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By Simmons Buntin, March 31, 2010 1:13 am

Inspiration, the first commercial building at Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia. Photo courtesy Busby Perkins+Will Architects Co.

The editors of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments at http://www.terrain.org are pleased to announce the launch of our 25^th issue: Virtually There.

One of our largest and most dynamic issues to date features:

Columns

• Guest Editorial: “Virtually Unconscious: Dreams of Escape” by Renee Lertzman, Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities and Sustainability, Portland State University
• Simmons B. Buntin’s The Literal Landscape: “Songbird”
• Deborah Fries’s Plein Air: “Sharing the Edge of the Sixth Shore: Artists and Scientists Converge at Lake Clifton”
• David Rothenberg’s Bull Hill: “The BluRay Squirrel and the HighDef Squid”
• Lauret Savoy’s A Stone’s Throw: “Winter Leaves”

Interview

• Patrick Burns interviews author Padma Viswanathan

UnSprawl Case Study

• Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia
  by Ken Pirie

Poetry

• Poetry in text and audio by Sara Talpos, Karen Schubert, Patricia Clark, Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Abe Louise Young, Linda Umans, Arianne Zwartjes, Jamison Crabtree, Sandy Longhorn, Matthew James Babcock, Robin Chapman, Tim Bellows, C. J. Sage, Paul Hostovsky, Lyn Lifshin, Deborah Fries, Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Julie L. Moore, Hugh Fox, and Fran Markover

Essays

• “How to Draw a Glass Mountain: Los Angeles and the Architecture of Segregation,” a hypertext photo essay by Aisha Sloan
• “The Book of Water,” by Joe Wilkins, with audio
• “The Road to Crownpoint,” essay by Kurt Caswell and illustration by Susan Leigh Tomlinson
• “The Place and the Photograph,” by Lex Runciman, with Stonehenge Photo Gallery
• “Four Dispatches from the Interface,” by Charles Goodrich, with Audio

Articles

• “Planning a Post-Carbon World: The City of North Vancouver and the 100 Year Plan,” by Patrick Condon
• “The Digital Cathedral in the Age of Democratic Sustainability,” by Peter W. Bardaglio
• “Isn’t it Time to Dig Vertical Farming?” by Chris Bradford
• “Open Data and Government 2.0,” by Nate Berg
• “Virtuality: The Splenda of Existence,” by Rachel Shaw

Fiction

• “Machete Maneuvers,” by Rachel Furey, with audio
• “The Glory of Ned Wiley,” by Braden Hepner
• “Holding Patterns,” by Bette Lynch Husted
• “Estrella, Extranjero,” by Chavawn Kelley

ARTerrain Gallery

• Ten art quilts of textile and mixed media by Jan Rickman

Reviews

• Jennifer McStotts reviews The Seasons on Henry’s Farm: A Year of Food and Life on a Sustainable Farm, by Terra Brockman
• Simmons B. Buntin reviews Animal Logic, by Richard Barnes, and Earth Forms, by Stephen Strom
• Julie Wnuk reviews When the Rains Come: A Naturalist’s Year in the Sonoran Desert, by John Alcock
• Stephanie Eve Boone reviews Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, by Francine Prose

Read the entire issue, available in both HTML and PDF formats, online now at http://www.terrain.org.

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By Patrick Burns, February 12, 2010 1:38 am

I first saw Padma Viswanathan’s novel, The Toss of a Lemon, on a shelf in Borders and was immediately taken by the title. It’s an interesting phrase. One I’d never heard, yet it sounds like something someone could have said a hundred times, a hundred someones. The phrase refers to a character in her novel, a Brahmin astrologer who has someone toss a lemon out the window the very moment each of his children are born. It’s the precision of the moment that helps him create their astrological charts, which will not only interpret each of his children’s futures, but those of his and his wife.

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.

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By Simmons Buntin, January 4, 2010 6:04 pm

The submission deadline for Issue No. 25, with the theme of “Virtually There,” is quickly approaching. February 1 is the last day to submit.

View our submission guidelines and then submit online!