard. I didn't actually start writing the nature essays until a few months later, when the primary season for the 2018 election really started gearing up. And all this ugliness was coming out." The book, which includes artwork by Renkl's brother, Billy Renkl, received generally favorable reviews, though some critics found the book hard to characterize. Influences While Renkl's formal education was mainly focused around poetry, she eventually settled on her current prose style, including some notably short micro-essays. Renkl names E.B. White, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and James Agee among the writers who have influenced her work. In Death of a Cat, Renkl explicitly links an existential understanding of the animal world to E.B. White's Death of a Pig. Danny Heitman of The Wall Street Journal noted that Renkl's nature writing "seems like a belated answer to White." Renkl's nature writing has been compared to naturalist writers such as Annie Dillard and Peter Matthiessen. Late Migrations was selected for Jenna Bush Hager's book club; Hager compared it to writing by Mary Oliver. The South Renkl is influenced by her upbringing and life in the American South. In her opinion essay "What is a Southern Writer?" Renkl grapples with the region's meaning, both in her work and for the canon as a whole, writing: People can hardly help loving the hands that rocked their cradles or the landscapes that shaped their souls, but I doubt there’s a single writer in the South for whom life here isn’t a source of deep ambivalence. And yet all the writers I’ve mentioned had opportunities to leave—many actually did leave for a time before returning to stay. It has all made me wonder: What if being a Southern writer has nothing to do with rural tropes or lyrical prose or a lush landscape or humid heat so thick it’s hard to breathe? What if being a Southern writer is foremost a matter of growing up in a deeply troubled place and yet finding it somehow impossible to leave? Of seeing clearly the failings of home and nevertheless refusing