Answering the Call of the Wild:
A Passion for Nature
Thursday, December 19, 1996

Field of Sun and Grass: An Artist's Journal of the New Jersey Meadowlands
by John R. Quinn

By Tina Traster
Staff Writer

A small boy in search of a pre-dawn adventure found his vocation in a frozen meadow in Overpeck Creek Valley.
The year was 1947, and John R. Quinn was 8. He had sneaked from his Ridgefield Park house and followed a wading bird's tracks in the frosted wilderness.
I remember that tiny fragment of warmth amidst the vastness," Quinn said. "Its persistence to survive in that forbidding, frozen environment made me pursue a career as a naturalist. I just knew then that I wanted to explore the natural world."
Quinn, a high school graduate who attended parsons School of Design in New York for two years, knitted his creative talents with his passion for nature.
In almost 40 years, he has written and illustrated a dozen non-fiction books on wilderness and marine life. He has designed exhibits and organized educational programs at science museums in Philadelphia, New Hampshire, and New Jersey. He worked at Tropical Fish Hobbyist Magazine as an editor and artist for the past decade.
Now Quinn, whose well-built frame and large hands are softened by a wavy mop of graying blond hair, a salt-and-pepper beard, and azure eyes, has harnessed his personal and professional experiences to pen and paint what he considers his most important work so far.
"Fields of Sun and Grass: An Urban Artist's Journal of an Urban Wilderness," to be published by Rutgers University Press, is due to hit bookstores and state libraries in July.
The 300-page book with 180 pen-and-ink drawings is Quinn's tour through the Hackensack River Meadowlands. The work includes history, science, and Quinn's musings and memories.
"People are estranged from their natural environment," said Quinn, who takes long pulls on his pipe while contemplating responses to questions. "I felt that the story of the Meadowlands should be told on a popular level. This is a recovering ecosystem, and there is great beauty there for those who have the eyes — and the heart — to see it."
Quinn lives in Little Ferry but still writes and draws at his mother's Ridgefield Park house, where he grew up. He accepts that development and landfills have destroyed a sweep of the Meadowlands, but says some of the natural habitat is returning. He is among a phalanx of conservationists who oppose plans by The Mills Corp. of Arlington, Va., to build a large mall in environmentally sensitive wetlands.
Neither Quinn, who received a $1,000 book advance from Rutgers University Press, nor the publisher expects the printing of 250 had-cover editions and 3,000 paperbacks to be profitable. The hardback will cost $50; the paperback, $24.95.
"We expect to lose money but the topic is worthy," said Marilyn Campbell, managing editor of Rutgers University Press in Piscataway. "The Meadowlands are an important natural area to preserve. They provide habitate for wildlife, recreation for humans. it's important economically for commercial fisheries. It's not just wasteland, as many people think. It's a vibrant part of our bio-system.":
Quinn will earn about 5 percent to 10 percent of the publisher's net on the hardback, and about 7.5 percent on the paperback, Campbell said.
The book will not make Quinn rich — but it will make him happy. "Fields of Sun and Grass is Quinn's lifelong ambition, and a project that has been on hold for almost two decades.
In 1978, a Boston publisher was interested in a proposal Quinn had submitted on a book about the Meadowlands, he said. But the timing was all wrong. Quinn and his first wife, who were living in New Hampshire, were getting divorced. he decided to return to New Jersey. Mired in economic difficulties and tough emotional transitions, Quinn abandoned the book project.
Prior to that, Quinn had published a handful of books, including "The Winter Woods," a Book of the Month Club selection during the winter of 1976-77. The book took readers on a hike through wooded lands near his New Hampshire home.
For five years, Quinn stopped writing and drawing. He focused on earning a living, working as a science curator for the Bergen Museum of Art and Science in Paramus from 1982 to 1984.
Quinn met his new wife, Lucy, at church in 1981, and became a surrogate father to her two daughters. Quinn's three daughters from his previous marriage live in Oregon.
In 1984 the couple moved to Neptune City while Quinn worked for Tropical Fish Hobbyist. He made his publishing comeback in 1989 with "Our Native Fishes," which enjoyed a second printing, and he spent the next five years grinding out four more books.
The Author said he is updating a 1979 book, "Nature's World Records," for McGraw Hill.
Quinn plans to dedicate "Fields of Sun and Grass" to his father and grandfather. "My father," he said," because I loved him so much, and my grandfather, because he took me on my first trip to the Meadowlands.
With "Fields of Sun and Grass," Quinn completes his work in non-fiction and moves into a new genre.
His first effort's working title is "Mammut: The Last of the Mastodons," and it's a children's book with autobiographical elements about a young boy who feels isolated and unloved in his modern-day suburban town and travels back to prehistoric times. He meets a mastodon who becomes his spiritual guardian, and shows him "Who we are. How we fit in. How we learn to love."

Editor's Note: "Fields of Sun and Grass" was published in September, 1997 and is available at bookstores and online. Written by a native son of the Meadows, it captures the people and places in Meadows like no one else can. It is by far the best work published on the Meadowlands to date. — KLS