Orion Autumn 2019

THE NEXT U.S. presidential election is still over a year away, but one thing is already clear: climate is no longer a marginal topic. At least on the Democratic side, every candidate has a formed opinion about the climate emergency and some semblance of a plan to solve it. That’s an encouraging trend, for it wasn’t all that long ago that entire election cycles would go by without any substantial discussion of climate — or, for the matter, the health of the environment in general. But talk is cheap. Addressing the climate emergency will be a terribly difficult thing to do, one that will require the rethinking of almost all aspects of how American culture works. It will involve an enormous amount of coordination across many independent and varied sectors…

Eloisa Amezcua’s debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize. Amezcua is the founder of Costura Creative. Andrea Carrubba is a photojournalist focused on social and humanitarian stories. His work has been exhibited across Italy. Craig Childs has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, most recently Virga & Bone. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic and the New York Times. Camille T. Dungy’s most recent books are Trophic Cascade and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History. John Freeman edits Freeman’s and Literary Hub and is the author of the books How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail. His story in this issue is excerpted…

FROM OUR READERS LIKE A responsible parent, Joe Wilkins, in his lyric “On Edges” (Summer 2019), refrains from scary words like “climate emergency” and “global crisis.” But when Wilkins and his wife, Liz, leave their tired children during a hike, continuing uphill and out of sight, the allegory is undeniable. How will Edie and Walter’s generation rise to meet the planetary horrors we hand them? Eventually Wilkins turns back toward the children. He needn’t. To see Walter and Edie self-revived, stick-wielding, and stomping after their brush with exhaustion is to catch a shard of hope. If there remains value in taking kids to the woods, in letting them “begin to know their limits and so create themselves,” it can be measured in how they come back swinging to a fractured…

LAST WEEK, when I swung by the assisted living facility for a quick hello, Gram surprised me with the news that she had been a good Catholic girl from Yonkers — the Irish Mick from the Big City — and that she had maintained her chastity right up to her very wedding night. Is news the appropriate word for such a disclosure? Being her grandson, I was slightly put off by this saucy talk, and suggested we pour ourselves some ginger ales in little clear plastic cups and head to the patio where we could talk weather instead. At ninety-five years old, Gram likes the weather, no doubt about it. Specifically, she likes the clouds that are the weather’s heart and soul — how they flop around in the sky,…

THE SUN WAS setting as my backpacking group and I headed back to our campsite from Cinder Cone in Lassen Volcanic National Park. We walked in silence, falling into a rhythm. The march of our steps and crunching of dry earth beneath feet grounded me. I felt anchored between two worlds: the physical and the psychological. My feet moved forward while my mind wandered capriciously. One moment, my sight fixed on trees; the next, on ants moving along familiar terrain. The land was theirs as they wound to a location unknown to me. Ants, I would come to learn, are cooperative insects, and this cooperation hinges on establishing a community of likeness. If an ant possesses the same pheromones as the colony it tries to join, it is freely admitted.…

LAURA BELEVICA is a Latvian architect, photographer, and multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. Nature, color, and light are her primary inspirations in all of her work. Shadow Series is an example of simulacrum—an organic metamorphosis, an attempt to play with perception and imagination by finding meaning and endless creative potential in shadows, literally as well as metaphorically. The work highlights the beauty of the mundane, often overlooked natural objects and the power of shadow in human beings. The subjects are photographed to capture their unique shadows that then serve as the starting point for the artwork that offers alternative interpretations of identity. She makes two new Shadow Series drawings a day and posts them on Instagram at @laurabelevica.…