Creatively facing change

Contributed Auburn Villager Louise Turner

Louise Kreher Turner has left no stone unturned. Born in 1914, Turner is now 94 and is best-known in Auburn for founding the Louise Kreher Turner Forest Ecology Preserve, located on North College. Now, Turner's lifetime commitment to community engagement and creative exploration has led her to her most recent feat - publishing her second novel.

Complete with imaginative illustrations by Barbara Keel-Lunsford, Turner's "Before Your Very Eyes" follows a diverse cast of animal characters as they learn what it means to co-exist and adapt to change.

As the colorful personalities of the narrative's chipmunks, squirrels, rats and birds develop, readers join their endeavor to create a home despite the odds - a theme Turner believes everyone can relate to.

Turner herself admits that she has changed with every decade.

"How many comebacks can one person make?" she said. "You just get curious about things. I was a dancer, built and moved houses, and did the Preserve and trails from research."

Highlights of Turner's life from the 1940s to the 1970s included teaching elementary physical education through public broadcasting, conducting workshops in dance, and receiving numerous awards for her service and creative achievements. Her husband, Frank Allen Turner, was a rural mail carrier in Lee County, and she was an education professor at AU until both retired in the mid-1970s.

In the '80s, Turner ended her dance career and decided to turn to real estate in her hometown of New Orleans. There she restored homes until she and her husband returned to Auburn.

On the Plains, Turner gained recognition for her work developing the Forest Ecology Preserve on land that had been in the Turner family for many years. The land was once a farm with fields sowed in cotton, but over the years the couple let the land return to its natural state.

Turner and her husband donated the land to AU's School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences in 1993, three years before her husband's death. The Preserve is now a 110-acre nature center with a large amphitheater, monthly programs, miles of trails and kiosks explaining various facets of local flora and fauna.

"Allen had a dream that the land be preserved in its natural state and shared in perpetuity with the community. He enjoyed the land so much that he wanted others to learn about it and what it has to offer," Turner said in 2000 at the dedication of the amphitheatre on the grounds, designed by AU architecture students.

In those early years AU didn't do much with the acreage, and Turner worked tirelessly to build interest and improve the property. Since her knees were ruined by her dance career, she scooted along the Preserve's paths on a golf cart.

The recipient of the statewide Kelly Mosley Award for "sustaining the quality and future benefits of our environment," Turner's development of trails, programs and classes led the preserve to become a community resource and environmental learning center, according to the Mosley Web site.

Turner said her work at the Preserve was challenging.

"I had to learn a lot about something I knew nothing about," she said.

Turner explained that she didn't set out to be an environmentalist, but simply advocated for what she saw as good.

"Before long, it just got harder to hear things like tree frogs and awfully difficult to see the stars," she said.

"There are things kids aren't really taught, but are things good to know. You just get interested and you get ideas about the environment and want to see more birds and flowers. When you seek them out, they are there because someone decided not to cut them down."

Turner stressed that "Before Your Very Eyes" is not "championing" any single point of view, however.

"There is not another book like it," she said. "It's neutral. I'm not a great thinker or influence, and I have no intention of carrying banners."

Turner said she hopes that after reading the book, children and adults alike can continue developing their own interest in the world around them.

True to this philosophy, cultivating her own interest in writing led Turner to join her first writing class in her eighties and eventually publish her first book "Margaretha's Trunk," a novel based on her family's arrival in America in the early 1800s.

"In working with genealogy, it's tough to fill all the holes, and it can be more meticulous than imaginable," said Turner, explaining that "Margaretha's Trunk" called for an immense amount of research through old family documents.

She liked the creative freedom fiction offered and said she especially liked the ability to use character names to give possibilities for action, like Hears Notellin, Sally Pinkpaws and Mama Gnaw in "Before Your Very Eyes."

From her first writing class, Turner said she's never regretted her choice to write, calling it "a refreshing change."