Orion November / December 2011

“i thank You God for most this amazing / day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky.” It’s hard to imagine a purer statement of gratefulness for the natural world than this passage from e. e. cummings. But the gratitude that cummings describes, and our despair over the degradation we know is around us, are inextricably connected. To be willing to feel deeply, to observe fully the beauty of the world, to give real thanks, also means to open ourselves to the thoughtlessness with which we treat the planet, and each other. That has never been truer than it is today. For those who care about nature, a meditation on cummings’s “blue true dream of sky” is inevitably buffeted by some kind…

Lisa Adams’s work is part of the collections of Eli Broad, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Edward Albee Foundation. Her monograph, Vicissitude of Circumstance, is forthcoming. Nico Alvarado’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Forklift, Thermos, Transom, and other publications. Ellen Bass is the author of The Human Line and Mules of Love, which won the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches at Pacific University in Oregon. Michael P. Branch lives with his family in the high desert of western Nevada. He has published five books and writes a monthly blog, Rants from the Hill, for High Country News. Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Transylvania, in Romania. He is the author of poetry, novels, and essays, and is a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered.…

Whether our terms come from farming or sailing or hunting, Bill McKibben’s July/August 2011 column, “A Little Leeway,” reminded me of the way we once adapted ourselves to the environment — trimming sails or heaving-to as necessary — rather than using brute force to overpower natural order. Dead metaphors today, maybe, but they remind us that there are other ways of being. VALERIE NIEMANGreensboro, North Carolina Perhaps we are born to care and empathize, but as Eric Wagner shows in “I, Turbo” (July/August 2011), to be in the field is to confront the natural order (and disorder) of things that our culture tends to sanitize. Thanks for sharing and giving me a hard dose of reality. SUSAN SANDERKerrville, Texas Eric Wagner’s “I, Turbo” reminds me of a few weeks my…

M.G.H. Gilliam, who has been the guiding force at Orion and The Orion Society for almost thirty years and acted as chairperson of The Orion Society’s board of directors since its inception, has stepped down. Marion will continue to serve as Orion’s Publisher. Alison Hawthorne Deming, a former member of Orion’s board who is known to many Orion readers for her work as a writer and poet, has been elected to serve as The Orion Society’s new chairperson. We’re happy to announce that Miroslav Penkov’s story “East of the West” (May/June 2011) has been selected to appear in the PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. Also, Amy Irvine’s “Spectral Light” and Terry Tempest Williams’s “The Gulf Between Us” have been named finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award…

Linda M. Hasselstrom Hermosa, South Dakota BLIZZARD. Snow hisses through the buffalo grass. I can barely see the highway a half mile away. The highway patrol advises motorists to stay home. Four eighteen-wheelers rumble south, snow boiling around them. Four SUVs creep north: subdivision residents heading for work. Sunrise pinks storm clouds. The thermometer reads zero. The windchill factor, says the radio, is thirty degrees below zero; exposed flesh can freeze in seconds. The house moans as winds gust and twist. Vortices of snow spin, dancing on the rims of old snowdrifts like wraiths. Twelve whitetail deer lie among the windbreak’s junipers, does sheltering yearling fawns. Mice and voles nap in tunnels of bentgrass near seed-filled earthen pantries. Porcupines doze in cracks in the limestone cliffs, digesting dried buffalo berries.…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, my state’s governor asked if I’d give an after-lunch speech to some of his cabinet and other top officials who were in the middle of a retreat. It’s a useful discipline for writers and theorists to have to summarize books in half an hour, and to compete with excellent local ice cream. No use telling these guys how the world should be at some distant future moment when they’ll no longer be in office — instead, can you isolate themes broad enough to be of use to people working on subjects from food to energy to health care to banking to culture, and yet specific enough to help them choose among the options that politics daily throws up? Can you figure out a principle that might undergird…