Georgann Eubanks is all lit up and talking about fireflies.
“There are 75 species in the eastern part of the country, and we’re still discovering more,” the writer says. “But we’re discovering them even as we’re destroying them.”
Of those 75 species, she’s describing a specific one native to pockets of Southern Appalachia: the blue ghost firefly. Unlike the bright blink we associate with most backyard lightning bugs—the species many of us are guilty of having trapped in tinfoil-topped Mason jars as children and probably killed—this firefly is distinct for hovering en masse about a foot off the ground while emitting a blue-white light, prolonged and almost sapphire at its deepest: “like fairies,” Eubanks says.
She’d seen the blue ghost fireflies on a private nighttime tour, as she details in her new book, only to later spot them outside her mountain cabin, at which point she excitedly reported the sighting to her guide from the tour.
“‘I’ve been doing this for 10 years,’” she recalls him saying with a laugh. “‘You don’t know how many people who’ve lived here 30 years, their whole life, whatever, and never saw [the fireflies] until they went on my tour, and discovered they had them, too.’”
Such grounding moments drive The Fabulous Ordinary: Discovering the Natural Wonders of the Wild South, Eubanks’s new book, out last month from UNC Press. Donna Campbell, Eubanks’s longtime collaborator, contributes photographs.
When I reached out to Eubanks for an interview, I asked in my email if there was a spot we could meet that was perhaps reflective of her book’s subject. I don’t know what I expected—maybe the Haw River, maybe the North Carolina Botanical Garden—but she responded and asked to meet at a gazebo “where the frogs sing after a rain.”
The gazebo in question turned out to be steps from her Carrboro condo. As we spoke, she held up her hands, every so often, to listen for a frog, their intermittent sonic appearances underscoring the “ordinary” referenced in her title.
Across 15 chapters, The Fabulous Ordinary explores “annual miracles” that take place in seven states. For North Carolinians, some are more immediately accessible, like the fireflies or bugling elk in Cherokee and moths in Little Switzerland. (An astonishing fact I learned from Eubanks: in contrast to the state’s 175 species of butterflies, North Carolina has upward of 3,000 moth species.)
Other miracles require a longer drive, but one you’ll likely feel compelled to make, as Eubanks sketches out how a variety of factors—a relatively stable climate, slower development—have made the Southeast a dramatic hot spot of biodiversity.
The climate emergency is endemic to any conversation about the natural world. The week Eubanks and I met, President Trump had just cleared 100 days in office, a stretch marked by, among other transgressions, the mass firing of thousands of Environmental Protection Agency and National Park Service workers and 145 actions rolling back clean air and water protections.
In The Fabulous Ordinary, climate urgency is transmitted through wonder and a sturdy sense of place.
“There are things you should see before they’re gone,” Eubanks says. “And that you should take your kids and grandkids to see.”
Eubanks grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Her paternal grandparents were both savvy about plants—at her grandmother’s funeral, when people cast flowers on the grave, Eubanks recalls her aunt saying, “She could tell you the Latin name of every one of those flowers!” Eubanks spent the first two decades of her career working as a consultant in higher education, with fiction as her main creative outlet. Eventually, the “gene kicked in,” and she began taking on creative nonfiction projects that intersected with the natural world.
“There are already too many great stories out there,” Eubanks says of her love for nonfiction. “Why would I want to make one up?”
There are things you should see before they’re gone. And that you should take your kids and grandkids to see.”
In 2007, UNC Press published her book on the “literary trails of North Carolina,” a project she persuaded her editors to turn into three books. That series then spawned 2018’s The Month of Their Ripening: North Carolina Heritage Foods through the Year, an exploration of Tar Heel foods “at peak readiness” by the calendar, and 2021’s Saving the Wild South, which had Eubanks tromping around six states to visit botanical species “wavering on the edge of extinction.” The Fabulous Ordinary serves as a bit of a sequel to the latter, broadening the lens from endangered plants to phenomena.
Books from academic presses, often specialized, don’t always reach the average consumer. And while The Fabulous Ordinary could seem fusty on description (“fabulous” strikes me as a word perhaps more often associated with a clothing boutique), Eubanks’s lyrical gifts shine through clearly. As Eubanks’s editor at UNC Press, Lucas Church, writes, this new book is “not a guidebook in the traditional sense.”
“Her gift as a writer is that she immediately entrances the reader,” Church writes in an email to the INDY, “offering a beautiful mix of evocative descriptions of, say, the sounds made by the sandhill crane or why the eastern spadefoot toad has elliptical pupils, while firmly grounding her storytelling in the relationship between us and nature, and how we must be better stewards of our environment.”
A chapter on dimpled trout lilies is almost thriller-like in its description of how a plot of the lilies, 30 acres large, came to be discovered near Whigham, Georgia—just shy of the Florida panhandle and far from the plant’s native habitat—when a highway expanded several decades ago. Later, in the early 2000s, a small group of citizens banded together to conserve the property’s rare tens of millions of flowers, distinct for their daily ritual of opening from dawn to dusk. If you pay a morning visit at just the right time, you may bear witness to a mass yellow unfurling.
Interestingly, several of the places chronicled, like the plot of lilies and a remote Alabama canyon full of glowing larvae, are not federally owned, reflecting a lack of state and federal investment in the Southeast’s ecology. But if private ownership is not an ideal model for conservation, Eubanks nevertheless finds hope in citizen efforts, arguing that drawing people’s attention to the singular aspects of where we live can help create sturdier regional identities. If the political is personal, so are the plants.
There is the sight of half a million purple martins in flight in Lexington, South Carolina, which Eubanks compares to the “spectacle of eighteenth-century migrations” of the passenger pigeon, quoting an 1813 passage in which John James Audubon described witnessing, over three days, what he estimated to be billions of birds like an “eclipse.” Passenger pigeons are now extinct, thanks to the hunting crazes of centuries past, but historical asides like that offer helpful comparison points—not just for what we have but for what we’ve already missed out on.
Upon witnessing the purple martins, Eubanks writes, there “are as many of their dark bodies as there are openings of light,” a “loose shawl” across the sky.
Eubanks’s previous book, Saving the Wild South, may have had a direct rallying cry as its title, but its follow-up also offers generous portraits of wonder—a kind of rendering that may animate and move people to act. As Eubanks writes, the task for readers now is to locate a “contagious kind of appreciation that can be kindled” and “do something to repair the world.” That change begins with an invitation to form a relationship with the plants and places we are most at danger of losing. Also: the frogs.
“We’re in a lot of trouble,” Eubanks says. “We’ve got a lot of smart people working on the problem. But we need more people who care.”
Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Bluesky or email [email protected].