Terrain.org is pleased to present, with Sky Island Alliance, Writing Down the Jaguar: Writing Workshops in El Aribabi, Sonora, Mexico from March 23-26, 2011.

jaguar.terrain.org

Offered at Rancho El Aribabi in the beautiful Sierra Azul Mountains of northern Sonora, Mexico, Writing Down the Jaguar is a three-day workshop of classes, lectures, readings, and discussions on the craft and techniques of fine writing about the natural world.

Writing Down the Jaguar is for writers who want to improve and market their outdoor, natural history, and environmental writing, as well as environmental educators and activists who want to improve their writing skills for their work. The morning and afternoon workshops and evening sessions will benefit both professional writers as well as those with a personal interest in writing poetry, essays, journalism, screenplays, or fiction that relates to the themes of nature and environment.

Writing Down the Jaguar provides an intimate group experience for writers — with just four participants plus the instructor per workshop!

Participants will select one of the faculty members with whom they will work on writing, reading, and shared critiques.

• Elemental Poetry, led by Simmons B. Buntin
• Focused on Writing: Combining Words and Images, led by Scott Calhoun
• The Full-Throttle Narrative, led by Ken Lamberton
• Write What You See: Screenwriting, led by Dawn Sellers

The rest of the day offers a range of readings and discussions, with ample time to write and socialize. The teaching faculty is composed of professional writers and editors distinguished in their fields, noted for their teaching abilities, and dedicated to helping participants improve their skills. The cost for the workshop, including travel from Tucson, food, and lodging, is $450 per participant.

Come write down the jaguar with us in the rugged, wondrous Sierra Azul!

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs
Annual Conference and Bookfair
Washington, D.C. : February 2-5, 2011

Terrain.org / Hawk & Handsaw Booth at Bookfair
Booth 509

Meet Terrain.org editors Simmons Buntin, Joshua Foster, and Patrick Burns, as well as Hawk & Handsaw editor and Terrain.org editorial board member Kathryn Miles, and learn more about these award-winning journals that focus on culture, environment, and sustainability.

Panel
Recovery as Discovery: Rethinking Nature Writing

• Thursday, February 3 : 1:30 – 2:45 p.m.
• Palladian Ballroom, Omni Shoreham
• Terrain.org editorial board member Alison Hawthorne Deming joins Tom Montgomery-Fate, David Gessner, Gretchen Legler, John Price, and Kathleen Dean Moore

Panel
What Do Writers Do All Day? Articulating Our Work in the Profession

• Thursday, February 3 : 1:30 – 2:45 p.m.
• Coolidge, Marriott Wardman Park
• Terrain.org editorial board member Kathryn Miles joins James Engelhardt, Stephanie Vanderslice, Christine Stewart-Nunez, and J.D. Schraffenberger

Panel
The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World

• Thursday, February 3 : 4:30-5:45 p.m.
• Hampton Boardroom, Omni Shoreham
• Terrain.org editorial board member Lauret Savoy joins Elmaz Abinader, Faith Adiele, Fred Arroyo, Debra Kang Dean, and Nikky Finney

Panel
Who Makes the Best Student? Growing Your Program with Nontraditional Majors

• Friday, February 4 : Noon – 1:15 p.m.
• Coolidge, Marriott Wardman Park
• Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin joins Patricia Clark, Sean Prentiss, and Joe Wilkins

Panel
The Language of Conservation, sponsored by Poets House

• Friday, February 4 : 1:30 – 2:45 p.m.
• Regency Ballroom, Omni Shoreham
• Terrain.org editorial board member Alison Hawthorne Deming joins Mark Doty, Sandra Alcosser, Joseph Bruchac, and Pattiann Rogers

Panel
Environmental Writing in the Age of Global Climate Change, sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

• Friday, February 4 : 3 – 4:15 p.m.
• Virginia C, Marriott Wardman Park
• Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin joins Terrain.org editorial board member Kathryn Miles, plus Sheryl St. Germain, Paul Bogard, and Janine DeBaise

Reading
Salmon Poetry 30th Anniversary Reading and Book Launch

• Friday, February 4 : 8 – 10 p.m.
• Pigment Art Studio
  1848 Columbia Road Northwest
  Washington, D.C
• Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin joins fellow Salmon poets Andrea Cohen, Allan Peterson, Kevin Higgins, Susan Millar DuMars, Alan Jude Moore, Patrick Chapman, Drucilla Wall, Eamonn Wall, Mike Begnal, Patrick Hicks, Stephen Powers, Drew Blanchard, Philip Fried, and John Fitzgerald; hosted by Terrain.org editorial board member and Salmon Poetry publisher Jessie Lendennie

Book Signing
Bloom, by Simmons B. Buntin

• Friday, February 4 : 10 – 11 a.m.
• Bookfair, Salmon Poetry Table, E26

~~~

Check back, as we’ll add and update events as we learn about them!

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.

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

Interview

• “A More Encompassing View of Human Flourishing” Terrain.org Interviews Author Alison Hawthorne Deming

To Know a Place

• “Setnet Fishing in Uyak Bay” Essay and Photographs by Sara Loewen, with Audio

UnSprawl Case Study

• MetroGreen Regional Greenway System in Kansas City, by Kendra Briechle and courtesy The Conservation Fund

Essays

• “Sinuous” by Elizabeth Dodd, 2010 Nonfiction Contest Winner
• “Kinds of Quiet” by Michael Palmer, 2010 Nonfiction Contest Finalist
• “Signal: Notes on the Desert” A Photo Essay with Prose by Gregory McNamee and Photography by Stephen Strom
• “Silent Hills” by Russ J. Van Paepeghem
• “Scope: Ten Small Essays” by John R. Campbell, with Photographs

Articles

• “Permaculture: Applying Ecology at Home” A Narrative Slideshow by Jolie Kaytes and Paul Charpentier
• “The Bard’s Bird or The Slings and Arrows of Avicultural Hegemony: A Tragicomedy in Five Acts” by Charles Mitchell
• “Fire Season: The Policies of Identity and Suppression in the Burning Forests of the American West” by Bernard Quetchenbach
• “Walking to Work: Bringing Employment Centers Back to Neighborhoods” by Jay Hoekstra

ARTerrain Gallery

• “Sonic Antarctica” Digital, Tactile, and Acoustic Art from an Antarctica Excursion by Andrea Polli

Poetry

• Laura-Gray Street : One Poem in Fifteen Parts with Audio : 2010 Poetry Contest Winner
• Reeves Keyworth : One Poem with Audio : 2010 Poetry Contest Finalist
• Sara Talpos : Three Poems with Audio : 2010 Poetry Contest Finalist
• Julie Hanson : Two Poems with Audio : 2010 Poetry Contest Finalist
• Tom Daley : Three Poems with Audio : 2010 Poetry Contest Finalist
• Davi Walders : Two Poems with Audio : 2010 Poetry Contest Finalist
• Ben Howard : Two Poems with Audio
• Cynthia Huntington : Three Poems
• Derek Sheffield : Five Poems with Audio
• Laurie Klein : One Poem with Audio
• Mary Cisper : One Poem with Audio
• Jason Myers : Two Poems with Audio
• E. Louise Beach : Three Poems with Audio
• Emily Wall : Three Poems with Audio
• Jeff Newberry : One Poem with Audio
• Nick Ripatrazone : Five Poems with Audio
• Sherry O’Keefe : Two Poems with Audio
• Eric Paul Shaffer : One Poem with Audio
• Jeffrey Thomson : Two Poems with Audio
• Francis Raven : One Poem with Audio
• Nickolas Butler : One Poem
• Paula Sergi : Two Poems
• Janine DeBaise : One Poem

Fiction

• “Right of Way” by Andrew Wingfield, 2010 Fiction Contest Winner
• “Into the Lake” by Kevin Catalano, 2010 Fiction Contest Finalist
• “Wet Paper Grass” by Jasmon Drain, 2010 Fiction Contest Finalist
• “Precarious Things” by Debbie Weingarten
• “The Antarctic” Story and Photographs by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
• “Tracking Fire” by Frances Kerridge

Reviews

• “The Hard and the Sweet”: Wendy Burk Reviews Girl on a Bridge, Poems by Suzanne Frischkorn
• “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

View our dynamic new issue at http://www.terrain.org.

The interview with Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin is now online at:

http://www.duotrope.com/interview.aspx?id=1142

The interview includes compelling responses to such questions as “Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less,” and “What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?”

If you’re interested in submitting to Terrain.org, or just want to read a bit of the strange workings from Terrain.org’s founding editor (not to mention fiction editor Patrick Burns), check out the interview now.

Here’s what’s going on for us:

Table at Bookfair

Join us at Exhibit Hall A, H9 from Thursday through Saturday. We’ll be right next to the table for Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability, and we’re also dedicating a corner of the Terrain.org table to The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts, a great little literary bird journal that wasn’t able to get a table of its own.

Wild Lives / Raucous Pens: Readings from Terrain.org and Hawk & Handsaw

Join us Thursday evening, April 8, from 8 to 9:30 p.m. for a joint reading held at the Tivoli at Auraria Campus (Adirondacks Room).  Facilitated by Hawk & Handsaw editor Kathryn Miles and Terrain.org editor Simmons Buntin, the reading features Patrick Burns, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Scott Elliott, James Engelhardt, Suzanne Frischkorn, Andrew Gottlieb, Luisa Igloria, John T. Price, Ben Quick, Suzanne Roberts, Jeffrey Thomson, and Arianne Zwartjes.

We hope to see you in Denver!

The view from the Wildbranch Writing Workshop: Craftsbury Common.

It seems to me that there are really two types of writer’s events — writing workshops and conferences about writing, the latter usually including a bookfair, publishers’ exhibits, or the like.

The biggest and perhaps best known example of the conference about writing is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference and bookfair, which usually draws at least 5,000 people.  The panels cover a very wide range of writing topics.  For example, I chaired a panel at the NYC AWP conference in early 2008 on “the future of environmental essay.”  Large conferences such as these are excellent venues for attending panels of very well-known writers and visiting (and being overwhelmed by) publishers’ booths.  I can’t recall the number of exhibitors at the bookfair, but it must be well over 400, I bet.  In New York in 2008 and Denver in 2010, the journal I edit — Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments — did/will have a table.  Visiting tables/booths and talking with editorial staff (and sometimes contributors) is the best way to learn about the publication short of actually purchasing it (or, in our case, visiting it online).  Like smaller writer’s conferences, it’s not a venue for submitting work, but rather for identifying publications you’re interested in submitting your work to (whether individual literary journals or book publishers), talking with the editors to get a sense of what they’re interested in for upcoming issues, and rubbing elbows with other inquring writers.

Smaller conferences are not so overwhelming, and often provide a more intimate experience and opportunity for connecting even further with an editor.  I think of this summer’s Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) biennial conference in Victoria, BC.  With perhaps 400 attendees, the panels are smaller and last longer, the panels and events are tailored in this case to a specific set of literature — environmental literature and literary ecocriticism — and there are more opportunities for networking, especially with editors and contributors.  The exhibitor can be much smaller; there were perhaps ten or twelve exhibitors at ASLE, Terrain.org among them.

At both settings, readings are offered.  In the case of AWP, they’re offered both as part of the program and outside of the official event — dozens of them nightly, it seems.  For example, in Denver in April 2010, Terrain.org is teaming up with Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing to host a reading not affiliated with AWP but which, we hope, will draw fans of those publications and people interested in place-based literature — even as it will conflict with one of AWP’s big poetry readings.  At ASLE, on the other hand, it seemed appropriate not to schedule an off-site reading but rather to attend the two or three scheduled evening readings.

At the other end of the spectrum, though still related of course, are writing workshops.  Staying in the environmental literature genre, I think here of the Wildbranch Writing Workshop held over a week each summer in northern Vermont.  While one or two journals may be represented — Orion magazine (the Orion Society) is the primary sponsor, so always participates, and sometimes editors of other journals attend either as speakers or students (that was my experience in the summer of 2007) — there is little opportunity for editorial interaction unless it’s part of the workshop.  At Wildbranch, however, that opportunity is a distinct and important part of the overall workshop experience: the year I attended, Orion’s editor-in-chief Chip Blake agreed to read every participant’s submission and provide individual feedback.  That’s not common, I think, but is certainly valuable.  What also isn’t common except at workshops like Wildbranch is the ability for students to meet with and really hang out with the instructors.  I had the good fortune of spending time with Scott Russell Sanders and Sandra Steingraber, two writers/activists whose work I much admire.  I’ve kept in touch with both of them.  It’s true that as an editor myself I may have more opportunity to maintain our contact, but that the opportunity is there in the first place is pretty special.  I doubt you dine at every meal with your instructor and other participants, including sponsoring magazine editors, at most workshops.  But every writing workshop has some unique opportunity, I’d wager, and I suspect all of them develop a sense of community among the students that may continue well after the workshop.

So is there value in either or both of these approaches — the writer’s conference versus the writing workshop?  Definitely.  At the conference, the writer receives broad exposure to publications and access to an array of panels across genres but doesn’t receive instruction.  The opportunities to meet publishers at booths/tables are many.  At the workshop, the writer receives individual (small group, really) instruction and usually may sit on a few panels offered when the instructor-led workshops are not in session.  Exposure to publishers and editors is limited, though.  It’s really a question of what the writer is after.  For me personally, they all offer benefits, but I can only go to so many larger writer’s conferences like AWP, especially if I’m not one of the presenters.  And I could only attend a writing workshop (mainly due to cost and, at a full week often, time off) every now and then.  But Wildbranch for me was incredibly beneficial and affirming.  And the ASLE conference, held every other year, is an event I plan not to miss if I can help it.  I don’t feel much community at AWP because of its vast size, but I definitely do at ASLE and Wildbranch.

Look for Simmons’s second entry tomorrow (Tuesday), and then new entries each Tuesday. You can see these and the other interesting city-related blog entries at:

http://americancity.org/updates/category/blog/

.

7) Where do you see your publication/editing in 5 years?

In five years Terrain.org should just about be on Issue No. 30. I envision more interactive features–Flash-based poems and video essays, for example, and article/essay commenting from readers. We’re also considering online chapbooks and annual contests. The web is moving to handheld devices, so a “mobile” version of Terrain.org seems in order.

What I hope you won’t (continue to) see is advertising.

Read the full interview at:

http://menoftheweb.blogspot.com/2007/10/simmons-b-buntin.html
.