Content Tagged ‘Orion’

by Anna Montgomery Patton

There is a strange ache that comes with hunger.  One must take inventory of one’s body, locate the source of the hunger. Stomach? Brain? In fact, the feeling of hunger is not a message delivered to the brain from the stomach. It turns out that Neuropeptide not only communicates a desire for food to the brain, it also reduces pain, stress, anxiety, and blood pressure. Sometimes when I feel hungry I automatically assume my body is telling me it wants food. Perhaps it is simply wanting some sort of nourishment. And what I, and many others, find satiating is reading. Words are delicious.

It is no surprise, then, that an incredible amount of restaurants all over the world share names with well-regarded literary magazines and journals. During a meeting of the Ecotone practicum last semester, we discovered Prairie Schooner. No, not the noted literary journal of the University of Nebraska, which has been in circulation since 1926. This was Prairie Schooner of Ogden, Utah, a Wild West–themed restaurant where one can “dine in a covered wagon next to an open prairie fire while enjoying our delicious hand cut steaks, fresh seafood, and signature desserts.” I have not had the opportunity to dine at Prairie Schooner, but my experience reading an issue of Prairie Schooner was similar to enjoying a satisfying meal. And should that not be the goal of successful writing? If nothing else, a writer strives to leave a reader full, if not a little uncomfortable.

The discovery of Prairie Schooner (the restaurant) led me down a rabbit hole of dining opportunities linked to the literary, some more “fine” than others. Ploughshare Brewing Company in Lincoln, Nebraska (“Share the Bounty! Get Behind the Plough!”) was named best new restaurant in 2014, and boasts original brews and brats among its vittles. Wellington, England, is home to Tin House, a Cantonese restaurant with an overpriced (in my humble opinion) chow mein takeaway. McSweeney’s serves up twenty-one pieces of shrimp for a reasonable $4.50 in Pittsburgh. They are better known for their $1.95 red hots: hot dogs in steamed buns with McSweeney’s meat sauce and onions. The website warns, “onions buried, may cause sauce to fall off hot dog due to bun crisis of 2002.” I am uncertain about what this means, but it seems of a piece with the quirkiness and “daily laffs” of McSweeney’s.

Threepenny Cafe in Charlottesville, Virginia, not only won the OpenTable 2015 Diner’s Choice Award, and serves a $33 three-course prix fixe menu that sounds delectable (think charred romaine salad, pan roasted rockfish with champagne sauce, pecan bread budding with bourbon creme anglaise), but they have a lovely outdoor patio and live music. Back in the United Kingdom, the Granta has a mouthwatering menu of modern spins on British pub classics. Every Sunday they have a home-cooked roast along with seasonal vegetables, and Yorkies, also home-cooked. The literary Granta is similarly classic and attuned to long-time traditions.

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As you may know already, Ecotone features authors and artists who explore the transition zones between landscapes, literary genres, scientific and artistic disciplines, and modes of thought all in the name of reimagining place. We’ve published traditional nature writers since our founding in 2005, and in our Anniversary Issue featured an emerging brand of expansive new nature writers such as Claire Vaye Watkins and Ana Maria Spagna.

To celebrate Ecotone’s love of place and environment, this edition of Making a List highlights other place-based literary journals around the country and the web.

1.    The Common
Published biannually out of Amherst, Massachusetts, The Common seeks to “find the extraordinary in the common…literature and art powerful enough to reach from there to here.” The stories, poems, essays, and art in each issue invoke a “modern sense of place”, whether it’s a kudzu-creeped Mississippi apartment in Issue 10’s “Crescent City” by Maurice Emerson Decaul, or a warm Bombay kitchen in Amit Chaudhuri’s recipe for pomfret chutney masala from Issue 9.

2.    Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment
An online journal open to “all interpretations of environment,” Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment explores the “social and political implications” of environmental complexities. From its home base at Iowa State University, the journal publishes place-based fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art on a rolling basis, and runs a yearly short fiction and poetry contest where the prize is both publication online and a box of organic Iowa sweet corn.

3.    The Fourth River
Students at Chatham University’s “groundbreaking MFA focusing on nature, travel writing, and social outreach” produce The Fourth River, a print-and-online journal for innovative and unique place-based fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In the most recent online issue “Queering Nature,” guest editors Dakota Garilli and Michael Walsh stress the inversion of “the accepted definition of what is artificial versus what is natural.”

4.    Orion  
With over thirty years publishing environmental and social writing, Orion “lies at the nexus of ecology and the human experience.” Based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Orion describes itself as “America’s finest environmental magazine,” but also features a strong online presence, an annual book award, and involvement in grassroots organizations across the country.

5.    Terrain.org
Each piece in Terrain.org celebrates the “symbiosis between the built and natural environments” otherwise known as the “soul of place.” With both journalistic and literary works, Terrain.org makes place-based and environmental writing accessible to a wide audience interested in the intersection of humanity and ecology.

–Megan Ellis, Ecotone designer

It’s been a week of wild weather for most of the country, and wild things have been happening for Ecotone folks too.

Paul Lisicky is getting RAVE reviews for his memoir, The Narrow Door, released last week, a section of which appears in our Anniversary issue. This book is about the big stuff: friendship, for sure, but also “Writing. The chaos of sexuality. Competition and envy, dying and grieving. The high (unrealistic?) expectations we have of those we love, with our needs becoming so great we drive them away.” Check out the full NYT review, and then get your hands on a copy.

Ecotone‘s founder, David Gessner, recently hosted a one-hour episode of National Geographic’s “Explorer: Call of the Wild,” which discusses how “As humans become more addicted to technology and withdrawn from nature, our brains are becoming rewired.” Here’s a short clip of David from the show.

Awards are wild for our contributors! Hearty congrats to National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Lauren Groff, and to Wendell Berry, recipient of the Book Critics’ Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award!

On a very sad note, farewell to Eva Saulitis, who died in Alaska last week. Eva was a passionate advocate for orcas, Prince William Sound, and all things wild, as well as beautiful and immensely talented writer. Eva’s work appeared in Ecotone 15,  but we’d like to share this podcast from Orion, in which she reads an essay that appeared in their March/April 2014 issue.

We hope your week is filled with less shoveling (we didn’t get a flake here on the coast, we’re sad to say!) and more of wonderful wild things. Thanks for tuning in!