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By Simmons Buntin, May 31, 2009 6:12 pm

Terrain.org recently received:

The Author’s Guide to Publishing and Marketing, by Tim Ward and John Hunt

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By Simmons Buntin, May 24, 2009 10:47 pm

If you’re going to the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s biennial conference in Victoria, British Columbia (details here), be sure to stop by the Terrain.org table in the exhibitors area, where you’ll have the opportunity to meet Terrain.org’s editor and publisher, Simmons Buntin, as well as learn more about the journal.

Simmons will be reading an essay appearing in the new issue of Hawk & Handsaw: A Journal of Creative Sustainability titled “Songbird” on Wednesday morning, June 3, for the Wildbranch Writing Workshop panel (Session B14, 10:30 to noon).

Simmons is also participating in the Ecological Media pre-conference panel on Tuesday, June 2. His hypertext essay is “Virtual Sense of Place: Terrain.org and the Online Nexus of Literature and Environment” and can be viewed online at www.terrain.org/ecomedia.

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By Simmons Buntin, May 23, 2009 8:25 pm

Terrain.org recently received:

Voices from the American Land : Winter 2009
Lo & Behold: Household and Threshold on California’s North Coast, by Joanne Kyger

Voices from the American Land chapbooks are published four times a year by the American Land Publishing Project, Inc., a New Mexico nonprofit organization, in partnership with the Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago. The ALPP produces four chapbooks a year, offered by subscription, and conducts on-the-land readings and classroom educational activities. The Center publishes an annual collection of the chapbooks as a single volume, distributed nationally to bookstores by the University of Chicago Press.

On the inside cover:

Here begins Voices from the American Land — Joanne Kyger’s chronicle of a literary life infused with the natural scene in a village on the northern California coast. Lo & Behold offers an evocative memoir of the animals, plants, landforms, strange and wonderful visitors, neighbors, an dfamous poets and artists that are part of the poet’s daily round.

Forthcoming authors include Quraysh Ali Lansans [out now] who writes of growing up black (and Native American) in the hard, dusty landscapes of Oklahoma. He is Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Studies and Creative Writing at Chicago State University. Patricia Clark, poet-in-residence at Grand Valley State University, reflects on the numinous interaction of the human spirit with the spirit of the woodlands of Michigan. And Levi Romero, poet and architect-planner, whose work, in English and Spanish, tells of the life on the land in Hispanic northern New Mexico. A critic writes: “No other poet can pull el duende from his labyrinth the way Levi can.” Such as the Voices from the American Land.

~~~

Terrain.org will not be reviewing this chapbook in a forthcoming issue, but we do encourage you to investigate the good work of the American Land Publishing Project and the quarterly Voices from the American Land series at http://www.voicesfromtheamericanland.org/.

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By Simmons Buntin, May 21, 2009 9:26 pm

If you haven’t yet seen it, then you need to do yourself a favor and head out to your local literary bookstore, or order online, the latest copy of The Georgia Review (Spring 2009).

Among many other outstanding contributions, it includes “Culture and the Environment — A Conversation in Five Essays:” Scott Russell Sanders (Simplicity and Sanity), Reg Saner (Sweet Reason, Global Swarming), David Gessner (Against Simplicity), Lauret Savoy (Pieces toward a Just Whole), and Alison Hawthorne Deming (Culture, Biology, and Emergence).

From The Georgia Review editor Stephen Corey’s introduction:

The keynote work, Scott Russell Sanders’s “Simplicity and Sanity,” puts forward a wide-ranging examination of humankind’s relationship to the natural world and argues for its radical overhaul.

Reg Saner’s “Sweet Reason, Global Swarming” embraces Sanders’ fears for the literal survival of the human race but gives the argument a different center — one that conjures a dark figure from all of our high school history classes, Thomas Malthus, whose lone claim to renown is a theory we have let slip into the background while confronting myriad more immediate-seeming dangers.

David Gessner then confronts Sanders with “Against Simplicity: A Few Words for Complexity, Slippiness and Joy,” claiming that his sometime-mentor/idol may be entering the fray with the wrong weapon in hand.

Lauret Edith Savoy, in “Pieces toward a Just Whole,” initially lauds Sanders’ position but concentrates the bulk of her essay on certain racial and economic factors that she believes are being overlooked in virtually all discussions of environmental catastrophe.

Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Culture, Biology, Emergence,” the most sweeping of the five essays in this conjured five-way conversation, moves across eons of time and many disciplines of study to reach a conclusion that is, paradoxically, more desparate and more hopeful than those presented by her four compatriots.

If you are familiar with The Georgia Review (which has no relation to Terrain.org though many of the contributors mentioned above appear in our online pages), then you know that its contributions are of the highest quality. With this environmentally focused issue, the journal clarifies the focus by some of our foremost thinkers and writers, literary or otherwise.

We encourage you to check it out.