Table of contents for September / October 2011 in Orion

TEN YEARS AGO, a weekday that dawned in the usual fashion was quickly eclipsed by the unthinkable. It was a day that no American will ever forget. As disbelief gave way to despondency, we were forced to confront the hard truth of the moment. Nothing would ever be the same for us, or for our country. As horrifying as the attacks were, it is also horrifying to think about how little has been made of the opportunities for change that 9/11 brought. American culture has budged little from the attitudes that fueled the disdain that resulted in the attacks. Today’s politics are governed by more — not less — of the sort of ideology that Dick Cheney represented when he stated that “the American way of life is non-negotiable.” Even…

Allium canadense. Allium validum. Wild and smelly one,little sister of stinks. Broken, rubbed between two fingers you linger like nostalgia, regret, grief. You grow anywhere,a garden, a pavement’s crack, a verge beside the road. In abused soil, acidic, starved, your white heart waits, whiteas loneliness—the first thing, Milton says, which God’s eye named not good. Kha-a-mot-ot-ke-wat, the one who seeksa poorer soil, your heart-bulb sunk deep beneath the sod. Weed. No blade can cut you out. You are reborn each spring,green tongues from black earth. The Egyptians buried onions with their dead, a circle within circles. Lonely, lonely, lonelyis every layer around the heart. And I—each year more lonely—will break your culms and rub my brow with your oil.I’ll chew your white heart for cure. If that is no remedy,…

Soon enough and just as easilythis beachfront home will wriggleand crack, the ocean lifting us, like abandoned ships,back out to the sea.Roped by soaked sand, crossing that great waist of the world,will the hurling comfort?I was never unafraid, even at sun-up.Battened down, it turns outthe hatches were only plywood My insular Tahiti was sinking.Someone lit a matchand the universe exploded. Deck smashed and windowswracked by reef,mouthy winters survived, some species perch atop a pedestal,water foaming at the lips.Some are spun around and never come up again.…

Algonquin Books, 2011. $24.95, 320 pages. JAMES CAMERON, creator of Avatar, said his film “asks questions about our relationship with each other, from culture to culture, and our relationship with the natural world at a time of nature-deficit disorder.” Avatar is “the most-watched film in history.” The scale of its success has roots that reach well beyond the fantastic special effects. The story line tapped a collective, instinctual knowledge that our growing alienation from the natural world comes at our own peril. In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv warned that nature-deficit disorder threatens our health, our spirit, our economy, and our future stewardship of the environment. Louv’s newest book, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, takes the next step and tackles the ambitious…

USELESS BAY, Washington — ten minutes across by motorboat, and so shallow that when the tide sweeps low you can walk out a mile on dry sand and wade another half before you wet your shorts. There’s Mount Rainier shining like a ghost across the water and the lights of Seattle a solid line beneath it, and here in the bay — what matters to the fishermen — there’s Dungeness crab and good halibut, salmon, dogfish, flounder. There were always stories about the place: Indian legends of animals with the power to heal, and pioneer tales of wild storms and treasures washed ashore — stories told so many times they wore thin and ratty as a dirty magazine and began to resemble something else entirely. Newer stories, too: my mom,…

Rachel Barrett is a fine art and editorial photographer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and has appeared in the New York Times, Next American City, and other publications. Blair Braverman is an MFA student at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in High Country News, Appalachia, and other journals. Linda Connor, a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, is the founder of PhotoAlliance. A compendium of her work, Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, was published in 2008. Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author of ten books, including, most recently, the novel Mink River. Janice N. Harrington is author of Even the Hollow…

A DECADE AGO, I published a book about the links between chemical exposures and cancer. The research for it required four years, two postdoctoral fellowships, and fluency with Freedom of Information Act requests. I attended workshops on cluster analysis and taught myself molecular epidemiology. I made field trips to cancer laboratories, studied tumor patterns among wildlife populations, and rode a cable down a three-hundred-foot shaft to look at groundwater. When the writing was all done, I helped prepare the publicity materials, which, among other things, claimed that my book was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries. No one had attempted that before. It was a big book. One of my first stops on the author tour was a television talk show…

W. W. Norton, 2011. $14.95, 248 pages. MARRYING FICTION and politics is risky. Nonfiction can explicitly reflect on ideas, present information, and even advocate for a “side” without violating the promise the genre makes to its reader, but fiction is another story. A whiff of the didactic or polemic, any glimpse of the work’s creator stepping in to direct a reader how to think or feel, can shatter the fictional world the writer has so painstakingly constructed and unravel the reader’s suspension of disbelief. However, when successful, fiction that addresses political issues can be deeply affecting in ways other genres cannot. Helon Habila’s novel Oil on Water is a memorable example of such success. Habila plunges his audience into a place and nightmare situation most of us know only by…

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. $25, 288 pages. THIS IS A BOOK with a great cast of characters: There’s Yoko, small in stature but tough and feisty. Though a ruthless adversary, he’s intensely loyal to his friends. There’s Rachel, who as a child loved bubble baths and frilly dresses, but who was abandoned by her family at age three. Jethro is a peacemaker. Regis loves to paint and listen to music. Chance is nervous and cautious right down to her taste in food; she doesn’t like hot peppers on her pizza. Sue Ellen has a weakness for large, bearded men. And then there are the humans. One is Gloria Grow, a former dog groomer who, with her veterinarian husband and her sister, turned a 240-acre hobby farm in Quebec into a…

WORDS & IMAGES When you make a donation to Orion this fall, you can direct your gift to the aspect of Orion’s work that is most important to you. Go to orionmagazine.org/donate or use the envelope bound into this copy of Orion to support writing, visual art, photography, poetry, or whatever part of Orion you care about most. ORION IN CREATIVE WRITING CLASSROOMS Orion offers discounted subscriptions to creative writing classes through the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses Lit Mag Adoption Program. If you teach creative writing and would like your students to have access to Orion through this program, call us at 888/909-6568 ext. 10, or go to clmp.org/adoption. THE SCHOOLS WE NEED Join Orion on September 21 at 7 p.m. (edt) for a live conversation with Erik…

Browne Molyneux, one of the people profiled in Diane Meyer’s “Without a Car” (May/June 2011), spelled out a critical reality about going carless in LA: the missing ingredient is social justice. It’s crucial to empower those who don’t have access to decent public transportation, who live in dangerous neighborhoods, or, for whatever other reason, can’t afford the luxury of carlessness. Until we grapple with those challenges, going carless will remain a partial solution limited to those who can afford it. I hope Orion will do more to address this disconnect in a way that reflects all its social, economic, and racial complexity. FLORA BRAINArcata, California Thanks to J.B. MacKinnon for his insight into the vital wisdom held in the memories of elder animals. I’d like to add to it a…

PLATO DECLARED he would ban poets from his ideal Republic. Placing a garland on their heads, he would send them into exile. Storytellers too — with few exceptions — would be barred from his state, and flutes would be illegal. What does it mean to exile the arts? Plato knew, and so does the current British government, ordering the most savage cuts to arts funding in more than a generation. At universities, the arts and humanities will bear the brunt of budget cuts. Public libraries, a priceless commons of knowledge and metaphor, are being closed across the country. With phlegmatic cynicism, Plato based his Republic on the premise that an ideal state will seek expansion, encroaching on neighboring lands and resources, resulting in permanent war. His Republic describes the ideal…

CALDICOTT ACADEMY, a private day school for girls, had not expelled a student in decades. There were few prohibitions. Drinking and drugging and having sex right there on the campus could supposedly get you kicked out; turning up pregnant likewise; that was the long and short of it. There was a rule against climbing down the side of the ravine on the west side of the school, where a suicide had occurred a century earlier, but the punishment was only a scolding. Alice Toomey, headmistress, would have welcomed a rule against excessive skinniness. Emily Knapp, all ninety pounds of her, was making Alice feel enraged, and, worse yet, making her feel incompetent — she, Alice, awarded the prize for Most Effective Director two years in a row by the Association…

SOMETIME AROUND 2014, Italy will complete construction of seventy-eight mobile floodgates aimed at protecting Venice’s three inlets from the rising tides of the Adriatic Sea. The massive doors — twenty meters by thirty meters, and five meters thick — will, most of the time, lie flat on the sandy seabed between the lagoon and the sea. But when a high tide is predicted, the doors will empty themselves of water and fill with compressed air, rising up on hinges to keep the Adriatic out of the city. Three locks will allow ships to move in and out of the lagoon while the gates are up. Nowhere else in the world have humans so constantly had to create and re-create their infrastructure in response to a changing natural environment than in…

Some springs, apples bloom too soon.The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quickto trust that the frost has finished. Some springs,pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are emptyand quiet. No reason for the bees to come. Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden applesglow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches,the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit. You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled.You could say, Some years, there are apples.…

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. $26, 315 pages. ALBEDO IS A CURIOUS WORD, long unfamiliar to even the most informed. But it is soon to become much better known — and not least because it figures importantly in Sara Wheeler’s latest book. Unaltered from its Latin root, the word means “whiteness.” It describes a property possessed by snow and powdered titanium dioxide, for example, but entirely absent from coal. Some few cooks know it as the white pith beneath the zest of a lemon. But the meaning about to burst onto the world’s linguistic stage is one climatologists and astrophysicists have employed for a long while: it is the whiteness of the reflection of sunlight from our planet’s two giant and ever-glaring polar ice caps. Sara Wheeler, whose literary wanderings…

Yale University Press, 2011. $18, 96 pages. FOR KATHERINE LARSON, science is a lover she embraces and betrays. The poems in her first collection, chosen by Louise Glück for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, remind me how necessary poems are to expose the beauty and riddle of our humanity. Larson elides the lyric’s sensual impulsivity with biology’s reasoned patience. There is in her poems no division between these habits of mind that we’ve come to think of as disciplines. In “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees,” the poet is not content with dissection on the lab bench as a means to understand the body of a squid: After class,I stole one from the formaldehydeand watched it bloom in my bathroomsinkbetween the cubes of ice. This is a narrative detail, but story…