Amy Etcheson

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we conclude our conversation with SIU Press authors Fred Delcomyn and James L. Ellis, who co-wrote A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we continue our conversation with SIU Press authors Fred Delcomyn and James L. Ellis, who co-wrote A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers. In 2003, Fred imagined his two-and-a-half-acre backyard, which had been farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to a tallgrass prairie. For the next seventeen years, he and his friend James scored, seeded, monitored, reseeded, and burned those backyard acres into prairie. Their book documents the journey of their restoration and reveals the incredible potential of a backyard to travel back to a time before the wild prairie was put into plow rows.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we begin a conversation with SIU Press authors Fred Delcomyn and James L. Ellis, who co-wrote A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers. Released in the summer of 2021, this book documents a seventeen-year-long restoration of Fred Delcomyn’s two-and-a-half-acre backyard in central Illinois to its natural state of tallgrass prairie.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we continue our Summer in southern Illinois theme, with Land Between the Rivers: The Southern Illinois Country, by authors C. William Horrell, Henry Dan Piper, and Jon W. Voigt.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we continue our Summer in southern Illinois theme with John E. Schwegman’s book The Natural Heritage of Illinois: Essays on Its Lands, Waters, Flora, and Fauna.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we continue our Summer in Southern Illinois theme, with Larry P. and Donna J. Mahan’s book 20 Day Trips in and around the Shawnee National Forest, published in 2013.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we hear some 'fish tales' from our region. For the past 66 years, SIU Press has published books that promote the understanding of our region, from its natural beauty to its storied and diverse history. Art Reid’s Fishing Southern Illinois, was published in 1986. At the time, it was a comprehensive guide to fishing in the region, drawn from the author’s 25 plus years of firsthand experience.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we mark the 55th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all state laws against interracial marriage in the United States.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we revisit the book In Their Letters, in Their Words: Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home edited by Mark Flotow.

Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as the discussion turns to an overlooked event in the history of activism, which is the subject of a chapter in Melissa Ford’s new book A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest during the Great Depression, recently published by SIU Press.