Table of contents for Winter 2021 in Orion

IN SEPTEMBER, Orion and the Yale School of the Environment cohosted a live online conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, David Haskell, and Mary Evelyn Tucker celebrating the release of Old Growth, our latest anthology of essays and poems about the rich inner lives of trees. Several thousand people tuned in as they discussed forest sniffing, Gilgamesh, and the idea of arboreal personhood. If you missed it live, you can catch a recording of their moving conversation on our website. We also had the good fortune to eavesdrop on a conversation with adrienne maree brown, Morgan Jerkins, Kiese Laymon, and Sheree Renée Thomas about how to build intersectional worlds and solutions by diversifying climate storytelling, part of a climate fiction contest we cosponsored with Grist.org. BIG CONGRATULATIONS to Orion…

I have murderous thoughts likewhat if the virus should kill us allhiding in my home watchingthe earth thaw and the birdsreturned too early worry up and down the trees Nothing can touch me but songand sun through the windowstill I feel this indoor springto be reckless with othersbare skinned in the biomemicrobes blowing in the breeze In our absence the wild onespeople the streets mutespecters in tooth and clawcome to play out our endor paw through our garbagealoof in smogless blue dawn I dream myself dead on a lawnrotting near nobody’s gardenthe purple of crocus and splayedas if tossed by a wave singinglong have I lain at the edgeof this plot dug briefly for you…

100. I LIVE MY LIFE IN LINES, a series of graphs, dots, or blips, readings that register the health of my personal landscape. When the line goes up, mucous begins to slather around my mouth. I become groggy, lethargic, concrete blocks strapped to my shoes as I stumble and slam into things. Language rolls like a cascading stream. Water is what I need to avoid the looming coma. The line might go up because I’ve eaten too much sugar or miscalculated how much insulin I need to “cover” my meal—or there could be a technical glitch, such as an air bubble inside the tubing of my insulin pump, one not yet registered, one that the pump doesn’t tell me is blocking the passage of insulin I need to stay alive.…

That night of apparition snowbecame horses thundering throughheadlights spread beams splaying light bladesuntil they appeared hurdling the roadfull run, over and over again, in some portalskipping time back to range unbrokenunfenced. From backroads clear to Laramie,or was it Cheyenne … You called, unableto get a bus because blizzard, broke,busted, befuddled. Left me nothingto do but load up head out to bringyou back home. Almost made it before apparition snow broke out into horses, unbroken, unbridled, unreal, yet true, filled the world in headlights while dark matter took the rest.…

Odilon Redon, The Egg, 1885. lithograph in black on ivory china paper laid down on ivory wove paper, 17.25 × 12.36 inches (sheet), art institute chicago PICTURE ME: seven years old, curled shell-like around a book, oblivious to anything beyond the borders of the page. For as long as I can remember, I have been unable to resist the immersive power of books, the promise of another world unfurling itself from words and paper. As a child I was always reading at what my family considered to be inappropriate times (at family gatherings or in the middle of the night), but I later turned that antisocial obsession into an occupation: I completed a BA, MA, and PhD in literary studies, and have since written academic literary criticism and taught undergraduates…

New Directions MOSQUITOES. One of the world’s most hated and ubiquitous insects. Punishing and sometimes deadly, their sound alone—late at night—can drive you mad. But imagine if you could communicate with them. Bernal’s novel follows an aggrieved drunk who feels forsaken by his own culture and abandons it for “a truer jungle” than civilization—the Mexican jungle, where he is adopted by the Lacandón of Chiapas and where he eventually masters Mosquil, the language of mosquitoes. As they communicate with one another, we discover their complex operations and history and why they sacrifice so many for the taste of human blood. But to what end? A searing commentary on colonialism and ecological collapse, Bernal shows the human condition in all its conditions, including not just the intoxicating effects of alcohol, but…

I ENCOUNTERED tulca (tul-kah) while trying to make sense of the physical and emotional landscapes in western Ireland, where the language can sometimes be like spider-silk strings that I clutch on days when feeling seasick standing on dry land. Most words we employ during the day do not dare reach so deep. Like many Irish words, tulca connotes several beautiful and sometimes seemingly discordant things at once, which to an outsider is like trying to understand poems literally layered or spoken on top of one another: it means “a large sea wave,” it means “a large mass of fish,” and it means “fluent speech.” My body does not—cannot—understand these words, but my head does, and although I know this means I am hearing my surroundings several octaves below the truth,…

WHEN I WAS INVITED to be the guest image editor for this issue, my first thought was, “You’ve got to be kidding.” I am a blind person. I have been blind since the age of eleven. To take on the responsibility of suggesting and selecting artwork to accompany the essays and stories in this issue seemed challenging, if not foolhardy. Still, like most blind people, I live in a visual culture. I grew up and went to school with sighted people. I read books, consume other media, inhabit architecture, and engage in social practices made for and by sighted people. On top of what I consider to be this common knowledge about the visible world among blind people, my understanding is enhanced by the fact that both my parents were…

I’m one of those annoying people who doesn’t really have much of a sweet tooth—except when it comes to the amber sweetness and crumble of maple. You’ll forgive me if I don’t miss much about the brutal winters of western New York, where I lived for fifteen years, tromping in knee-high snow as I walked to campus to teach, almost sliding off the thruway too many times to count, and waiting in multiple strandings at the airport. But sometime in February, just when we grew restless and a little weary from the lack of color all winter, from the scarves, boots, shovels, and crockpot stews, we’d feel the flurries of my favorite type of snow: a sugar snow, thick and heavy, hugging the base of the sugarbush—what a forest of…

A Drinkable Beauty susanne paola antonetta MY HOMETOWN of Bellingham, Washington, is a last corner of the continental United States, a final chew of land before the long drink of the Pacific. We’re bound to the west by water, to the east by mountain, and twenty miles to the north, by Canada. It’s a place of beauty that’s a bit prickly in its heart. Our water numbs and the beaches are stone and pebble. The mountain—Mount Baker, or Kulshan to the Native people whose unceded land we live on—is volcanic. Striking out in most directions is an act defined by the necessity of turning back. Heading south down our Chuckanut Drive, fossil leaves and ferns from the Eocene peel off the banks of shale that line the roadside. Sometimes I…

I. Heart Sickness works like this. There is something foreign in the body. A virus, a bloom of bacteria, havoc of single-celled organisms in the gut. The immune system blitzes what is unwanted—cells suffocating others that shouldn’t be there, purging the respiratory or digestive systems, amping up a fever to shatter a virus to bits. You feel sluggish, drained, exhausted. Then the body rids itself of the unwanted, or medicine pitches in. You get better, or you die. Don’t forget this part: the binary we’re taught of disease. Autoimmunity works like this. There is no foreign attack. There is no external threat. There is only DNA gone askew, the body tripped up, attacking itself, fatigue of a fight without truce. Confusion. Antibodies spilling into the bloodstream. A body forgetting it…

THE FUTURE for the Whethervane always begins the same way: a curled fist of pressure at the base of the neck, a stretching along the neckline, invisible fingers curling and squeezing until they reach the head. Then a lancing pain that settles behind the right eye: sometimes a throbbing, sometimes a pulsating wave that comes and goes. Then the nausea, the sensitivity to smell. If you visit in the hopes of finding out who you’re going to marry, best not to wear perfume. Emily, who works in the gardens and sometimes the kitchen, is standing outside the Whethervane’s bedroom door on a sultry, storming summer afternoon. Her son, Rowan, is in her arms. Rowan is four years old. His forehead against her neck is hot and sweaty; she’s sweaty too,…

FSG Originals Norwegian writer and academic Jan Grue excavates “what lies beneath” the human body when the body is a body that nondisabled people tend to avoid, ignore, or erase; and how does his body, in particular, fit into a world not made by or for him? Diagnosed at age three with spinal muscular atrophy, Grue surpasses an abbreviated life expectancy, yet he doesn’t escape the gaze of people who see him as a survivor and not someone who is defiantly, unapologetically, and wonderfully alive. He discards such presumptions with this unconventional memoir and bristling prose that examines language and words themselves. In fact, body and language are the story here, and Grue has written a narrative on how the former determines the latter … and vice versa. Our bodies…

Melville House FOR ALL THE WOMEN who write about walking in nature (Wild, The Salt Path, etc.), there is no companion I’d rather have than Katherine May: her graceful, wonderful, funny, sometimes clumsy, and electric (per the title) self. It’s not an original story: a journey begins with a long walk of reevaluation and contemplation on rugged terrain, which mirrors a rocky, conflicted interior. But May, in addition to wrestling with societal expectations of women and mothers, also contends with a public that doesn’t cope well with people like herself, someone with Asperger’s syndrome—which she only realizes while listening to a radio interview on this trek. Suddenly, the way May perceives and processes the world makes a heck of a lot of sense. Her journey to understand her own atypical…

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The sun is an old tire.The sun is a grand piano.The sun is a borrowed mother,a sutured wind, a still spiral air. When you were born, I held you and said:“I am so happy to see you again.” The surprise of a wet leg in the palm of my hand.The heat of a paper map near the saline seamelding thought to arm and lung to now. The sun is an old woman wearing only pants.The finer powder of living will leak throughand she will be alone and terrible and perfect. The strewn feathers in the sand layin a pattern looking exactly like that of a bird. You look exactly like that of a prayer.A tidal gasp to your ills. Over and over.It takes over in the summer of our shelter.It…

I come from cotton pickers, those folks who not only walked down rows, but also sometimes crawled down them for expediency. Mama told me that she wore two cotton sacks across her back. “You could carry two rows this way,” she explained. She spoke of the brutality of picking cotton and how the bolls scratched her fingers to the point of bleeding. She picked so much cotton that her hands became calloused. Mama and her siblings’ childhoods in South Carolina were truncated because they had to labor in the field. Mama practically boasts of how she had picked 250 pounds of cotton a day and how her mother and grandmother picked as much as any grown man: 350 to 400 pounds. I had no idea how much those measurements meant;…

Paint over creases in the paper, in the archive, swish that color right into the edges till we shine, you and I, we shine, bodies submerged emerge in the beaten still white page, skirt watery dispersion to assemble, molecule by molecule, toward a reach, a breach, a stretch that lifts the chasm out of my life. Paint in thick pastes to spackle over the cracks. Each squeeze displaces vacuum. Tiny spider finds a new home as the thickness rolls, licks and blobs. The hollow bursts into contour, texture, with each breath and slap, it swells and hardens into new land, fit for a tender foot or tendril. And then there are hills and plains and the plants I knew by the ditch’s side, and the weight of the kohlrabi head…

Comment: A return to places I’d been as a young person—Burlington, VT (having ranged first through that city with companions met on the road), Comstock, NY, and the old Great Meadows Prison there, and Albany, where I’d lived in the 1960s and 1970s. Found shelter in Burlington from Hurricane Gloria in a movie theater (Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Ploughman’s Lunch). I’d wanted to ride across the Adirondacks and David Warren came with me as far as DeRuyter, company for the first forty miles, and then turned off to go back home—Ithaca—a different way, a wide bow south to Otselic Center and then the climb up from Marathon and the Tioughnioga. Hundred mile day for him. Central New York was low rolling hills, a mile for us every five…

New York Review Books ON THE FIRST DAY, a storm is born. A whorl in southeast Japan. Her name is Maria. For twelve days (each day a chapter), we follow Maria’s growth as we would a child; however, her development is more rapid, tumultuous, dangerous. By day eight, she deluges San Francisco after many months of drought, with further turbulent conditions still to come. Originally published in 1941, Storm features a main character, Maria, who unfolds as not a soulless weather condition, but as a female life force in contrast to the nonhuman, largely unnamed char acters like Chief Forecaster, Load Dispatcher, Superintendent, or just “men.” There’s a broken marriage, Stewart suggests, between civilization, storms, and climate. Animals hoard food, grow thick fur, hibernate, he observes. They plan. “But the…

Bloomsbury IF TREES COULD TALK, what would they say? In The Island of Missing Trees, the forbidden love between Kostas (Greek Christian) and Defne (Turkish Muslim) unfolds beneath a fig tree, a tree that also (partly) narrates the book and embodies the complex history, ethnic conflict, and religious hypocrisy of Cyprus. Shafak uses the fig tree to tell this story, in part because it helps address such charged topics at a slight remove and in a sentient way, a point of view that is silent but wholly conversant in the issues it sees. And the fig tree witnesses everything from the deep past, climate change, intergenerational and inherited trauma, and the suffering of star-crossed love. In shifting from the journalistic to the unearthly, historical to fantastical, truth to fiction, these…

Taylor Brorby is the author of Crude and Coming Alive and coeditor of Fracture. His next book, Boys and Oil, is forthcoming. He teaches environmental studies at Wofford College. Sarah Capdeville worked as a wilderness ranger for five seasons and is a graduate of the University of Montana and Chatham University. She lives, writes, and daydreams about crosscut saws in Missoula, Montana. Ashley Colley is a Memphis-based poet currently working on her first book, a poetry collection exploring people’s relationships to animals and their images, from cave art to de-extinction science. Pete Eckert is a blind light-painting photographer whose work has been commissioned by Swarovski, Playboy, Volkswagen, and the USPS. He has been featured in a SOMArts Cultural Center exhibit, among other places. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was inducted into…