Village boys with their horse and cart, from Julian Hoffman's "Faith in a Forgotten Place," the winner of the 2nd Annual Contest in Nonfiction. Photo by Julian Hoffman.
Issue No. 28 — “Image” — features an interactive mix of literary and technical contributions, including the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction winners of our 2nd Annual Contest; our second image-filled online poetry chapbook; a new column by Elizabeth Dodd; a hypertext narrative gallery on art and the Russian landscape; and much more:
Editorials
Guest Editorial: “Defining the City: On Being and Becoming” by Scott Doyon, Principal, PlaceMakers
Almanac: “Red Buffalo, Black Butterflies” by Elizabeth Dodd
“Redefining Terms, Reclaiming Place”: Oliver de la Paz reviews The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, edited by Alison Hawthorn Deming and Lauret E. Savoy
“A Symbiosis of Poem and Painting”: Derek Sheffield reviews God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World, by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens
“Delivering the News”: Andrew C. Gottlieb reviews Story Problems: Poems, by Rob Carney
“Bird Conservation in the 21st Century”: Tom Leskiw reviews The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation, by Daniel J. Lebbin, Michael J. Parr, and George H. Fenwick
Following my previous book/CD projects on birds and whales, I am now on a quest to make music live with bugs. The first and perhaps greatest stop: jamming with hordes of singing cicadas, the kind that come out once every thirteen years across the American midwest.
Here on a particularly exposed single tree at the corner of Vigal Road and East Lakeshore Drive in Springfield, Illinois, it feels like photographer Charles Lindsay and I have arrived at the epicenter of the thirteen year cicada invasion. There are literally millions of cicadas per hectare at such moments, and we have a hard time keeping them out of our clothes. If you are afraid of insects, this is the way to get over it—take out your saxophone in the midst of a swarm of cicadas, bugs that have been slowly growing for thirteen years underground preparing for these few weeks when they ascend the trees, sing in swells of wheeeeeoooowsh white noise, calling out for a mate.
We don’t really know how selective the females are at such moments, but Dave Marshall and John Cooley discovered that a precise wing-flick sound made by the females exactly half a second after the males finish their song is the signal that the female is ready to mate. There are so many bugs out here that perhaps everybody scores. Science doesn’t really know—fieldwork can only be done less than once a decade. I didn’t hear any other saxophones out there. And we have no idea how or why the males of Magicicada trecassini synchronise their whoops in waves of swelling sounds every few seconds. The sound of ten of them all doing this next to my ears is as deafening as a heavy metal concert.
Melissa L. Lamberton Interviews Terrain.org Editor-in-Chief Simmons B. Buntin
Melissa L. Lamberton: What’s the history of Terrain.org? Where did the idea come from and when did it get started?
Simmons B. Buntin: Terrain.org was founded as Terrain: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments by Todd Ziebarth and me in 1997. We had both recently graduated with our master of urban and regional planning (MURP) degrees from the University of Colorado at Denver, and wanted to start a magazine that focused in large part on land-use issues but also included literary work. Our models were magazines such as Orion, Audubon, and Planning, and we were both influenced by the “New Urbanism” architectural movement, which presented to me at least a kind of poetry of place. When we quickly realized we had neither the experience nor the funding to publish a print magazine, however, we decided to create an online journal.
I had a little web development experience, and that was pretty much all one needed back then to begin an online publication. Our original website address was www.bod.net/terrain but we quickly picked up www.terrain.org. We changed our name a couple years later to lessen confusion between our online journal and the print magazine titled Terrain, published by the Ecology Center in Berkeley. We didn’t know when we founded Terrain.org that there was another environmental magazine of the same name. We selected the title “Terrain” based on an A.R. Ammons poem of the same name. I’ve long been a big Ammons fan; required reading I’d say!
Since our first issue in summer 1998, we’ve published on average two issues per year, and we’ve expanded in scope and size, as well. Initially we included the main content areas of editorials (or columns), poetry, essays, fiction, articles, the UnSprawl case study, and the ARTerrain gallery. Since then we’ve added reviews, an interview, and — with the launch of the current issue — To Know a Place, which features a story, essay, or poem(s) selected by the editors that demonstrates an eloquent intimacy between the author and the author’s place. We’ve also expanded to include a blog, Facebook page, Twitter site, issues in PDF format, and events section. We tried a discussion forum for a while but had to moderate it too closely due to spammers and ultimately gave up. Now, though, we have the capacity to accommodate comments on our contributions and that’s a real plus, as it expands the conversation of the piece well beyond issue launch.
As we’ve grown our editorial board and editorial staff have grown, as well. I’ve always served as the editor-in-chief, web producer, and publisher, while Todd (like myself) was a columnist and reviewer. In the last two years I’ve brought genre editors on board in fiction, nonfiction, and reviews (Patrick Burns, Joshua Foster, Jennifer McStotts, and Stephanie Eve Boone, respectively), and we now also have an assistant editor (Rafael Otto) who primarily maintains our blog. I’ve expanded the role of editors both because our submissions have increased substantially over the last several years and because it doesn’t make sense for a journal that is as established as Terrain.org to rely solely on one person. My hope would be that if the proverbial bus was to run over me tomorrow, Terrain.org could live on. We still need more of a self-automated process (or a backup web producer, perhaps) for that to be guaranteed, but with genre editors, at least the lineage is in place.
The editorial board serves really as an advisory board, though several of our board members — David Rothenberg, Deborah Fries, and Lauret Savoy — also write regular columns. Todd wrote a column for several years but a couple years ago decided to withdraw so is now only an editorial board member. The same is true for Catherine Cunningham, who joined our editorial team primarily as a columnist in 1999 and now serves on the editorial board. The board itself is expanding, as well — something I see continuing with the expanding Terrain.org network.
MLL: What do you mean by “built and natural environments?” What are the types of themes Terrain.org authors tend to explore?
SBB: The term “built & natural environments” is intended to be provocative; that is, we want readers to think about the context of the built to the natural environments. Are they the same? Are they different? “Environment” is such a general word that we wanted to pull it apart a bit. So we say:
Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is a twice yearly online journal searching for that interface—the integration—among the built and natural environments, that might be called the soul of place. It is not definitely about urban form, nor solely about natural landscapes. It is not precisely about human culture, nor necessarily about ecology. It is, rather, a celebration of the symbiosis between the built and natural environments where it exists, and an examination and discourse where it does not.
“Examination and discourse” is at the heart of what we’re about, in any genre, because aren’t we as readers, as artists, as humans always impacting and being impacted by place? How, and why — and why does that matter?
Each issue of Terrain.org is theme-based, and these themes are one contextual way to explore the above questions. The current theme, for example, is “The Signal in the Noise,” and upcoming themes include “Entropy,” “Image,” and “Migration.” All of the issues, in the context of their themes, are archived indefinitely at www.terrain.org/archives. Our first theme was “The Urban Neighborhood.” Some of my favorite themes through the years have been “The City Wild,” “The Dark and the Light,” “Understory / Overgrowth,” “Islands & Archipelagos,” and “Symbiosis.” Oh, who am I kidding? I love all the themes because Terrain.org is ultimately about context — the relationship of human to nonhuman environment, the relationship of contribution to contribution within each issue.
It’s not possible to further define the specific themes that authors and other contributors tend to explore because that varies so much based on issue theme, genre, and the piece itself. I can say, however, that for a while and perhaps still, I suppose, we received a lot of submissions about how bad suburbs are, and alienation in suburban settings. That’s a true theme in America, too, though for our journal the submission had better approach that in a truly unique, surprising, and compelling way because otherwise it feels cliched by now.
MLL: What are the unique challenges and/or benefits of having an entirely online journal? I notice you really take advantage of technology with audio poetry, images, etc. Could you talk a bit about the rationale for this, and perhaps what you think about the future of online journals in general?
SBB: I believe the benefits far outweigh the challenges when it comes to online publications. Major benefits include low cost of publication (web hosting is about $160 per year), high visibility (we receive more than 100,000 visits per issue with an achievable goal of multiplying that number by ten in the next few years; most literary print journals are lucky to receive 4,000 or 5,000 “views”), indefinite archiving, easy and real-time accessibility, and the opportunity to include interactive multimedia that print generally doesn’t accommodate.
The challenges include a stigma that online publications still aren’t as high-quality as print publications, competition for readers from other websites (not just journals, but the crazy and I think exciting mix of environmental and cultural sites out there that may cover some of the same topics, literary and otherwise), and the need to constantly accommodate and plan for technology evolution. But with these challenges come good opportunities: more and more online publications are landing contributions in the Pushcart Prize anthology, for example; less and less is “online” a qualifier for publication quality. With linking and especially social networking — Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. — so-called competition can actually benefit all of the websites as they share site visitors and create, potentially, a discourse that goes beyond any single journal, spanning several websites. And with rapid changes in technology we find that the website becomes easier to maintain and share, that we can draw more visitors to the site by offering more dynamic features, and that visitors can access the site in multiple ways (traditional computer, smart phone, Kindle, etc.).
To me it seems a shame not to take advantage of multimedia in an online publication. Little disappoints me as much as going to a new online journal only to discover it’s simply a PDF prepared for print that’s served up online. Big deal. Okay, it may have fantastic literary content, true. But what else? So with Terrain.org, our goal is to include as much (reasonable and elegantly presented) interactive multimedia as possible: audio with poetry and lyrical essays and short stories, video essays and interviews, interactive photo essays and narrative slideshows, commenting on contributions, searchable contributor index, image galleries, and more. That is truly what brings an online journal beyond the realm of the print — and is pretty standard now on most informational websites, anyway. The opportunity, then, isn’t so much having that interactive content, but presenting it to readers in such a way that it really pulls them in.
I am biased, of course, but that’s one of the ways I believe that Terrain.org excels: design. There are some online journals with very good poetry and the like, but the work is presented in such a way as to be almost painful to look at or browse through. When people come to Terrain.org, my hope is that one of the first things they do is say, “Wow! What a beautifully presented journal with fantastic content.” I often hear what great images we have, and that’s not accidental: it all ties in. Simply, our goal is to be the most functionally beautiful environmental journal, if not journal overall, online. I’m not saying that we are there now, but we continue to strive.
I think the future of online journals is tied directly to devices we’ll use to access “the web” in the future. I’ve mentioned smart phones and Kindle — digital readers. The latter poses the most interesting challenge for a traditionally HTML journal like Terrain.org, because the digital readers are not HTML and so (right now) cannot accommodate the interactive features. I can’t imagine that won’t change in some capacity, though. Think about the newspaper subscriber who reads the “traditional” newspaper on her Kindle but wants more information, say audio and an image gallery, housed on the newspaper’s website. Perhaps these digital readers already do support that linkage, but if not it must just be a matter of time before the Kindle tool links to additional online content and has the capacity to eloquently serve that content. From a production perspective, however, digital editions for Kindle follow in style and actual assembly from a PDF based on a publication designed for print. We go back and convert our HTML to print for our PDF edition, but that’s not adequate for getting it onto Kindle. And then there’s the additional challenge (and cost?) of actually getting Terrain.org picked up by Kindle. We don’t charge for access, there’s no subscription rate and I don’t ever intend there to be. So if Kindle charges a fee to “host” issues of Terrain.org, could we afford to do that? Not right now…
Though I don’t have a lot of capacity to convert Terrain.org to all of these platforms, I think about how the journal can fit — what’s coming up next — all the time. And the challenge is as exciting as it is daunting.
MLL: What’s going on behind the scenes? Who are your slush readers, how many do you have, and how do you keep the website up and running?
SBB: As the editor-in-chief, I’m responsible for final say on all contributions, and serve as the genre editor for poetry. I also solicit (and/or respond to and often write) interview, ARTerrain, UnSprawl, and other contributions and sections of the site. We have dedicated editors for fiction, nonfiction (one editor each for essays and articles), and reviews, and they work through the slush pile (which is easy to manage thanks to our online submission manager, which many print and online journals use now for the submission process) and forward their recommendations to me. Terrain.org is an on-the-side love affair for all of us, so we get to contributions and other editorial matters as we can, from our own locales, and do not have editorial meetings. Our editors are in Tucson, San Francisco, and Buffalo. So location isn’t as important as, say, dedication.
I’ll often review work on a Sunday afternoon, or on an evening that isn’t too late. If I like it right away we’ll accept it right away, but more often we want to live with it for a while and then will accept it. We may lightly or sometimes heavily edit pieces we accept (this is especially the case for nonfiction and articles), or suggest completely new ways to approach a piece, especially if it’s multimedia. That can get pretty exciting. A recent example is Aisha Sloan’s wonderful photo essay on Los Angeles, “How to Draw a Glass Mountain: Los Angeles and the Architecture of Segregation” (http://www.terrain.org/essays/25/sloan.htm) which she submitted as a fairly different essay with a couple photograph possibilities. I met with her (turns out she’s in Tucson) after reviewing the piece and we reconstructed it together before she went back and really overhauled it, much to the piece’s benefit. There was no guarantee we would accept it, but I felt like with the new structure it had a great chance of really working, and it does. Now that level of collaboration and editing is not standard, but we will work closely with the author if we think that will do the trick.
I maintain the website — it helps that I’ve been a professional website developer and designer. Building out the site takes a very long time; I often have to take several days from my full-time job plus work on it hours every night for a month and a half before issue launch to get it ready for contributor review. That’s just the web component, on top of all the work in reviewing and editing. As I like to say, besides my babies (I have two daughters), Terrain.org is my baby.
MLL: How do you measure “circulation” — number of web hits? Twitter followers?
SBB: We use Google Analytics to track traffic. The most important statistic is website visits: dedicated time on the site by single visitors. Page views and percentage of new versus returning visitors are also important. Then we have the capability of tracking search terms that bring visitors to the site, visitor paths through the site, primary entrance and exit pages, time on site, browser and platforms, and the like. We also track visits to the blog, using the same tool.
While I look at Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” or fans, I’m less concerned about those numbers, though always want to help increase them because they’re good tools for getting announcements and other information out there. We also send the Terrain.org e-News to an email distribution list we’ve been accumulating since we started; I’d really like to grow that list, as well.
The challenge that I haven’t mentioned earlier, but which relates to growing the email list and increasing site traffic, is marketing, and the funding for said marketing. We’re nonprofit but not legally so; therefore, we cannot receive tax-free donations. That’s something we plan to address over the next eighteen months, but until then Terrain.org is a wholly self-funded endeavor. Paying for web hosting and such isn’t too bad, but marketing in magazines like Poets & Writers, and then exhibiting at conferences such as AWP and ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) isn’t cheap, though essential. Additionally, at some point down the road I’d like to be able to pay for contributions, especially articles. We’ll need a revenue source in one capacity or another for that, and it seems to me that incorporating as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit is about the only way to open ourselves up to large and regular funding sources; it’s certainly the only way to be eligible for the majority of organizational grants and fellowships. That leads to the challenge and resource constraints of grant writing, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, as they say…
MLL: Any thoughts you have on where you’d like to see Terrain.org go in the future, or the role it plays in making a space to talk about environmental issues?
SBB: This is a good and loaded question, one I feel like I’m constantly considering. Of course I’d like to see Terrain.org expand in quantity and quality: more readers, more submitters, more outstanding contributions, more visibility, more discussion sparked by the contributions, more awards and recognition, more changing the world for the better.
Specifically, though, I’d like to secure enough funding to spend more of my time on the journal and move it from a twice-yearly to a quarterly format. I think we have enough submissions to do that at this point, at least in the creative genres. But I don’t have the capacity — even with the addition of genre editors — to put the issue together four times a year, to write the UnSprawl case studies and conduct the interviews four times a year as I often do. I would need more than extracurricular time to make that jump (and perhaps the genre editors would, as well), but it is a goal.
Additionally, I want to continue to build networks and collaborations with other journals and organizations. It may sound strange, since I used the c-word before (competition), but there can be real synergies between even similar journals that make them both better. For example, the editor of Unity College’s beautiful print journal Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability, Kathryn Miles, is on our editorial board. Beyond that, though, we haven’t collaborated and yet we have the opportunity to do just that. Where Terrain.org has formed expanding partnerships, though, is with book publishers such as Milkweed Editions and Trinity University Press, in which we include excerpts from new books. That ensures we get good content (we review and select or decline as with any submission) and the publisher gets more exposure. One of Terrain.org’s first partnerships was with the now-defunct journal Terra Nova: Nature & Culture, published in the 1990s by MIT Press. David Rothenberg was the editor and is on our editorial board. He also writes a regular column for Terrain.org. The cornerstone of the partnership, though, is that Terrain.org includes contributions from Terra Nova in the journal on occasion, extending the life of that essay, story, or poem. Who knows what other partnerships and collaborations are out there, but I’m certain there are many more opportunities.
Indeed, opportunities would appear to be the optimal word — for technology, for collaborative efforts, for making a space to talk about environmental issues. And opportunities for considering the context of the built and natural environments in literary and technical mediums are what I hope we present in a lovely and important online format.
~~~
Melissa L. Lamberton is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. A native Tucsonan, she worked as a science writer for the Water Resources Research Center and the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and her articles have appeared in the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Citizen.
THE ELECTROSENSE OF PADDLEFISH: a multimedia piece on Water in the American West
Charles Lindsay and David Rothenberg
Frederick Loewe Theater, 35 West 4th St. NY, NY
(between Washington Sq. Park E. and Greene Street.)
Why did Floyd Dominy draw the instructions for how to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam on a napkin? It was his greatest creation as director of the US Bureau of Land Management. What did he know about the evils of damming the West?
This is the premiere of a live multimedia performance interpreting the complex environmental, political and social issues involving water and the Western United States. From the frontier days to 21st century silicon valley, water has been a lifeblood, transforming the western half of our nation from desert and wilderness into a booming region requiring vast quantities of this precious liquid resource — which westerners will stop at nothing to get.
Music: Lindsay’s pristine and processed field recordings, live electric cello and Moog guitar. Rothenberg on clarinets and overtone flutes, live explorations of found sounds and words depicting the strange struggle of water to fight back against those who would try to control it.
Video: From May through August, 2010 Lindsay traveled the west capturing video of all things affected by water. Locations included Las Vegas, Fort Peck, Mono Lake, The Hoover Dam, Idaho’s ‘Craters of the Moon’ National Monument and Silver Creek Preserve. He shot Yellowstone Park’s geysers and forest fire remnants, Paddlefish snagging, The Mermaid Bar in Great Falls, the open pit copper mine in Butte, which is the United States largest Super Fund site. He shot Noah’s Ark at a Creationist Dinosaur Museum, industrial irrigation, an abandoned depression era farm, water coolers and truck stops and 75 million year old ocean beds.
The remixed video projection is structured in eight parts for a forty minute improvised performance. You might find out what happened to that napkin, as well as just how them leviathan paddlefish find those water fleas.
Charles Lindsay, video, moog guitar, electric cello, electronics
David Rothenberg, clarinets, electronics
Chen Serfaty + Liron Unreich, video editing and production
This is the closing event of Ear to the Earth, an annual festival of sound and music devoted to the environment, which is sponsored by the Electronic Music Foundation.
Maggie Payne and Andrea Polli are also appearing in this concert.
The editors of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments are pleased to announce the launch of our 26th issue, “The Signal in the Noise,” at http://www.terrain.org.
Issue No. 26 features a rich mix of literary and technical contributions, including the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction winners of our inaugural contest, the new “To Know a Place” feature, and more:
Editorials
Guest Editorial: “To Re-imagine the Place of Humans in the Natural World” by Kathleen Dean Moore, Founding Director, The Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word
The Literal Landscape: “Dirty Words on Mount St. Helens” with Photo Gallery by Simmons B. Buntin
Plein Air: “Open Book, Field, Mind: Life Lessons Learned in Minneapollis” by Deborah Fries
Bull Hill: “The WhaleKit Machine: On Tour with the Karelian Magicians of Glitch” by David Rothenberg
A Stone’s Throw: “Bedrock: Coming to a Language of Earth” by Lauret Savoy
“Close to Home”: Julie Wnuk Reviews The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Quest for a Radically Local Life, by Kurt Hoelting
“A Desert Urchin”: Andrew C. Gottlieb Reviews Urchin to Follow, Poems by Dorine Jennette
“A Girl and Her Dog Consider the Storm”: Jennifer McStotts Reviews The Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate Change: A Complete Visual Guide, by Juliane L. Fry, Hans-F Graf, Richard Grotjahn, Marilyn Raphael, Clive Saunders, and Richard Whitaker
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.
Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is pleased to welcome four new Editorial Board members:
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Erik Hoffner
William Keener
Kathryn Miles
They join the following dynamic mix of existing Editorial Board members:
Scott Calhoun
Miriam Marty Clark
Rick Cole
Carolyn Dooling
Deborah Fries
Jessie Lendennie
Rich Michal
David Rothenberg
Lauret Savoy
David Wann
Todd Ziebarth
Additionally, Terrain.org’s editors are:
Simmons B. Buntin, Editor and Publisher
Stephanie Eve Boone, Reviews Editor
Patrick Burns, Fiction Editor
Catherine Cunningham, Editor
Joshua Foster, Nonfiction Editor
New Board Member Bios
BIOS
Alison Hawthorne Deming was born and grew up in Connecticut. She is the author of Science and Other Poems, selected by Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and three additional poetry books, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, Genius Loci, and most recently Rope. Alison has also published three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real. She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Bayer Award in Science Writing from Creative Nonfiction for the essay “Poetry and Science: A View From the Divide.” Her poems and essays have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Georgia Review, Orion, Sierra, OnEarth, Verse and Universe: Poems on Science and Mathematics, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She currently is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona and also teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program in Maine and the Prague Summer Program.
Erik Hoffner is an activist, writer, and photographer whose work appears in Earth Island Journal, The Sun, World Ark, Orion, and others. His photography has been exhibited in numerous spaces, perhaps most often in the Vermont Center for Photography, and he is also on the board of Coop Power, a member-owned renewable energy cooperative based in New England. Also for Orion, he coordinates the Orion Grassroots Network, which is the action arm of the magazine.
Besides blogging for the web’s top green news site, Grist.org, Erik is also known to grow enormous shiitake mushrooms on the 7 acres of Western Massachusetts forest he shares with his wife, Jenny Goodspeed. Learn more about Erik at www.erikhoffner.com.
William Keener is a writer, naturalist and environmental lawyer in the San Francisco Bay area.
His chapbook of nature poetry, Gold Leaf on Granite, winner of the 2008 Anabiosis Press Contest, was recently published. His poems appear in numerous journals, both print and online, including Appalachia, Atlanta Review, Camas, The Main Street Rag, Margie, Rattle, Terrain.org, and Water-Stone Review. In August 2009, he was invited to be one of the “Artists in the Back Country” in Sequoia National Park, a program designed to rekindle the tradition of enhancing public awareness of our country’s lands through literature and the arts.
Currently a senior attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, he was formerly the Executive Director of the Marine Mammal Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the rescue of sick and injured seals along the California coast, and a natural history tour leader specializing in birds and whales. He has led trips into the gray whale breeding lagoons in Mexico, and up the Amazon in search of river dolphins.
Kathryn Miles is an award-winning writer whose recent essays have appeared in Ecotone, Reconstruction, The Bioregional Imagination, Best American Essays, and Terrain.org. She is the author of Adventures with Ari: A Puppy, A Leash, an Our Year Outdoors (Skyhorse/Norton) and a forthcoming narrative history about the Irish famine exodus entitled All Standing.
Kathryn currently serves as scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council, as director of the Environmental Writing Program at Unity College, and as editor-in-chief of Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability.
In October, just after appearing at Terrain’s launch event at the UA Poetry Center, David Rothenberg went off for three weeks aboard a hundred year old Dutch schooner to sail around the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen with fourteen artists on a project known as The Arctic Circle, www.thearcticcircle.org
October 6th, Longyearbyen 78.2° N, 16°E
Last Sunday I walked the lonely streets of Tucson, city in the desert. It was a hundred and five degrees and no one else dared go out. One week later I am 78° N in the Northernmost place in the world reached by regular air service. It is 15° and snowing heavily. The white mountains have that looming arctic shape, where the base melds into the sea and the summit dissolves into cloud, with the middle stages of black on white like some giant illegible hieroglyphic. The world is like this, we are privileged to be able to leap from one climate to the next with ease. It is always much bigger than we are, and impervious in its beauty. That is the terror of the sublime.
In between I stopped to climb the marble slopes of the new Oslo Opera House, a great white building forged out on the shore of the most populous of Norway’s fjords, a spot always raw and under construction. It is meant to be the North’s answer to the great curved shell’s of Sydney’s opera, and with its white blocks of carefully hewn rock it does not disappoint. It is an artificial mountain by the shore from whose summit one can see distant real mountains, a pilgrimage site of the future, when this city will one day be beautiful.
Opera House
We are building a world that will never compete with the vastness of Arctic ice. The names of the folding coastline are unpronounceable and long, the archipelago of Svalbard is full of towering peaks and unreachable canyons hardly ever touched by human feet. It seems endlessly beyond the range of our ability to impact but it is all in danger. The bears and whales grow toxic as their food concentrates all we have dumped into the environment, we are taught to weigh sadness as we learn all this beauty is melting away.
But nature remains more than anything we can do to it. One hundred, one thousand, one million years. It is nothing in the grand scale of time. We are fourteen artists sailing on a hundred year old schooner into rough and windy seas, with as many computers, cameras, recorders, devices, none of which can capture anything of the rich majesty of the world. We are supposed to possess special eyes, ears, and vision to be able, in our own ways, to represent some fragment of this beauty to help change the way people may see. It is an impossible task, but it is the least we can do since we have come this far.
October 8th, Fourteenth of July Bay, Krossfjorden, Spitsbergen 79.2° N 12°E
We are fourteen artists, two scientists, and a crew of four sailing as close to the North Pole pack ice as we can get away with. Aboard the M/S Noorderlicht, a hundred-year old Dutch schooner, we left Longyearbyen one week ago in the Norwegian territory of Svalbard, the most northerly point in the world with regular air service, for several weeks traveling the Arctic through open sea and sheltered bays, stopping along the way to respond to the landscape in uniquely artistic ways.
Ship and Land
We have been out two nights, and already we have met a phenonemon of nature that cannot be captured in an image. The aurora borealis is a beautiful piece of natural performance art cannot be easily filmed or photographed. A time-lapse photo reveals only fuzzy colors, and a moving image cannot get enough light to capture the dynamic strangeness of it all. The Northern lights have been painted as hanging, shimmering curtains of multicolored fire, and old engravings show an imaginary fierce luminosity that wants to leap from the page into our minds. Computer enhanced contemporary images recreate the experience, but they too seem unreal, like motion-capture animation.
Rarely has a boat like this had so many hard-drives and up-to-the-minute cameras, with hundreds of images snapped and recorded, set immediately on to the great download of analysis and processing. The artists are all at work, puzzling, thinking, figuring out how to get beyond the two extremes: pure documentation, and blatant irony. “I will take a picture of me on the ice in a black suit, with flashlights on an armature illuminating my face,” says Tomas from Croatia. “It is an ego trip, I know.” A statement, a point. We don’t want to be seen as tourists, but of course we are tourists. Art tourists at the end of the world, trying to describe what will always be greater than any description.
I am afraid of voicing my own rather conservative musician views. It matters not to me what is or is not art, but what is good art or bad. Or more easily, what is better of worse. You gonna wear a black suit on the white ice? All right, tell me the better or worse ways of wearing that suit, surrounded by a crown of flashlights. Wear that suit like you mean it, not to make me laugh. It is too beautiful out here to laugh at, but I am always ready to laugh with you, not at you, or your work.
It is the aurora that makes me more than smile, but open my mouth into an astonished “O.” I have seen it many times before but it is never less beautiful or surprising than before. We can make art out of it but we cannot ever replay it. The images we snap and flash can only be the starting point. Better to think of auroras and set up one’s own arctic lights of the night, as did light installation artist Raphaele Shirley:
Light installation by Raphaele Shirley.
I remember the eighteenth century, and the notion of the sublime. That quality in nature that leaves us in awe because it is always beyond the fact of our gaze, the extent of our reach. We are as small as it is great, as we seem hardly to make any mark upon this grand arctic expanse. The sublime, said the philosophers, is not as fine as the beautiful, because it impresses us because of how giant it is, and how impossible to touch. Beauty, instead, must be something more, something we can choose to contemplate, rather than be always humbled by.
And yet this giant beauty today seems ours to pollute, to warm, to melt out of existence. We must honor those facts of nature that are greater than any ability of us to destroy, or ignore. The force of the wilderness smacks us across the face, and its grandeur must always burn, in our hearts, in our thoughts.
October 9th, Sallyhamnen, 79.7° N 11.2°E
Today I played my soprano saxophone aboard the zodiac as we motored close to the whiteblue tongue of a glacier. The scene was being filmed by Italian artist Andrea Galvani for a giant photograph he would later print at a gigantic size from an old 4 x 5 single-load film camera. “This digital image,” he says, “is like a Polaroid for me.” I was wearing his Muji raincoat because it looked much more cool than my own high-tech gear. Everything was black. The boatmen lay down on the floor of the zodiac so we wouldn’t be seen, making it look like I was out there all alone. A wire ran from my saxophone into the sea to make it look like I was playing right into the water, down to the hydrophone to broadcast my sound to any whales who might be listening below. I have done this many times before but this time, as winter approaches, there are no whales in the fjord.
David Rothenberg plays in the fjord.
The lone saxophone tones echoed off the stark mountain walls. Once I figured out the length of the reverberation I could time my phrases so a minimalist rhythm could be formed by the bouncing of the sounds off the two mountains. The echo turned time into space and made this one little instrument beat into the sides of the landscape, a golden reflection dancing off the descending light. Snow continued to fall, beginning to collect on the bell of the horn and the floor of the boat. The photographer was shouting instructions at me from the kayak as it faded away into the mist. All became soon invisible, I forgot where I was and who this music was for. A fulmar shrieked. A bear roared in the distance. He climbed into the still green water and started to swim.
October 10th, Moffen Island, 80°N, 14.5°E
From this completely flat island on the horizon we see nothing, as if we are deposited in some alien sea. It is strangely warm and moist, nothing like the endless winter one might imagine at the end of the road of darkness. Through September it is forbidden to land on this island in case breeding walruses and seabirds might be disturbed. By October the law permits us, and it is now possible to walk right up to huddled walruses and tap them on the shoulder, inject them with tranquilizers, and take a sample of something. But we’re not scientists, so we don’t do that, though we do approach close enough to feel their eyes looking right at us, squinting, trying to see something of interest. Eye of the walrus—doesn’t sound as romantic as ‘eye of the whale,’ and I don’t know how humans have been changed or touched by it.
The tiny human forms traipse across the white landscape, looking for something, as always, an idea, a creative spark, a mood borne out loneliness that might find a place in the civilized world after we return.
Heini Aho, a Finnish artist, attaches her video camera to a tripod on the white windswept plain of the Reinsdyrflya, a flat expanses surrounded by the distant white peaks beyond the Liefdefjord, or Fjord of Love. Then she poses in front of the camera and rapidly dresses and undresses herself with piles of hats, scarves, coats, gloves, and fleeces. When she’s down to a black turtleneck and balaclava she looks like some kind of arctic ninja performing some strange ritual that is not explained.
Finnish artist Heini Aho.
On the islands flat snow-covered plain are old glass bottles with clear liquid inside that hasn’t frozen. Vodka? Turpentine? We can’t smell it, we can hardly tell. There are spheres the size of soccer balls, made of plastic, metal, buoys for fishing nets. “Once I picked up one of those,” says our leader Jan, “and instead I found it was a human skull.” If you die up here no one will come to take your body out.
October 14th, sailing toward Magdalena Fjord, 79.6°N, 11°E
The bell rings on deck, that means there’s something to see. “Ayeaah,” says the captain, usually a man of few words, “seven polar bears eating an old whale carcass. I have only seen something like this a few times in all my journeys in the North.”
Every artist rushes to our cabins, grabs our latest-model cameras, and runs up on deck. The bears don’t seem interested in us, that slimy whale backbone looks so delicious. We can smell it easily a few hundred yards away, it’s probably been there for months. “Ooohhh…” someone says, “it looks like something out of a Matthew Barney film.”
Polar bear through camera lens and binoculars.
We watch the bears eating and playing for hours. It’s impossible to pull our eyes away. The raw reality of nature holds us transfixed. A couple of us remember Werner Herzog’s line in Grizzly Man, where the great director announces, coldly, “People think nature is beautiful, but I do not agree. To me it is nothing but a realm of cruelty, survival, and the relentless search for food.” With his beautiful documentaries Herzog shows that notion is just a pose, for he loves nature and has truly succeeded in revealing it in art, cutting far beyond the clichés and the preset stories of the wild we are all so used to.
Polar bears eating whale carcass.
Sure, I could tell you them all: the sea was rough, the cameras and computers were pitching to the floor. Wine glasses were breaking, milk spilled onto the floor. Waves from the sea sprayed us head to toe in the tiny zodiac as we made rough we landings on shore. The light is indescribable, the snowy peaks stretched into the distance forever. The immense loneliness zeros straight in on the sublime, where the land is great because we are so small.
I tell you those things and all of them are true. But we are artists, not tourists, so it should not be enough to be impressed by walruses and polar bears. But we all love the polar bears! Their bloody faces smile as they chew on rancid whale meat. You don’t become an artist by denying any tourist instincts. We all want to see and love the world. Just as artists in the Age of Exploration were the only ones to offer up images grand and graphic enough to show people back home what the far reaches of the globe can offer, today we must cut through a world saturated with images and stories to see if there can still be a fresh way of expressing one’s experiences on the journey, careening through the sea and back and forth from the frozen, empty land.
Oct. 18th, Ny Ålesund, Arctic Science Village
In Ny Ålesund, a former mining village that is now an international center for climate research, most of the two hundred researchers and technicians have left for the season. But at the Alfred Wegener Polar Institute, a German engineer still remains, for a whole year in this inaccessible outpost, to repeat the same experiments every day. In one he releases a large white weather balloon, each day at 1pm, which rises and drifts into the stratosphere before exploding when it gets too high, but not before transmitting essential data from its disposable radio which will never be found. Then at night he shoots a high energy laser beam straight up into the clouds, of such power that even a tiny fraction of its bright beam is diffused back through the cloud cover and can be registered by the naked eye. The beam bounces through the building inside a complex and irregular rectilinear box, down to the floor off a large telescope mirror, then straight up through a hole in the roof. The green ray heading skyward looks like it is strong enough to reach the moon.
Ny Ålesund, a former mining village, now an international center for climate research.
The German engineer speaks extremely precisely. He will not answer any questions around which he has even the slightest doubt. “Why do the stars here in the North flicker with such visible multiple spectra of color?” I ask, “shimmering from red then to green and to blue.”
“I know of what you speak,” he nods. “But I do not know enough astronomy to say anything more.”
“And what,” I point, “is that big wooden contrabass case doing next to the laser mirror, the beaten-up box that says ‘Berliner Philharmonische Orchester’ on it?”
“Oh,” he smiles. “Usually there is a instrument in there, but not right now. It is not mine.”
Oct. 19th, Barentsburg
If you think it is strange there is a Russian town on Spitsbergen, remember that this land is not exactly part of Norway. It really is a kind of no-man’s territory, not subject to any taxation, where historically a man could arrive from anywhere and stake a claim. The American Longyear founded Longyearbyen, the Russians had Pyramiden, now abandoned, and Barentsburg, still going strong. Long before climate change grabbed our attention the Arctic had tremendous strategic importance, and the Germans bombed all of it in World War II. They even had one far and remote weather station that was the final place the Nazis surrendered in September 1945.
Whereas Ny Ålesund is a curious modern science town of satellite dishes, nationalistic research buildings from nations as diverse as China, India, Germany and France, Barentsburg looks like a little slice of Siberia. You walk up to the city up hundreds of carefully constructed wooden steps, to emerge on a plateau with crumbling concrete buildings, most built in the sixties through eighties but generally looking much older. The faded grandeur of the Soviet time is out in full force, monuments everywhere you look. To the glory of the coal miner! To the arctic socialist explorer hand in hand with a polar bear! A concrete apartment building with a giant brick design of a Russian country maid.
Strangely, there are murals throughout the town (of perhaps 600 Russians, with room for about a thousand more) of green and leafy summer scenes, images of a landscape so far removed from where we now stand that it is hard to understand why anyone would want to paint them here. Is this some kind of wry Arctic joke? Or are these billboards advertising the land all the residents will sometime soon go home to?
Barentsburg, a Russian town in Norway.
The bartender at the one foreigners’ hotel smiles when I ask her, “how long have you been here?”
“My term is two years. The pay is good. But then I am getting out.”
In the middle of the night after hours of vodka in the bright fluorescent bar we are laughing in the dark, running down those perilous wood steps at top speed, slipping on rail tracks in the tunnels that lead from the mine. Around a corner we spy three coal-faced miners, returning from work. All of a sudden life here seems no longer a party, but risky, dirty work. We all go silent for a moment. But soon we start laughing again and run back to our boat.
Bar in Barentsburg.
Oct. 17th, Blomstrand halvøya, Krossfjorden
In 1910 Ernest Mansfield was convinced that this was going to be the site of the greatest marble quarry in the world, so he set up the Northern Exploration Company to cut all the stone out. He named the spot New London. Some of his machines remain right on the rails, having never even been used. The whole project fell apart, there was nothing worth taking.
The more we experience this distance the place, the less it seems it’s a wilderness. Spitsbergen is the warmest place in the Arctic, because it’s the end of the gulf stream, so much of the sea surrounding remains ice-free most of the year. Already by 1700 the Dutch had killed all the whales here, and after that came trappers, hunters, miners, still trying to extract something useful out of the landscape. What might remain most useful today is strategy—a few years ago a cable was laid all the way from Norway under the sea, bringing fast communication to the outside world. There are now hundreds of scientists stationed up here keeping track of what will happen to a warming world.
Blomstrand halvøya, Krossfjorden
The mining sputters on, the locals still hang onto it with pride. Greenpeace was up here just before we arrived demanding that the coal mines shut down. Of course they are wasteful, hopeless, destined to fail like the quarry at Blomstrand. Coal mining has no place in the Arctic, no place anywhere. If we work hard enough we’ll soon find better sources of energy: from the sun, the wind, the waves.
Is that a workable dream? Spitsbergen is full of the graves of dreams that failed. The beauty of the place is a success, it cannot be tamed. Or is that only because we cannot see deep into history?
Oct. 20th
On shore beneath a glacier the wind whips up around us, the most furious storm on the trip. It is snow, it is rain, something in between that cuts the skin. The artists are making their final gestures in the field. Heini Aho is trying to build a final fire sheltered beneath chunks of ice. Willy Somma is running all around, jumping onto icebergs, photographing herself in flight. Some of us are huddled in a snow cave, one of us, Amy Wiita, is actually swimming, in a dry suit. The wind whips up, snow is all over our faces, and we can’t believe that soon we will be going home and this whole confined world, this small group tossed together in the swaying seas to observe, to wonder, to create, will all be disbanded, and we will have to figure out how to hold onto this journey back in our usual lives of warmth and of light.
Ice fire.
Artists.
Ship and snow.
David Rothenberg.
David Rothenberg is the author of Thousand Mile Song and Why Birds Sing. He is now busy making music out of the sounds of crackling ice.
Some music made out of the sounds of the ship hitting ice (Ice Baby):
8 p.m. : University of Arizona Poetry Center : Tucson
This celebration of the “Borders & Bridges” issue (No. 24) features readings by contributors Christopher Cokinos (Hope is the Thing with Feathers and The Fallen Sky), Pamela Uschuk (Crazy Love), Deborah Fries (Various Modes of Departure), and headlining artist David Rothenberg. It will take place on September 24, at 8 p.m., at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson.
David Rothenberg is a philosopher, musician, and the author of Why Birds Sing, Sudden Music, Blue Cliff Record, Hand’s End, and Always the Mountains. His articles have appeared in Parabola, Orion, The Nation, Wired, Dwell, Kyoto Journal, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and Sierra. Rothenberg is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, and he has seven CDs out under his own name, including On the Cliffs of the Heart, named one of the top ten CDs by Jazziz Magazine in 1995. His latest book is Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales. Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Agenda
Welcome, Issue Overview, Contributor and Editor/Board Callouts (in audience), and First Reader Introductions – Simmons Buntin
Pamela Uschuk (poetry) – 8 minutes
Christopher Cokinos (nonfiction) – 8 minutes
Deborah Fries (poetry) – 8 minutes
Introduction of David Rothenberg – Kieran Suckling, Center for Biological Diversity
David Rothenberg (music and prose) – 20-25 minutes
Refreshments and book signings (UA Bookstore will sell books)
Mark your calendars and please join us for this free and fun event! For more information, view www.terrain.org
Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments explores the nexus between the built and natural environments through two theme-based issues per year. Online since 1997, we publish editorials, poetry, essays, fiction, articles, reviews, interviews, the ARTerrain gallery, the UnSprawl case study, and the new To Know a Place multimedia feature.
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On Thursday, September 24th, Terrain.org held its first-ever public issue launch and reading, celebrating 
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