Orion May / June 2015

AT THE AGE OF EIGHT I was dispatched to a suburban summer camp. I don’t remember much about it except that (a) there were a lot of rules and (b) I hated it. At the end of the third day I announced to my mother that I wasn’t going back, and she said that that was fine with her — as long as I came up with a new plan for how I was going to spend my summer. Deep down, I’d known all along what I wanted — to spend the summer at my grandmother’s in the rural South. And so a scheme was quickly hammered out, and a few days later I was put on a Trailways bus — alone — and traveled from my hometown of Philadelphia…

Wolf Ademeit is a photographer living in Moers, Germany. His acclaimed series Animals, from which a selection of images in this issue are drawn, took over five years to complete. Morgan Bulkeley paints and sculpts in his hometown of Mount Washington, Massachusetts. He is director of Green Berkshires, an environmental advocacy group. Rebecca Clark studied painting and drawing at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. She lives in Maryland. Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. His most recent book is Martin Marten. Jody Gladding’s poetry collections are Translations from Bark Beetle, Rooms and Their Airs, and Stone Crop. Jessica Greenbaum’s The Two Yvonnes was one of Library Journal’s Best Books in Poetry in 2012.…

The poems, prose, and visual art from prisoners compiled in the January/February 2015 issue of Orion are compelling and breathtaking (“How Long Has It Been Since You Smelled a Flower?”). As a poet, I receive and read literary journals from around the country, and the work produced by these prisoners is in many cases better than what I read in those journals, much of which amounts to little more than clever intellectual exercises. But here, the reader can begin to understand what these men feel — which is exactly what good art should do. RAPHAEL KOSEKHopewell Junction, New York My sincerest thanks for the selections of writing by prison inmates, and especially for the undeniably compelling introduction to them by Richard Shelton, whose dedication to humanity and the written word…

7 SURVIVAL TIPS FOR THE HARDY EXTRATERREST RIAL 1. Embrace the cold. Here on Earth, life requires liquid water for its essential operations. But on the surface of Mars, where temperatures seldom get higher than -70°C, water is perpetually frozen. This means that any microbes burrowed into the Martian permafrost may have the ability to quench their thirst with a liquid that has a lower freezing point. No life has yet been found on the Red Planet, but recently, a team of scientists suggested that an organism capable of combining hydrogen peroxide with a small amount of water might survive such cold, dry conditions. 2. Live in a cloud. One layer of Jupiter’s vast atmosphere is a haze of ammonia, ammonia hydrosulfide, and water — all smeared by the planet’s…

FOR OVER A DECADE I have been collecting place-words: gleaned singly from conversations, correspondences, or books, and jotted down in journals or on slips of paper. Now and then I have hit buried treasure in the form of vernacular dictionaries or extraordinary people — troves that have held gleaming handfuls of coinages. One such trove turned up on the moors of the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis in 2007. There, I was shown a “Peat Glossary”: a word-list of the hundreds of Gaelic terms for the moorland that stretches over much of Lewis’s interior. Some of the language it recorded was still spoken — but much had fallen into disuse. The same year I first saw the Peat Glossary, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A…

IN THE PALE GLOW of a half-dozen smartphone screens a shadowy figure stands half-buried in monstrous foliage. He has a blunt instrument in his hand and is stabbing it, skewering it, into something hidden in a pool of water. Behind him, through the warping glasshouse panes, there is the brooding presence of a forest from the Triassic … I’m rather surprised that there are no classic Victorian whodunits set in botanic gardens at night. The Cambridge University tropical houses have an atmosphere of pure gothic mystery after dark. Shapeshifting alien forms, optical illusions, an aura of impending drama. I was there late last year, with a special out-of-hours pass, to witness the night blooming of the giant Amazonian water lily, the plant whose exceptional size — its pad can grow…