There’s a new environmental journal to be aware of — and they are now taking submissions!
River Margin is a new literary magazine with a focus on ecology, botany, wilderness and nature writing accepting poetry, essays, creative non-fiction, short fiction, photography and visual art.
In her debut collection, ‘Sandstone and Kin’, Camille LeFevre creatively explores the natural landscape of Northern Arizona, presenting an intimacy with the land and dissolving the boundaries between nature and humanity.
The collection was selected for publication from FLP’s New Womens’ Voices Chapbook Contest and it is definitely deserving of this achievement.
I find myself distracted by people within earshot at exhibitions or museums, with their inane chatter, phone noise, and lack of spatial awareness. Since the Covid-19 restrictions ended, crowds have surged, swarming around cultural artefacts for social media trends. I occasionally visit when buildings are empty, recalling a memorable visit to see the early medieval Fadden More Psalter at the National Museum of Ireland, where my partner was on the Museum Board. The psalter was found in a bog, preserved by low oxygen and sphagnum moss.
When was the last time you sat for a length of time in a quiet space outdoors, looking at, listening to, smelling, and communing with the vast biodiversity of the heterogeneous life forms all around you? How does contemporary Western society—and the systems and structures that shape it—prevent us from doing just that, detaching us from the world around us while also stripping natural spaces of the biodiversity and heterogeneity that comprise them? How can we begin to see and understand the natural world we are part of outside of these systems and structures? These are the questions Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian explores in her thought-provoking book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature.
Woman, Wolf, Carbon Capture. How could I resist? This petite work of fiction by Noelle Catharine Allen, which clocks in at 40 pages, is small but mighty. Allen manages to give our protagonist, Tiny, a mess of technology issues, grief, bad neighbors, and even throws in a few Kayaktivists in a war against beavers. Poor Tiny, who is anything but, is actively grieving for her Gra-Gra, “As Tiny felt her fury kindle, she heard Gra-Gra’s voice: ‘Close your mouth, Tiny, before your tongue catches fire.’” She is also in conflict with her decibel-counting neighbors over her GeoSphinx, a sophisticated heat pump and air filter. The machine makes a bit of noise but is crucial in controlling her asthma, which she developed during her early career of battling wildfires, and is now a reluctant substitute teacher.
I wanted to read this book because I’ve long wondered, as Kawa writes: “… isn’t it fucking wild that hundreds of millions of people in North America shit into fresh drinking water on a daily basis?”
When was the last time you read a fable, or, more likely, had one read one to you? As a child? In Folklore 101 at college? Maybe it’s time to revisit. Animals have always been used in storytelling as a mirror on our own sorry human selves, and The Parliament of Mice, a Fable, by Robert Epstein is no exception. While keeping within the formal syntax of a traditional fable, the writing itself is lovelier than that. Even the epilogue sings: “Somewhere under the sun on a petty scratch of earth hunched an old house and an old barn that listed towards each other as if they longed to collapse in an embrace.”
A rather clichéd question consistently asked of curators, connoisseurs and collectors in interviews is: ‘if this place was on fire, what would you save?’ The chosen piece is inevitably of deep personal, cultural, religious or monetary value, and the interviewer moves along within the generic interview framework. However, what if a whole village, town, area or region was on fire, what would a community wish to save? What would the rest of the world wish for that community to save? Professor Thijs Weststeijn’s The Future of the Past – when cultural heritage meets climate change confronts these challenging questions that the accelerating climate crisis renders increasingly urgent.
Matthew Wolfe’s Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage is a compelling work of narrative nonfiction, meticulously researched and written with the tension of a thriller. Amid the stories of ELF members who stealthily committed arson in the name of animals and the planet are the stories of the law enforcement officers whom the Elves outwitted and outran at every step—until they didn’t. And underneath the drama is a stark message: the planet is imperiled, and those most passionate about saving it have been labeled terrorists.
In our writing program Writing for Animals, we talk a lot about language and how it reflects the ways we treat animals (for better and for worse) — and especially how our use of language can inspire change in the world. It is wonderful to see University of British Columbia professors Derek Gladwin and Kedrick James look at language as a way “to spark a shift in how we understand and interact with the world” in their book Becoming Ecological: Navigating Language and Meaning for Our Planet’s Future.
As a nursling of the rural Irish landscape, I was taken with the title of Merritt R. Turetsky’s book Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life as bogs were a recurrent and onerous part of my childhood. The word ‘bog’ is deeply embedded in the Irish rural psyche, evoking generational resonances of social poverty, fuel, agricultural unproductivity, folklore and the uncanny.
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Greetings, EcoLiterarians, I'm happy to share a few more writing opportunities -- they are coming in fast and furious! And we have two new book reviews to share. Finally, our live Writing for Animals program begins on Sunday and there is still room left. Click here to learn more. Thanks, as always, for reading like you give a damn.John YunkerEcoLit Books Here are the latest upcoming deadlines for environmental writing... Oct. 30: Tiger Moth Review (poetry, fiction) No fee - Website Nov. 1:...
Greetings, EcoLiterarians, For those of you in or near New York State, there is an opportunity to be a part of a huge march to end animal testing. Even if you can't be there, you can support them. See below. And we have new book reviews to share from Midge Raymond and JoeAnn Hart. Thanks, as always, for reading like you give a damn.John YunkerEcoLit Books Here are the latest upcoming deadlines for environmental writing... Sept. 7 - Terrain.org: Contests (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) $20 fee -...
