Table of contents for July / August 2013 in Orion

Congratulations to two Orion writers: Rick Bass, whose essay “The Larch: A Love Story” (September/October 2012) won this year’s John Burroughs Award for an Outstanding Published Nature Essay; and Charles Mann, whose essay “State of the Species” (November/December 2012) was a finalist for a 2013 National Magazine Award. Orion has also been nominated for a 2013 Utne Media Award in the category of General Excellence. We’re honored to be among independent media outlets of such high caliber, and proud to be a member of the community of magazines and websites that are addressing the need for change. For a week in late July, writers of all ages and backgrounds convene at the twenty-sixth annual Wildbranch Writing Workshop, cosponsored by Orion and Sterling College, in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. Faculty members Robert…

LAST NIGHT a host of nonhuman neighbors paid me a visit. First, two gray foxes sauntered up, including an older female who lost her tail to a leghold trap six or seven years ago. They trotted back into a thicker part of the forest, and a few minutes later a raccoon ambled forward. After he left I saw the two foxes again. Later, they went around the right side of a redwood tree as a black bear approached around the left. He sat on the porch for a while, and then walked off into the night. Then the foxes returned, hung out, and, when I looked away for a moment then looked back, they were gone. It wasn’t too long before the bear returned to lie on the porch. After…

It floated in on the edge of our sightlike the ghosts of lost animals. We watched it gather on the ocean, drift over white steeples,red houses tiny as monopoly pieces on the peninsula below. We were eatinglunch on the peak of Mount Franey, a peach, an apple, while it pushed its way up the peak.On the trail, it closed us in like puffs of smoke, like a bright moonvaporizing. A strange bird pecked at gray grasses. Everything had becomea shade of gray and we walked like shades through these shades, the dark figuresof trees emerging like soldiers from white fields, their rifles in their cradled arms shining.We saw we swore we saw a pink shape in the distance. An umbrella, a circleof people looking down at a map. They pointed…

I RECENTLY SPENT a few weeks at the Penland School of Crafts, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The artists and artisans who secure residencies to pursue their work here are among the best in the country, visionary people producing museum-quality work in glass, steel, clay, wood, and other materials. Most are in mid or early career and I found them at work in their studios—in front of coal forges, easels, jewelers’ tables, and lathes — at every hour of the day and night. It was here that I first encountered the creations of Sylvie Rosenthal. The piece that initially drew me in was a large black wooden rabbit. The fore and hindquarters were carved and finished realistically; connecting the two was a loggia, an airy, furnitureless, roofed…

The ants have returned and even the simplicity of lust fails me.Watermelon, muskmelon, the slippery foam of cantaloupe. The windkeeps blowing out of the south where rain gathers to plan its trip north.In June, along the forest road where I pick raspberries, I find used condoms,red, blue, flesh-colored, trying futilely to love the earth. Urinerestores nitrogen to dirt. What does the spent jism of teenagers replace?Last November, high on the ridge, I spread my father’s ashes in a wildblueberry field for the bonemeal upon which my grief might grow plumpand ripe. When I dump melon rinds on the compost, hundreds of antsscatter, then scramble back onto the pile, their mandibles clackingin a raucous song of appetite.…

Once a point of national pride and identity, America’s infrastructure is showing its age. Even in their heyday, the big infrastructure projects of the past were not always mindful of the communities in which they were built, nor did they reflect or respect the realities of life on a finite planet. But this is a finite planet, and many communities are imagining new systems and structures for transportation, food, water, waste, energy, and information. In the process, they’re creating new, more beautiful, more resilient public works. With this issue, Orion introduces Reimagining Infrastructure, a series of twelve feature articles over two years exploring infrastructure solutions for the next generation.…

Cynthia Barnett has reported on fresh-water issues from the Suwannee River to Singapore. Author of the water books Mirage and Blue Revolution: Unmaking Ameri ca’s Water Crisis, she is now at work on a human and natural history of rain. Michelle Bonczek is the author of The Art of the Nipple and an editor at The Poet’s Billow. She teaches writing in Syracuse, New York. Todd Davis is the author of four books of poems, including In the Kingdom of the Ditch and The Least of These. He teaches at Penn State University’s Altoona College. Brian Doyle is the author of many books, including a novel, Mink River. His essay in the September/October 2011 issue of Orion, “The Creature Beyond the Mountains,” was a winner of the John Burroughs Essay…

CONFESSION: summer isn’t really my season. I like soft spring afternoons, and crisp, smoky fall evenings. And I love the snows of winter. When it gets really hot, my instinct is to stretch out on the porch and take a nap. Hibernation, I think the scientists call it, though I may have that confused. Hibernation with lemonade. But not this summer. This summer’s going to be a little different. And not because of the temperature. It’s been one hot summer after another—every year in the last decade has been hotter than average, and last summer in the U.S. we saw the warmest one yet. The last two weeks of July, statistically, are the hottest stretch of the year. So it’s the right time to be thinking about climate change. In…

Thanks to William Giraldi for “Splendid Visions” (March/April 2013) — it’s a beautiful essay. However, to some extent, I disagree with the author’s argument. The line between nature and society has been made to seem clear and definite when, really, our societies are fabricated from nature—there is wildness in cities and in ourselves. I have lived in cities my whole life, and, these days, my philosophy is that wildness is less a characteristic of our environment than a characteristic of us and the way we interact with our surroundings. Rather than raising our children in the woods, perhaps what’s needed is simply to raise them with more freedom and wonder, more opportunity to play and build, destroy and discover—wherever they happen to be. MEREDITH JACOBSONBerkeley, California I suggest William Giraldi…

Innumerable robins, dandelionsgone over to perfect overexposures poised for release an iron bridgespanning a steep-sided river, shadows falling sideways through the cables:no climbing, no jumping, no rappelling at any time the roadsidean uninterrupted stream of ripening timothy, bird noise and cowtheir brown and white arrangement, their undisguised inquiry as we pass breaking up spacelike the barbed wire’s staccato of uprights and horizontals a flimsy boundarywhen you consider what we’re made of, and that somebody—despite the brand new barn’s acknowledged comforts and the farmerchecking for gaps hawkweed, celandine and buttercupmight mask— somebody might change their mindsomething could break and how would we know with all of thisblooming this temporary rise and fall and light rain softening our edges?…

(First line from the radio) Plans for the bridge are still up in the air,printed on the blueprint of the skylike jet trails bending into curves that getmore graceful as they grow fainter,until at their most exquisite they disappearbefore we can get them down on paper,our idea of the bridge always more beautifulthan anything we might actually build.And yet there has to be a way to bring itdown to earth if we are ever going to be ableto cross from here to there, even if somethingis lost in transit, because we don’t livein some vaporous sphere but down herewhere the air we breathe also makes things rust.…

The Faraway Nearby BY REBECCA SOLNIT Viking, 2013. $25.95, 259 pages. THE FARAWAY NEARBY begins with a mountain of apricots rotting on the author’s bedroom floor. There were roughly a hundred pounds of them demanding her attention, picked by her brother from their jealous, aging mother’s apricot tree after she had forgotten the difference between the refrigerator and the cupboard, between a family photo album and the place she kept her socks. It sounds like a fairy tale, if a grim one, the first inkling that one of the 1,001 threads Solnit will spin in this lyrical, tapestraic memoir will address storytelling itself, and how “to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea…

REIMAGINING INFRASTRUCTURE On page 16 of this issue, Orion launches Reimagining Infrastructure, a series of articles exploring infrastructure solutions for the next generation. In addition to twelve feature articles over two years in Orion’s print and digital editions, the series also includes slide shows and other online features in a new section of the Orion website, www.orionmagazine.org/infrastructure. ORION IN THE CLASSROOM If you’re an educator and are filling out your fall curriculum—be it creative writing, environmental studies, civics, or another subject — consider adding Orion to your syllabus. To find out about group subscription rates and discounts on anthologies or other Orion books, e-mail us at marketing@orionmagazine.org. PLACE-BASED EDUCATION Newly updated by renowned author and educator David Sobel, this popular book from Orion provides parents and teachers with field and…