Orion Summer 2020

THIS ISSUE of Orion marks the departure of H. Emerson Blake, under whose editorial leadership the magazine has operated for the better part of its history. To characterize our time with Chip (as many of us know him) as a period of growth would be an understatement. His influence extends to Orion’s core assumptions about what it means to write about nature, supporting a legacy of discourse from thought leaders and cultural icons on how to engage more deeply with the world. With Chip’s guidance, the magazine built a presence online, created the Orion Book Award, set and broke many standards for environmental writing, and established workshops to nurture the next generation of authors. And since Chip’s appointment as executive director in 2005, Orion has followed him into what always…

Tina Chang is Brooklyn’s poet laureate and author of Hybrida. She directs the creative writing department at Binghamton University. Su Cho’s poems can be found in Poetry, New England Review, and elsewhere. She resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she serves as editor-in-chief of Cream City Review. Allen Crawford’s work includes Whitman Illumi nated, an illustrated and hand-lettered edition of “Song of Myself.” Kwame Dawes’s most recent collection of poems, Nebraska, was published in 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press. Toni Demuro is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Sassari, Italy, and works in the fields of visual arts and design. Stuart Dybek is the author of three books of fiction: I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Anuar Patjane Floriuk…

KRISTA TIPPETT (“On Hope,” Spring 2020) beautifully expresses the two-sided coin of hope and despair. I wake up hoping every day that we are in the age of a tectonic shift, and try to use a historian’s perspective to remember that we are only a few dozen years out from the first photo of Earth from space. I reread Archibald MacLeish’s reflection published on December 25, 1968, in the New York Times over and over and over again: The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of every-thing. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere — beyond the range of reason even — lost in absurdity and war. This lat-est notion may have other conse-quences.… To see the earth as it truly is, small and…

WHEN I ARRIVE in Wyoming, it’s green. High plains at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. Hills, a rocky summit knife-flat, but wreathed like a crown. For two years, I’ve been traveling to places I’ve never been before, where I know no one. Trying to understand what home is, where it is. Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? I’ve been invited to spend June at an artists’ residency on a peaceful twenty-thousand-acre cattle ranch in the majestic, wide-open setting of northeastern Wyoming. I want to hike, but talk of bears, lightning strikes, and rattlesnakes scares me off. Ruthie, the program director, drives me through roads of winding hills, hand out the window, blue tattoo at her wrist. She says, all this used to be…

AS I SWERVE OFF the exit toward the Grand Canyon corridor on AZ-64, I talk with my wife, who has called me from home, on the hands-free. We debate which would be worse: missing the birth of our firstborn or contracting the plague. “Both could happen,” she says through Braxton-Hicks contractions. The call drops. I pass Grand Canyon Junction, Joe’s Route 66 Hot Dogs, and the gates to Big “D” Ranch. Just before Red Lake Valley is Espee Road. The range is dew-dropped, tangy with manure. I cross a cattle guard at 27.8 miles. Before opening the gate, I stuff my pants into my socks. Like the long-sleeve shirt and bug spray, this protects my skin from fleas. I shared this description with my wife days before: “Bacteria are spread…

SOUTH CAROLINA LOWCOUNTRY. The porpoise came up out of the May River, due north of Bull Island, where Barataria Creek dumps into the main channel. I was buzzing down-tide in a big skiff, one-fifty Yamaha, twenty-two knots. A hundred yards out, the porpoise rose half out of the water, cocked his head, and gave me that grin and that eye. If you know porpoises, you’ll know what I mean. I swung the wheel to port. He slipped beneath the water and rose again before me, to starboard this time, and he did the same to port, just twenty yards away. I throttled down, and he circled the boat, dove at the prop, inches from whirling death, feigning suicide if I did not shift to neutral. I did. He circled the…