Poetry

• “Exchange of Azalea and Quail” by Karen Holmberg, Issue No. 28
• “Renunciation” by Christopher Locke, Issue No. 27

Nonfiction

• “Faith in a Forgotten Place” by Julian Hoffman, Issue No. 28
• “Winter Flood” by Ana Maria Spagna, Issue No. 27

Fiction

• “Song of the Turkey Vulture” by GE Tallant, Issue No. 28
• “Under the Reservoir” by Anna Laird Barto, Issue No. 27

As always, selecting our total of six allowed submissions is difficult among all of the work we are honored to published in two issues per year. We thank these nominees and all of our contributors for making Terrain.org such a wonderful and important place-based journal!

Poetry
Judged by Alison Hawthorne Deming

• Winner – Rebecca Dunham for her poem in seven parts, “Morning: Joplin, MO”
• Finalist – Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé for his poem “Scholem in Forty Winged Hours”
• Finalist – Gretchen Primack for her poem “Fawn”

Of the winning poem, Alison Hawthorne Deming writes:

This poem sequence takes up the task of beginning again after the disaster of tornado and flood that hit Joplin, MO earlier this year.  Beginning requires seeing and the poem accomplishes that with acute precision and urgency as it ricochets between observation and the inward seeing of contemplation. I admire the poem’s economy and questioning in taking on the particulars of a tragedy that wounded human, plant, and creaturely communities alike. But I admire even more that the poem makes no attempt to make it all better with simplistic pieties. Rather it asks the reader to make a home in this reality–”roost, thou forsaken”– and to “let the pain remind you/ what it means to survive.”  In a world of wounds, one of poetry’s great tasks is to educate our empathy. This poem does just that at a time when empathy needs all the help it can get in the world.

Fiction
Judged by Andrew Wingfield

• Winner – G.E. Tallant for her story “Song of the Turkey Vulture”
• Finalist – Malka Davis for her story “Kenley’s Watch”
• Finalist – Erica Olsen for her story “Driveaway”
• Finalist – K.L. Barron for her story “Controlled Burn”

Of the winning story, Andrew Wingfield writes:

“Song of the Turkey Vulture” is a prose elegy to the deeply placed existence of a single woman whose small farm is the great work of her life.  Rich in details of the land and its bounty, tuned to seasonal rhythms of work and weather, this story grew up around me with the quiet majesty of a pumpkin vine.  As our small farms devolve into housing tracts, or fall prey to the factory food system, we squander not only good land, but also the habits of care that are the essence of agriculture.  Through its sharp characterizations and careful evocations of place—the sheer weight of its specifics—“Song of the Turkey Vulture” invites us to feel the gravity of our loss.  The story is mournful yet celebratory, suffused with wry humor and laced with a bitterness that’s as bracing as a mouthful of mustard greens.

Nonfiction
Judged by Elizabeth Dodd

• Winner – Julian Hoffman for his essay “Faith in a Forgotten Place”
• Finalist – Katie Fallon for her essay “Hill of the Sacred Eagles”
• Finalist – Catherine Schmitt for her essay “New Orleans, The Gulf Coast, 2010″

Of the winning essay, Elizabeth Dodd writes:

I’ve selected “Faith in a Forgotten Place” as winner of this year’s nonfiction contest.  This piece combines terrific reporting—repeated visits to the village of Zagradec, careful inclusion of historic context—with an evocative personal response, indicating how the Prespa basin has touched the author.  “And while most of Lesser Prespa Lake exists in Greece, the great bowl of open water throws an unexpected arm around an oak-clad mountain at its southern end. The hill-slopes close in, like parallel lines running together in the distance, until only a thin finger of water touches the shore, a reed-tangled wedge belonging to Albania.” This faithful presentation of the world’s body underlies the essay’s contemplation of hopes and borders, and how eco-tourism can be an opportunity for re-inhabitation by those who are not the tourists.  Richly informative, deftly reflective, this is splendid literary journalism.

All of the winners and finalists will be published in our forthcoming issue–No. 28, “Image”–which will launch on September 19th. Additionally, winners each receive a $250 prize.

Congratulations to our winners!

Theme: Entropy

Issue No. 27 features a rich and surprising mix of literary, technical, and artistic contributions, all with eloquent responses to entropy — a measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system:

Editorials

• Guest Editorial
  “Crossroads if a Water Crisis” by Tara Lohan, Senior Editor of AlterNet and Author of Water Matters
• Plein Air
  “All Quiet at the Jersey Shore” by Deborah Fries
• Field Notes
  “Delight and Disorder” by Kathryn Miles, our new columnist
• Bull Hill
  “Order and Chaos and the Clash of the Titans of Modern Art and Science” by David Rothenberg
• A Stone’s Throw
  “Desegregating Nature” by Lauret Savoy

Interview

• Entropy Made Visible
  Terrain.org Interviews Author James Howard Kunstler

To Know a Place

• Time in the Karst Country
  Essay and Photographs by Julian Hoffman, with Audio

UnSprawl Case Study

• Rockville Town Square
  Rockville, Maryland

Essays

• Ghost Nests: A Photo Gallery
  by Erik Hoffner
• It Begins With Neon Lights
  by Liz Scheid
• Makeshift World: The Entropy of Dorchester County, Maryland
  A Narrative Slideshow by Kateri Kosek
• Winter Flood
  by Ana Maria Spagna, with Audio
• Measures of Loss
  by Susan Carol Hauser
• Last Days: A Video Essay
  by Lisa Bickmore

Articles

• Sanctuary of Ruin: Touring Western Australia’s Piano Graveyard
  by Jason Cotter, with Photo Gallery
• Through Traffic: A Small-Town Perspective on High-Speed Rail
  by Kate Johnson
• The Thirsty Tree: Confronting Invasive Salt Cedar in the American Southwest
  by Melissa L. Lamberton
• The Federal Hand that Feeds You: A Post-Modern History of Food Safety in America
  by Rafael Otto
• Changing the Climate or Changing the Way We Farm?
  by David Wann
• What, Really, is the Commons?
  by Jay Walljasper

ARTerrain Gallery

• Entropy ~ Photographs
  12 Photographs by David Perry

Poetry

• Genevieve Kaplan
  Four Poems with Audio
• Christopher Locke
  Three Poems with Audio
• Amanda Whiting
  One Poem with Audio
• Jennifer Wallace
  Two Poems with Audio
• Mark Tredinnick
  Four Poems with Audio
• Maryann Corbett
  Three Poems with Audio
• Natalie Young
  One Poem with Audio
• Frank Gallimore
  One Poem with Audio
• Jill McCabe Johnson
  Three Poems with Audio
• Katherine Riegel
  One Poem with Audio and Images
• Kelly Madigan
  Two Poems with Audio
• James Engelhardt
  Two Poems with Audio
• Wally Smith
  One Poem
• Anna Catone
  Two Poems with Audio
• Robert Hill Long
  One Poem with Audio
• Peter Huggins
  One Poem with Audio

Fiction

• Flash Fiction: “Waiting for Her,” “She Let Him,” and “Sink”
  Prose by Teague Bohlen, with Audio
  Photography by Britten Traughber
• Saw an Old Friend I Know
  by Nels Hanson
• Under the Reservoir
  by Anna Laird Barto
• A Field Guide to Adirondack Black Flies
  by Jennifer Duffield White

Reviews

• Nature and Culture, Student Edition
  Kate Johnson reviews The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World, by James J. Farrell
• “I want its poetry to overtake us” ~ On the Power of Place-Based Writing
  Jennifer McStotts reviews Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-Based Writing, edited by Florence Caplow and Susan A. Cohen
• Beauty and Peril
  Suzanne Frischkorn reviews Bloom, poems by Simmons B. Buntin

View our dynamic new issue at www.terrain.org.

Yesterday I learned that the photographer Rick Maloof passed away on December 27th. I didn’t know Rick well but did have the good fortune of spending a day with him and his wife Joan, a Terrain.org contributor, up in the old-growth rainforests of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the summer of 2009. That trip resulted in an article by Joan with slideshow by Rick in Terrain.org’s Fall/Winter 2009 issue: view it here.

Though I only had that small window of interaction, I knew right away that Rick was a caring, compassionate, wonderful individual. I’ve long known that about Joan. Rick and I spent hours along the trails and the bumpiest bus ride in my memory, anyway, talking photography, conservation, literature, and beyond. Even in that short time he has inspired and influenced me, as his memory and photographs will continue to do. Safe travels, Rick.

~~~

Obituary from the memorial service, held January 16 at Salisbury University:

Richard D. Maloof of Quantico passed away peacefully at home on the morning of December 27th, just as the sun came out on the fresh snow. The cause of death was renal cell carcinoma which was diagnosed in late September. Rick is well known as a photographer-philosopher. His work has been shown in many local galleries, and it continues to enliven many walls.

Rick leaves behind a wife of 32 years, Joan Maloof, and five children: Natalie Maloof; Richard Maloof Jr. of Quantico, MD; Traci Stroupe of Lost Creek, WV; David Maloof of Big Sur, CA; and Alyssa Maloof of Philadelphia, PA. He also leaves behind two brothers: Daniel Maloof and Robert Maloof. He was preceded in death by his parents: Caroline Morris Watson Maloof and Daniel Maloof. Rick made friends very easily and he also leaves behind many close friends.

Rick Maloof was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942. He graduated from Bladensburg High School in 1959 and joined the Army in 1960. He was part of a Long Range Recon Patrol company and later joined the Special Forces. He served his country in Vietnam and eventually became a commissioned officer, attaining the rank of Captain. His last years in the military were spent teaching ROTC at the University of Delaware and Salisbury University. Although Rick served 23 years in the Army, he was a pacifist at heart and supported many organizations promoting nonviolence.

After retiring from service, Rick devoted his time to photography. He produced many “slide shows” for local nonprofit agencies, and he worked for a while as Salisbury University’s official photographer. He photographed countless weddings and produced an endless stream of artwork. His years in photography bridged the era of film and darkroom to digital and lightroom.

Rick led an adventurous life and had many skills. He traveled all around the world, including Greece, India, Thailand, Pakistan, Mexico, Germany, Spain, New Zealand, China, Indonesia, and many more places. He was a pilot, a skydiver, a scuba diver, and a backpacker. In addition, he was a great cook and a lover of fine red wines. He felt very satisfied with all that he had experienced, and he left this life with no regrets.

Donations in his memory, and all proceeds from his artwork, will be used to print a book of his forest photography titled A Path to Beauty: Ecology of Ancient Forests.

Girl on a Bridge
Poems by Suzanne Frischkorn
Main Street Rag Publishing Co., 39 poems in 57 pages

“Suzanne Frischkorn is a fierce and fearless poet. In Girl on a Bridge, she first upends our dainty notions of girlhood and then leads us into the wilderness of violence, madness, fear, and love — and does so with beauty and tenderness.”
– Julianna Baggott

“Good citizens beware: Suzanne Frischkorn has let Girl on a Bridge loose on the world and she’s spreading the word about the furies of femininity and the madness of motherhood with its ‘stone weight of home.’ These poems burn holes on the fairy tale pages of domestic fantasy and uncover the treacherous (though more exciting) narratives of those women who dare stray from the path or, at the very least, who celebrate their desires: ‘What’s more flattering than being wanted by a mouth that waters?’ This book of finely-crafted verse holds up its poetry like a lovely razor blade.”
– Rigoberto Gonzalez

Read poetry by Suzanne Frischkorn appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 18, and look for a review of Girl on a Bridge in our next issue, online in mid-September.

~~~

Venison: A Poem
By Thorpe Moeckel
Etruscan Press, 1 poem in 66 pages

“Food doesn’t get any more local, cosmic, primitive, tasty, or disturbing than in this book-length, lyrical-meditative poem. At stake are no less than the origins and mysteries of flesh and touch.”
– from the book back cover

“Thorpe Moeckel’s Venison is civilized and wild, like a life lived well, a barbaric yawp of pain and joy and true wonder at the brilliant ordinariness of a life lived close to the earth and close to the bone. Moeckel’s fine poetic is whetted on the visceral and cannily transcendental. Read it.”
– Christopher Camuto

“This book, a glorious and breath-taking incantation of the beauty to be found in killing for nourishment, spins into the realms of woods, home, family, and community. The language is dizzying, as beautiful as you’ll ever read.”
– Janisse Ray

Reading poetry by Thorpe Moeckel appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 24 and Issue No. 24.

~~~

The Surfacing of Excess
Poems by Arianne Zwartjes
Winner of the 2009 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry
Eastern Washington University Press, 13 poems & 38 stitches in 87 pages

“These lively ‘eco-poems’ take the marvelous, but endangered, species called language on a lively quest for sustenance. Arianne Zwartjes contemplates mysteries, politics, emotions, and aesthetics, indulging us with a feast of realities. The ‘surfacing of excess’ turns out not to be a clever phrase, or a ruse, but the hard work that a beautiful mind accomplishes, thinking about life, in Zwartjes’s case, in an interlinked diction of science and religion, which resolves itself in a language of love.”
– Jane Miller

“Arianne Zwartjes’s thoughtful, playful poems map the surfaces of language, image, flight, and architecture. Reading The Surfacing of Excess is like removing the boring part of your skull and letting the sky abut your brain. Or like hanging around with the theoretical mathematicians’ guild, getting goofy, drinking wine by the jug, positioning geometries, speaking Greek. Ambitious, fragmented, and thinky in ways most poetry doesn’t even attempt, triangulating by stars including Weil, Carson, Plato, Calvino, and Heidegger, Zwartjes is a new breed of bird in a sky filled with sameness. Part descent, part descant, always vector, in her words, herein you’ll find ‘here / we know there is a mystery greater than beauty.;”
– Ander Monson

Read poetry by Arianne Zwartjes appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 25.

After reading the novel, I found Padma on Facebook and made a strange request. I asked her if she’d sign my hard bound copy of her book if I sent it to her and promised to pay for the return postage. Not only did she agree (graciously), she also paid for the return postage. And this after the book had just been reviewed in the New York Times, a time I imagine friends and admirers must come out of the woodwork. Again, she couldn’t have been more approachable.

When we were looking for someone to interview for our next issue, she was the first author who came to mind. She’s kind, well-traveled, thoughtful: a great writer at the (relative) beginning of what will surely be a long and illustrious career. I approached her again, and again she accepted.

We talked, as we always do at Terrain.org, about place. This led to further questions about novels vs. plays, about Brahmins, about Elizabeth Bishop, and about the role of failure in art.

I can’t wait for it to come out, but in the meantime–if you’d like to sample some of Padma’s work–here’s a short story she wrote a couple of years ago that won the Boston Review’s annual short story contest. The work, “Transitory Cities,” has a very different tone from her novel. It’s more experimental, more a work of magical realism–though many authors might reject this term. Either way, it’s a great story and should more than get you warmed up for the interview.

The selection completes the hat trick for Terrain.org, as we placed fiction in the 2008 edition (“The Split” by Kim Whitehead) and nonfiction in the 2009 edition (“Catching Hell: The Joe Holt Integration Story” by Heather Killelea McEntarfer).

Read and listen to the poem — and two others by Pamela Uschuk — at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/24/uschuk.htm.

We are delighted to once again place a contribution in the Dzanc Books Best of the Web anthology series!

Update:

Dzanc Books is setting up Dzanc National Workshop Day on March 20, 2010.  It has over 30 workshops set up in over 25 cities on that date. Learn more at the Dzanc Day website:

http://www.dzancbooks.org/dzancday

We were hoping that Alison Hawthorne Deming, who also has poems in this issue, would be able to join us.  But alas, she couldn’t make it. I think they’d get along splendidly — they have a lot in common. And that strikes me as true of many poets who likewise write of science and environment. What is it that draws us together? Ideology, passion, scientific understanding, constant pursuit of truth and justice, a love for art and an acknowledgement that art and science are fundamentally linked? That’s why Terrain.org resounds, I think. It’s about nexus. In this case, the nexus between art and science, environment and humanity — the places real and virtual we all coexist, even if we don’t completely understand them.