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By Simmons Buntin, August 27, 2010 10:33 am

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is pleased to announce the finalists and winner of our inaugural poetry contest, judged by acclaimed writer and publisher Jessie Lendennie:

• Winner: Laura-Gray Street for the long poem “Goya’s Dog”
  
• Finalist: Reeves Keyworth for “Summer Evening, the West Side”
• Finalist: Sara Talpos for “Mammoth,” “350,” and “Body of Evidence”
• Finalist: Julie Hanson for “They are Widening the Road” and “Allocation”
• Finalist: Tom Daley for “The Woman in the Pamet River,” “Overpass,” and “Theology”
• Finalist: Davi Walders for “Not in ideas…” and “The Path”

Here’s what Lendennie had to say of the winner:

Laura-Gray Street will receive the cash prize of $250 and publication in our forthcoming issue, No. 26, with the theme of “The Signal in the Noise.” The issue launches at www.terrain.org on September 20, 2010. The issue will also include poems by all the finalists: Reeves Keyworth, Sara Talpos, Julie Hanson, Tom Daley, and Davi Walders.

Congratulations to Laura-Gray, Reeves, Sara, Julie, Tom, and David, and many thanks to those who submitted to our first contest. We had a wonderful array of poems from which to choose.

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By Simmons Buntin, August 26, 2010 12:12 am

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is pleased to announce the finalists and winner of our inaugural fiction contest, judged by acclaimed writer and teacher Aurelie Sheehan:

• Winner: Andrew Wingfield for “Right of Way”
  
• Finalist: Kevin Catalano for “Into the Lake”
• Finalist: Jasmon Drain for “Wet Paper Grass”

Andrew Wingfield is the winner of the Terrain.org inaugural fiction contest.

Here’s what Sheehan had to say of the winner:

“Right of Way” is filled with microbursts of surprise, the fine prose unfurling a nuanced, but powerfully directed story with tension and drama. I appreciated the underlying wit in the narrative, which leavens the increasing snarl of moral compromise.  A story dwelling in the complexities of motherhood and compassion, “Right of Way” also explores the tension between the wild of the right of way and its occupants, and the tamer, tortured civilizers.

Andrew Wingfield will receive the cash prize of $250 and publication in our forthcoming issue, No. 26, with the theme of “The Signal in the Noise.” The issue launches at www.terrain.org on September 20, 2010. The issue will also include the finalist stories by Kevin Catalano and Jasmon Drain.

Congratulations to Andrew, Kevin, and Jasmon, and many thanks to those who submitted to our first contest. We had a wonderful array of stories from which to choose.

~~~

The finalists and winner of the Terrain.org inaugural contest in poetry (judged by Jessie Lendennie) will be announced on the evening of August 26th.

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By Simmons Buntin, August 24, 2010 1:56 pm

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is pleased to announce the finalists and winner of our inaugural nonfiction contest, judged by acclaimed writer, musician, composer, and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg:

• Winner: Elizabeth Dodd for “Sinuous”
• Finalist: Kelly Hayes-Raitt for “Still Alive”
• Finalist: Michael Palmer for “Kinds of Quiet”

Elizabeth Dodd beside a petroglyph in Chaco Culture National Historic Park. Photo by David Rintoul.

Here’s what Rothenberg had to say of the finalists and winner:

It has been a pleasure to read the three top entries of the nonfiction category of Terrain.org’s annual writing contest. “Still Alive” presents a haunting, gritty, honest picture of the kind of troubles and confusion the Iraq War has brought to people in the midst of it, a straight story of the kind we rarely get to hear in media-saturated America. The life of an over-caffeinated Brigham Young student in “Kinds of Quiet” who becomes a vacuum specialist is funny, dark, and painfully real in a wandering, wonderful way. But it is “Sinuous” that impresses me the most, with its movement from the direct experience of a snake-shaped petroglyph to a whole history of engagement from archeology, legend, tradition, and literature right into the moment of our attempt to look straight at an ancient image and try to make contemporary sense of it, finding the signal in the noise of history, record, and information.  It is always hard to combine writing based on raw personal experience of something mysterious and magical with all the reading we can do to offer experts’ visions of what our own encounter might actually mean. This author has combined these two elements seamlessly, so it is to this piece that I award this year’s first prize, and congratulations as well to the two fine runners-up.

Elizabeth Dodd will receive the cash prize of $250 and publication in our forthcoming issue, No. 26, with the theme of “The Signal in the Noise.” The issue launches at www.terrain.org on September 20, 2010. The issue will also include Michael Palmer’s essay.

Congratulations to Elizabeth, Michael, and Kelly Hayes-Raitt, and many thanks to those who submitted to our first contest. We had a wonderful array of essays from which to choose.

~~~

The finalists and winner of the Terrain.org inaugural contest in fiction (judged by Aurelie Sheehan) will be announced on this blog on Wednesday, and the finalists and winner of the inaugural contest in poetry (judged by Jessie Lendennie) will be announced within the next week.

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By Simmons Buntin, August 23, 2010 11:59 am

William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design – Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings
Edited by Thomas Hallock and Nancy E. Hoffman
The University of Georgia Press, 2010, 520 pages

Reviewed by Claudia Broman

William Bartram (1739-1823) was much more than a botanist.  He was an influential philosopher and thinker in colonial America whose unorthodox views of life’s interconnectedness filtered through his interests in nature and exploration.

Thomas Hallock, assistant professor of English at the University of South Florida, and Nancy E. Hoffman, adjunct professor at Villanova University, explore these lesser-known aspects of William Bartram in William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design.

The book, which presents previously unpublished material by Bartram, results in a more complete picture of the man behind many, if not most, of the botanical observations made in North America in the 1700s.

Bartram was the son of a self-taught botanist and lived on a farm in Kingsessing township in Pennsylvania.  For four years in the 1770s Bartram gathered botanical specimens on an exploratory tour of the southeastern United States.  His observations were published in the book Travels in 1791.

Correspondence included in The Search for Nature’s Design traces Bartram’s botanical adventures in chronology.  His previously unpublished papers cover botany, medicine, geography, gardening, native culture, slavery, environmental protection, commerce, aesthetics, philosophy, and religion.  Illuminated journal entries and botanical illustrations depict the natural detail of the 18th-century America Bartram observed.

William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design provides contextual depth for a man who continues to influence the nature writing, botanical, and horticultural movements in the United States today.

~~~

Learn more about William Bartram by reading Lucy Rowland’s article, “America’s ‘First’ Rare Plant: The Franklin Tree” from Terrain.org Issue No. 18.

~~~

Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, August 17, 2010 4:54 pm

Recently, artist Nicole Antebi sent us a little information about a new media/book website:

Water, CA: Creative Visualizations for a New Millennium
www.watercalifornia.org

Water, CA is a series of 22 contemporary projects engaging the history, mystery, and challenge of California’s water. Presented by Antebi and artist Enid Baxter Blader, Water, CA is a multimedia experiment in geography that incorporates mythological and playful understandings of complex histories. The enticingly interactive website features essays, painting, photography, video animations, and a California water timeline.

And I think we may just be looking at the future of creative, place-based multimedia. It is accessible, informative, artistic, and — once you’re familiar with the format — easy to move through. I admit it took me a while to figure out how to get into the individual projects (hover over the location of your choice then click the artist’s name). Ideally there should be a connect between the list of water projects in the blue box and the website visitor’s ability to then get into the projects — but they only indicate where in the state those projects are located. Just remember where they’re at, hover your pointer over that location, and you can dive in, so to speak.

That aside, we at Terrain.org think this is a pretty fantastic collaborative effort, and encourage you to check it out, pronto.

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By Simmons Buntin, August 2, 2010 9:46 am

Terrain.org’s submission period — for Issue No. 26, “The Signal in the Noise” and other issues — is now closed. Look for the new issue in mid-September, including the winners and select finalists of our inaugural contests in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, plus another diverse and exciting collection of literature and technical contributions, including an in-depth interview with poet, essayist, and teacher Alison Hawthorne Deming.

All contestants as well as regular submitters can expect to be notified on or before September 1, and our reading period will open again on October 1, 2010.

Thank you.