Ecotone

Today in Seven Questions, we introduce Ecotone associate editor Michelle Donahue. In addition to editing, Michelle writes fiction and has published essays and poems. Her prose has been supported by the Kentucky Foundation for Women and has been published in Arts & Letters, CutBank, Porterhouse Review, Passages North, and others. She received an MFA in creative writing & environment from Iowa State and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. Before joining Ecotone in August 2022, she was an editor for Quarterly West, the Adroit Journal, and Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment.

Michelle is a generous and energetic editor and a fabulous writer (not to mention a surfer and a brewer of beer). We are delighted to welcome her to the Ecotone team!

Co–fiction editor Becca Hannigan interviewed Michelle in fall 2022.

As you settle in to Wilmington and your new roles at Ecotone and in the creative writing department, what do you find most exciting?

I’m most excited by the real commitment to community here. Everyone has been so welcoming, and it’s clear that people are interested in building a nourishing publishing, teaching, and writing environment. I’m honored to be a new member of such a beautiful ecosystem of writers, teachers, students, and editors.

Your degrees are in creative writing and literature as well as Could you share a specific experience, class, or conversation that’s carried you along? To what extent do you view your work as a writer and editor through a scientific lens?

When I was an undergraduate, I spent a semester studying on San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos. It was such a unique experience that I’ve since tried to write about it, but always fail to capture it, with all of its strange beauty and contradictions. On the one hand, I spent my days lounging on the beach with sea lions who were wholly unafraid of humans. I watched blue-footed boobies perform their goofy mating rituals; I swam with green sea turtles, marine iguanas, manta rays, and reef sharks. It was unreal. But on the other hand, the Galápagos is a brutal, volcanic place, where the equatorial sun can burn unprotected skin in minutes. It’s a place where tourists who come to appreciate the unique life and landscape are also responsible for endangering its existence. I simultaneously loved every second of being there and felt guilty about my presence. I like this idea of an experience “carrying you along,” and my time in the Galápagos certainly has stayed with me in ways that are mollifying and maddening, celebratory and sad.

I think my background in science has changed the way I see the world, which I’m sure has affected the way I write and edit. In science, I was always drawn most to ecology, a discipline that focuses on relationships between the big and small, living and non-living. As a writer and editor, I’m interested in connections, in bringing the macro and the micro together.

You’ve worked as the managing editor for Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment as well as prose editor for Quarterly West and the Adroit Journal. How and when did you know you wanted to pursue editorial work?

As a younger writer, I wanted to be as involved as possible in any and every good literary community I could find. Editorial work seemed like such a tremendous opportunity to contribute and give back to the literary community, while learning about writing and publishing. Once I started with Flyway, I knew I’d found a lifelong passion.

We’re proud to share that AWP has selected Ecotone for the 2022 Small Press Publisher Award, given in alternate years to a small press or a literary magazine. Recent past winners include One Story, Creative Nonfiction, Birmingham Poetry Review, Milkweed Editions, and Graywolf Press.

The Small Press Publisher Award, as described by AWP, “acknowledges the hard work, creativity, and innovation of these presses and journals, and honors their contributions to the literary landscape through their publication of consistently excellent work.” AWP also recognized Terrain.org and American Short Fiction as finalists for this year’s award. We’re grateful for this support of our mission, and delighted to be in such fine company.

Upon accepting the award during AWP 2022, editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell offered these remarks:

I want to thank AWP for making space for literary magazines and presses in the beautiful way that it does. It’s an honor to receive this award.

Ecotone’s mission is twofold: we have a mission to train new editors and designers in the craft, and a mission of what we call reimagining place, or thinking about place in new ways, and bringing new voices into the space of place-based writing. There’s a great need for offering training for editors and designers. We rightly think of the primary producers of literature as the first people, the most important people, but we all need our work out in the world, and we need it edited well and designed beautifully. To make room for giving people the skills to do that is really important. There’s also right now a great need to think about the climate crisis and the ways that it affects, especially, poor and marginalized communities. I saw recently that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is saying that almost half of the world’s population is at risk now from serious effects of climate crisis—so it’s no joke, and we think of that as a big part of our mission.

Thank you to AWP for affirming those needs and parts of our mission. Many, many thanks to our nominators, and to the judges. And I want to briefly thank a couple of other people, including one person who can’t be with us tonight. David Gessner was the founding editor of Ecotone and is our editor in chief. He remains a fierce advocate for the work the magazine does, and we can’t thank him enough for his vision and the work he continues to do. UNC Wilmington and its department of creative writing have been steadfast supporters of our work, and we’re deeply thankful. Lots more people to thank, past and present—when you’re a magazine that trains new editors, you work with so many wonderful people.

I want to recognize Sophia Stid, our associate editor, who is here, and Michael Ramos, our art director, who is here. Thanks to both of you for your work—if you could wave your arms a little so people know who you are—and there are some other Ecotone team members in the room as well; could y’all wave your arms? I want people to see you! Thank you for your work.

I want to say thank you as well to our fellow finalists—please read Terrain.org and subscribe to American Short Fiction. You won’t regret it.

Long live literary magazines, and long live the fight for a sustainable place for us all to live.

Today in Seven Questions, we talk with Ecotone postgraduate fellow Sophia Stid. Sophia recently received the 2021 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, from Calyx magazine, and the 2022 Sally Buckner Emerging Writers’ Fellowship, from the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Her micro-chapbook Whistler’s Mother was published by Bull City Press in October 2021. Her work has also been supported by fellowships from Vanderbilt University and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and her recent work can be found in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and Pleiades.

Sophia has worked on Ecotone for the past two-plus years, and was recently promoted to associate editor. Her keen editorial sensibility, and her equally keen attention to both place and the artists and writers who consider it, are a gift to the magazine. Though some on Ecotone’s staff may quibble with her choice, in the lightning round below, of pie over cake, her editorial and writerly decision making is indisputably exemplary—wise, nuanced, thoughtful, kind. We are lucky to have her as part of the Ecotone team. Editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell interviewed her in fall 2021.

As you begin your third year with Ecotone, what are you excited about in your work?

I’m really excited about the Climate Issue, which we’re putting together right now—and Ecotone 30, which will reach subscribers and newsstands in the next week. The questions we’re holding as an editorial team are difficult and important: how to walk with hope and grief and rage at once, how to work for change while mourning what we’ve already lost. Carrying these questions in community with our contributors has already shaped my thinking and my living.

What’s something you’ve discovered in editing that surprised you or helped your own writing?

I’m surprised by how often it seems that when I have questions for a piece of writing as an editor, the work itself will hold a phrase or idea that guides the editorial team through those questions. I’ve learned so much from that about trusting the work itself to teach me how to write it.

On Earth Day this year, we’re thinking about the intersections between social and environmental justice and how we can show up for both in our communities. In honor of the Garden Issue making its way to mailboxes now, we’ve compiled a list of organizations that support gardens, gardeners, what gardens need (water, pollinators, and the like), as well as green and growing spaces and the equitable access to them.

These are difficult and wearying times, and the burdens are unequally distributed through our communities. If you find yourself with resources to share, these organizations are wonderful places to consider lending support in whatever way you are able. This list is by no means comprehensive, but we hope it offers a handful of seeds, a place to begin.

Co-founded by Leah Penniman, Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous community farm with a wide range of programs that serve over ten thousand people each year. In their words, they are committed to the intertwined goals of “uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system.” Their work encompasses every level of farming and food justice—individual, communal, systemic, and spiritual. They train and mentor farmer-activists, host a community-sourced reparations map for BIPOC farmers, develop youth food-justice workshops, deliver food to under-resourced households, and educate policy makers. They are currently seeking donations as part of a development initiative to fortify the foundation and future of the farm, as they build new infrastructure that will make their food-sovereignty work sustainable for decades to come.

On a nationwide level, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance is a network of Black-led organizations focused on Black food sovereignty, furthering Black visions for sustainability and justice, and creating self-determining food economies. Their food map and directory is an invaluable community resource. Their website offers several ways to donate and otherwise support their work, including contacting your senators in support of the Justice for Black Farmers Act.

We at Ecotone stand in solidarity with those protesting police brutality against black people, Indigenous people, and people of color, and fighting to eradicate the systemic racism endemic to the United States. We endorse and are thankful for this statement offered by the Offing, which reads, in part:

We stand with the Black Lives Matter movement. We stand with the grassroots organizations who have been doing this hard work. WE STAND WITH THE PEOPLE.

Below are some resources for taking action and supporting folks who are protesting, in North Carolina and beyond, as well as communities who continue to be disproportionately affected by COVID-19.

Emancipate NC’s Freedom Fighter Bond Fund has a long history of supporting activists arrested in civil disobedience in North Carolina. If you like, you can tag your donation to prioritize the bailing out and legal defense of activists working to effect change across North Carolina.

The ACLU of North Carolina works in courts, the General Assembly, and communities to protect and advance civil rights and civil liberties for all North Carolinians. A recent lawsuit they brought seeks an overhaul of Alamance County’s cash bail system, which they argue discriminates against poor people. The ACLU also offers a guide to protesters’ rights.

The National Lawyers Guild South is offering pro bono legal representation for protesters across the region. They are also looking for donations for a fund that invests in a new generation of radical lawyers, advocates and law students; and a community that embraces a politic of black leadership, queer love, immigrants & refugees, anti-capitalism, and disruption of white supremacy culture.

Southerners on New Ground “builds a beloved community of LGBTQ people in the South who are ready and willing to do their part to challenge oppression in order to bring about liberation for ALL people.” Among many actions and events, their Race Traitors summer call series invites white SONG members “to build connection, accountability, and relationship with other SONG members so we can fight together.”

The National Bail Out Collective is a black-led and black-centered collective to end systems of mass incarceration. Because people who are incarcerated cannot practice social distancing, the collective is accelerating its efforts to free people from jails, prisons, and detention centers. Donations help to bail out marginalized folks, with a focus on black caregivers. The organization is currently focusing its funds towards bailing out protestors, providing legal fees, and providing assistance to bail out groups around the country.

Campaign Zero, which is also accepting donations, has a comprehensive guide to policies that aim to correct broken-windows policing, excessive force, racial profiling, for-profit policing, cash bail, and much more. Familiarize yourself with laws in your area, and contact your representatives—at the local, state, and national level—to press them for their plans on ending discrimination in law enforcement.

The Deep South Center for Environmental Justice works with historic black colleges and universities to promote the rights of all people to be free from environmental harm as it impacts health, jobs, housing, education, and general quality of life. A major goal of the center continues to be the development of leaders in communities of color along the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor and the broader Gulf Coast Region, which are disproportionately harmed by pollution and vulnerable to climate change.

The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library offers this Black Lives Matter reading list. We’d encourage you to purchase these books from black-owned bookstores, like Shelves Bookstore in Charlotte, North Carolina, or borrow them from your local library once it is safe to do so again. A number of publishers are also offering antiracist reading for free, including these free ebooks from Verso Books, among them Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton.

Through the Arts Leaders of Color Emergency Fund, set up by the Arts Administrators of Color Network, folks can donate directly in support of BIPOC artists and administrators (consultants, facilitators, box office staff, seasonal and temporary employees, etc.) who have been financially impacted due to COVID-19.

A number of writers and editors are offering gratis support for black writers—manuscript reviewing, editing, advice for pitches, and more. Find a list here.

This post was compiled by Ecotone managing editor Rachel Taube.

This Earth Day, we’re thinking about the many artists and other workers who have lost their livelihoods, or seen them greatly depleted, as speaking, teaching, and performance engagements are cancelled around the country. Delayed projects, layoffs, furloughs, and unpaid leave are affecting our peers in the arts community and beyond. When it’s hard to meet basic needs, it can be even harder to advocate for environmental and social justice.

If you’re in a situation where you can and would like to help those who have been affected in this way, here are some organizations to consider. These are also, of course, excellent resources for those who wish to apply for support. Though this list is by no means comprehensive, we hope it offers some places to begin.

The National Endowment for the Arts, a longtime supporter of Ecotone, Lookout Books, and so many other arts organizations, has made CARES Act grants available for organizations affected during this time. The initial deadline is April 22(!), and application and details can be found at arts.gov. State and local arts councils are offering support as well—the North Carolina Arts Council, for example, has a thoughtful statement and this excellent list of resources.

Through the Arts Leaders of Color Emergency Fund, set up by the Arts Administrators of Color Network, folks can donate directly in support of BIPOC artists and administrators (consultants, facilitators, box office staff, seasonal and temporary employees, etc.) who have been financially impacted due to COVID-19.

Creative Capital has joined forces with several national arts grantmakers to form Artist Relief—an initiative that includes immediate, unrestricted emergency funding of $5,000 for individual artists of all disciplines, and resources to help those in need due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Learn more at artistrelief.org.

The NC Artists Relief Fund was created to support creative individuals who have been financially impacted by gig cancellations due to the outbreak of COVID-19. One hundred percent of donated funds will go directly to artists in North Carolina. Musicians, visual artists, actors, DJ’s, dancers, teaching artists, filmmakers, comedians, and other creative individuals and arts presenters are experiencing widespread cancellations due to this global pandemic. Given the overwhelming amount of need, this fund will also prioritize the most vulnerable artists among us: artists of color, queer artists, and artists with disabilities.

The Coffee House Writers Project, inspired by the WPA Federal Writers Project of the 1930s, is an initiative from Coffee House Press to commission new, short digital-only literary works from writers whose ability to support themselves has been affected by the COVID-19 health crisis. They’ll soon begin sharing new writing twice a month.

Feeding America is a nationwide network of food banks that secures and distributes 4.3 billion meals each year through food pantries and meal programs throughout the United States and leads the nation to engage in the fight against hunger. If you’d like to make sure your donation supports your local community, you can use this site to locate your closest food bank and make a direct donation.

For folks in the South, the excellent Scalawag magazine  has a list of regional mutual aid efforts that is well worth checking out.

350.org has a special place in our hearts because our local chapter is led by students in the UNCW’s MFA program—one of whom is Ecotone’s poetry editor. 350.org is an international movement that works to mitigate the climate crisis, and to build a world of community-led renewable energy for all. The organization argues that we cannot deal with the COVID-19 crisis by making the climate crisis and global inequality worse—and that a just recovery will acknowledge these interwoven crises.

The National Bail Out Collective is a Black-led and Black-centered collective to end systems of mass incarceration. Because people who are incarcerated cannot practice social distancing, the collective is accelerating its efforts to free people from jails, prisons, and detention centers. Donations help to bail out marginalized folks, with a focus on Black caregivers.

And finally, a shout-out to one of our favorite entities: the US Post Office. While many people in the United States and around the world are staying home, postal workers are delivering people’s prescriptions, keeping small and local enterprises in business, and connecting families—not to mention delivering reading material from literary magazines and independent presses! The COVID-19 shutdown is causing postal revenues to plummet even as costs increase, and the US postal service could run out of money as early as June. Some ways to support this vital service can be found at savethepostoffice.com. You can also, as always, buy postage and send packages to family and friends—and you can do all that no contact, online and, from many addresses, using USPS’s package pickup service.

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

This post was compiled by Ecotone managing editor Rachel Taube.

This month we’re delighted to debut the first of our Teach Ecotone guides. Each guide includes discussion questions, writing prompts, and activities focused on specific issues of Ecotone. Our featured instructor today is writer and educator Carlina Duan, whose one-week guide to the Craft Issue offers new ways to think about image and place, leaping off from Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s essay “Monsoon and Peacock.” The guide is available on the Ecotone website and as a PDF for download. As you prepare for spring classes, we hope you’ll check it out!

Here’s Carlina on teaching:

I entered writing through an incredible constellation of teachers, who saw me for who and where I was: curious, cautious, hungry for new light. Being a student—within the space of a traditional classroom and beyond it—opened my world to a community of thought. It gave me opportunities to reflect upon and challenge my interior life. Ani DiFranco sings, “The alphabet took us on a wild goose chase.” In teaching, I hope to make space for the wild, the joyous, the strange, and the unknown. I hope to celebrate reflection, and to invite contradictions. I hope to see my students for who they are and where they are, to continue growing and questioning along with them.

Here’s something we’ve been scheming about for a while: in honor of Ecotone poetry editor Jason Bradford, and his mother, Shirley Niedermann, we’re printing a series of broadsides of work from the magazine. Rory Sparks, who designed and printed our Craft Issue cover and those sweet bookmarks that came with the issue, is the printer for the first two broadsides in the series, which will feature Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “Doppelgangbanger” and Molly Tenenbaum’s “This Poem Contains No Natural Fibers.”

We’re having a party to celebrate these as well as Ecotone‘s latest issue and the new anthology from Lookout Books, Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism! Join us on Saturday, March 30, from 6:00–7:30, at the PNCA Print Studio.

Cortney and Molly will read, and Rory will host a letterpress printing demo for anyone who wants to try out printing the last run on a broadside.

Door prizes will include broadsides and copies of our publications. Light refreshments will be served.

Find us at the Print Studio, Pacific Northwest College of the Arts, 511 NW Broadway, Room 257 (second floor). It’s a six-minute drive or a 10-minute MAX ride from the Oregon Convention Center.

Come celebrate with Ecotone and Lookout staff and authors!

For Ecotone’s fall 2019 Love Issue, on our fourteenth anniversary, we’re looking for fine poems in fourteen-line forms: sonnets of all kinds, rondels prime (aka rondels supreme), and brefs double. We’ll be open to poetry submissions all day on Valentine’s Day, on which date we will consider poems in these fourteen-line forms only.

We’d like to see meter well used—which is to say, legible and smart and messed with, sometimes—and not just iambs, for we see a paucity of trochees and triple meters and accentual work around here. The full call for work for the Love Issue is here: ecotonemagazine.org/submissions/upcoming-issues/ —and our complete guidelines are here: ecotonemagazine.org/submissions/

Please send us your best of these, and help us spread the word!

Rondel prime (or supreme)

The rondel prime is a plain old rondel (though what rondel is plain old?) with an added final line. It goes like this—

ABba abAB abbaAB

—where initial-capped letters are refrain lines and lower-case letters are rhymes. Most meters work well for a rondel, we reckon.

Bref double

The bref double consists of three quatrains and a final couplet, much like a Shakespearean sonnet. There are three rhymes, noted a, b, and c. The a and b rhymes each appear twice in each of the first three stanzas—not necessarily, per Lewis Turco’s A Book of Forms, at the end of a line—and once each in the final couplet. The last line of each quatrain ends with a c rhyme. Lines should be of (roughly) equal length, but there’s no set meter for the bref double.

Sonnet

The card shown above gives the basics for Petrarchan—often abba abba cdecde—and Shakespearean—abab cdcd efef gg—sonnets. There are so many resources for sonnet-writing that we won’t say more here, except that two sonnets we’ve loved recently are this one, from Anna Maria Hong, and this one, from Cortney Lamar Charleston; we are interested in terza rima sonnets, Sicilian sonnets, etc., along with the more usual varieties; and we’d love to read sonnets in any meter. Also, we sure would like to see a crown or two.

A note

As always, we read submitted work with all upcoming issues in mind—so if you submit work with this theme issue in mind, if we love it but can’t fit it in Love, we’ll be in touch about publishing it in another of our upcoming issues.

Quatorzains forever!

Hurricane season for the Atlantic officially ended on Friday, November 30th, but the effects of Hurricanes Florence and Michael—and Matthew in 2016—on Wilmington and nearby communities are still ongoing.

Over the weekend of September 14, Hurricane Florence dumped nearly three feet of rain on our town. Our home institution, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, was closed for a month, the longest it has ever been closed for a weather event.

We were lucky: the extent of the damage for Ecotone and Lookout’s offices was a few leaky ceiling tiles, and many lost hours of reading, editing, and production. We’re grateful to the subscribers and submitters and contributors who supported us during that time, and who have been so patient as we’ve gotten back on our feet. We’re thrilled about the release of Trespass, the new Lookout Books anthology of essays from Ecotone, this month—and thrilled, too, about publishing our newest issue, the Body Issue.

So many in North Carolina and elsewhere suffered far more serious losses—of homes and livelihoods, of access to safe drinking water and mold-free living spaces. Thirty-seven people in North Carolina lost their lives to Florence. Rivers flooded to record-setting heights, and as the waters, polluted with hog waste and coal ash, receded, they left dead fish along I-40, millions of dollars of damage in their wake, and uncertainties about the health of the river and surrounding ecosystems.