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The Place Where You Live, Aloud

May 21, 2012, by Orion staff

Great news, audiophiles! We’ve partnered with one of our favorite radio programs, Living on Earth, to bring you podcast-able versions of our reader-generated feature The Place Where You Live. In the first episode, Orion reader Lisa Saffran talks about her home in the Ozarks:

“We have marked each year of land-owning with an annual meeting on the gravel bar, followed by gin and tonics and music around the fire until the stars burn bright above us.”

Once a month for the next year or so, Living on Earth will feature a Place Where You Live contributor, reading their piece aloud, on air. Have a listen, and then head over to our webpage to read about more places and contribute your own.

Five Questions for Florence Williams

May 18, 2012, by Kristen Hewitt

In Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, journalist Florence Williams delves into the biology, culture, and evolutionary history of this life-giving organ. In her witty and wide-ranging account, she explores where breasts come from, why we see them the way we do, and what they reveal as bellwethers for human health in a compromised environment.

Why is it important to change the way we understand, talk about, and research breasts, and why has it taken so long for people to actually begin doing so?

Breasts get a lot of attention, of course, but it’s very limited. It’s fair to say Western cultures are obsessed with breasts—generally big breasts—as sexual objects. Because of that, it’s been hard to take them seriously. When breasts are oversexualized, it becomes that much more challenging to support and encourage breastfeeding in a meaningful way. Beyond that, there’s not a lot of money to be made in researching breast milk, as opposed to, say, red wine or cow’s milk, so there hasn’t been a lot of incentive. Now, though, some companies are trying to mimic human milk substances and find markets in populations that are immune-compromised. It’s likely we’ll see more of this.

Your book brings together cultural studies and science—could you talk about the process of working in both worlds? Which came first—the scientific facts or the cultural criticism? Or did they come together?

For me, the science came first. There were other books out there about the cultural and social history of the breast, but I’d never before seen a history of a body part told through the lens of environmental history. That said, when you talk about the breast, culture comes into play pretty fast, for example with implants, and in how the debate over breast evolution drives our attitudes toward them. Were they sexually selected or naturally selected? Were breasts put on earth for men? That debate matters.

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New Books: Rough Likeness

May 16, 2012, by Hannah Fries

Lia Purpura’s new essay collection, Rough Likeness, includes two essays that appeared in Orion, “On Coming Back as a Buzzard” (September/October 2009) and “There Are Things Awry Here” (November/December 2010). Lia is also the author of the essay collection On Looking and the poetry collection King Baby, and was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Orion‘s Hannah Fries caught up with her to ask a few questions about Rough Likeness and what’s next.

In both On Looking and your new collection of essays, Rough Likeness, you engage in a kind of “looking” that takes immense energy and intention—a sharp kind of inquiry that refuses to take things for granted, that hungers to peel away layers and screens of all kinds. Is this a practice you were consciously aware of when you began to write these essays? Am I right to call it a “practice”? If so, how did it become one for you?

In one way, I think you’re absolutely right to call it a “practice”: paying attention is a way of being. It’s not an easy way of being, because porosity (registering, holding) does mean a kind of commitment to registering painful things. Or, maybe it’s a helplessness before such things. Probably that. I don’t know how such a stance became a stance for me—and others have asked this before. I do think the desire to turn outward, to see, to not turn away from, is counterbalanced by the drive to write, which requires a turning inward. I suffer, as many writers do, from feeling I’m not “doing” enough, not being an attentive enough public activist or advocate…but I’ve come to trust, too, in the tools I’ve been given—the capacity to sit and write—and have tried to strengthen my belief in those tools as “useful”—in showing alternate ways one might, as a reader, engage with the world attentively, in helping to provide language for states of being that are hard to word, but certainly shared by all.

Rough Likeness seems particularly concerned with language itself. As one might pick up an object, turn it over, examine it, see how it catches the light—even break it open—you do that with words. It makes the reader very aware of the shiftiness of language. What has compelled you toward this hyper-attention to words and language, and what role does it play in this book?

Language is really very physical for me. Words hurt, scrape, detonate, sidle up as companions, tap shoulders…I’m fascinated by the way we “use” language, how we accept it as either a blunt-edged tool, or a highly refined and nuanced precision tool. Writing feels almost sculptural for me—not so much a “honing and perfecting” kind of gesture but, I guess, just as you say, a practice in which I can look at language from all angles of vision—as if walking around a sculpture. I was wholly focused on poetry for many years, before I began writing essays, so the kind of training poetry and perhaps especially translating offered, that patient, close attention to singular words, words as smaller units in a phrase and component parts of lines, lines as tensile parts of sentences…all this absolutely influences my prose.

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Letter from Alaska

May 14, 2012, by Charles Wohlforth

“The ice was bad that year,” wrote Charles Wohlforth in the March/April 2004 issue of Orion. “It had been bad for a decade and seemed to grow steadily worse.” Wohlforth’s report from the Arctic Circle was one of the first to document the effects of climate change on far northern indigenous communities—communities that depend on regular movements of ice for their survival. We recently received an update from the author, a life-long Alaskan, on how change continues to visit the top of the world.

In 2002, whalers hunted on the melting sea ice as warming weather brought risk, uncertainty, and a fearful recognition that climate change was here and a threat. A decade later, the whalers’ courage and ingenuity have helped them to adapt to the shifting ice, but the process of change itself has overtaken them.

The cyclic round of arctic life has flattened into a linear path. The landmarks of the rounding seasons have not been replaced; instead, each year passes through a different Earth.

“There might be a new normal,” said whaler and scientist Richard Glenn. “It’s all about change, and monitoring the change. The bar has been raised for us, as far as vigilance and staying in touch with the changes that are going on around us.”

Change is coming too fast to understand. On the beach they’ve been finding sick seals and walruses, losing their hair, with skin lesions, becoming lethargic and unresponsive, wheezing and dying. Officials don’t know what is causing the epidemic, but suspect pathogens are spreading farther in newly ice-free waters.

Polar bears feasted on the dying seals last year, and now bears are showing up with patches of hair loss. Did they get sick from the seal?

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New Books: Step Gently Out

May 11, 2012, by Rick Lieder

To whom does a yard belong? The answer, if there is one, can’t be arrived at without a keen eye and a bit of patience. Photographer Rick Lieder brings both to bear in Step Gently Out, a picture book for all ages that documents the incredible diversity of small life within a single midwestern backyard. We asked Lieder to describe the process of capturing the book’s images, which seem nearly to quiver with urgency and light.

Step Gently Out began almost a decade ago, with a wish to look with new eyes at my ordinary backyard and the small life hidden within it. I wanted to go out with no preconceived ideas, and photograph whatever insects and other creatures I found; to have fun, experiment, and, hopefully, create some interesting images.

Although my equipment is more sophisticated these days, I began with a point-and-shoot camera (the resolution of which was less than that of most current smart phones.) I use whatever light I find, but since I’m flash-less, there’s often not enough illumination for a sharp exposure—the frantic pace of life lived in the micro-wilderness leaving behind just a blurred memory of its presence. Using only the sun and whatever light reflects throughout my small yard presents its own set of challenges, and the limited depth of focus helps me create a less clinical, more emotional and impressionistic view.

Ninety percent of my time is still spent in my backyard, but I try to photograph these small lives wherever I find them. My success rate is low—on many outings I return with nothing worth keeping—but when it all comes together, seeing these animals on their own terms is really a marvel: honey bees in flight carrying golden loads of pollen, fireflies mating and hovering over twilight fields, mosquitoes with a belly full of blood, and newly-born praying mantis nymphs emerging from their egg cases.

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America the Possible: A Discussion with James Gustave Speth, May 15

May 08, 2012, by Orion staff

America, it turns out, is number one—but in all the ways we don’t want to be. Compared to other advanced democracies, the U.S. has the largest per capita prison population, the highest homicide rate, the biggest inequality gap, and the lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children.”

The picture is grim. And yet, in the May/June 2012 issue of Orion, Gus Speth writes, “A future worth having awaits us, if we are willing to struggle and sacrifice for it.” Speth’s long career as an environmental advocate includes work at the White House and the United Nations, and his two-part essay in recent issues of the magazine explores both America’s decline and its possible renewal.

On May 15, at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific, join Speth and Andrew Blechman, Orion’s managing editor, for a discussion of Speth’s “America the Possible: A Manifesto”—the second part of which appears in the current issue of Orion. The event is free to join, will be moderated by Orion staff, and is open to all readers and friends. Register here.

Orion hosts live web events every month. Sign up to be alerted by e-mail when a new one is announced.

On the Shelf: Chris Dombrowski

May 07, 2012, by Chris Dombrowski

The week’s recommended reading and culture from Orion authors and artists.

While fishing last night sometime between two and three a.m., I heard a great horned owl call from a riverbank cottonwood just as the big waning moon crested a sand dune, and reckoned bird and well-lit sky-hung rock were conversing with each other.

Though this is unlikely, it is utterly possible. There are certainties of which we can’t be certain. Birds may indeed be “holes in heaven through which a man may pass,” as Walter Anderson has it in his Horn Island Diaries, a quote which serves as a section epigraph in poet Tom Crawford’s latest book of poems, The Names of Birds (Sherman Asher, 2011).

The author of five previous books of poetry, recipient of a Pushcart Prize and numerous other awards, Crawford is a meditative-lyric poet who asserts that birds “can enter you from any direction / and a fly-through, even by the common sparrow / can take out the heart” (“The Toll Birds Take”). Although the book’s title implies taxonomy, Crawford’s book is really an avian autobiography, beginning with “Wing”:

When I was eleven
I found a black wing,
just one wing,
on our road.

I was a loaner.
Shy. Afraid a lot.

For a long time
I kept it in my pocket.

If I was really nervous
I’d take it out
and fan it open
like a deck of cards.

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Sionnach

May 04, 2012, by Brian Doyle

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Five Questions for Woody Tasch

May 02, 2012, by Andrew Blechman

When Woody Tasch published his Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered in 2009, he inaugurated the Slow Money movement, which aims to steer investor and donor capital toward supporting organic farms and local food systems through grassroots mobilization, networking, and educating. The movement is slowly but surely catching fire around the country with more than 20,000 people signing the Slow Money pledge.

Orion managing editor Andrew Blechman caught up with Woody when he came to speak in Orion’s hometown one evening at a fundraiser for our local land trust. Andrew and Woody met up again the next morning for breakfast at a favorite Great Barrington cafe that specializes in local food.

How would you explain Slow Money to a ten-year-old?

If you had some extra money, would you give it to a stranger to invest, or would you give it to people you know and trust who would invest it in your community, in where your food comes from?

It’s all well and good to ask people to invest locally, but a lot of us in the 99 percent don’t have the luxury of experimental investments. Isn’t that for rich people?

We need to design investment systems for three strata of people: angel investors who have hundreds of thousands or more to spare; middle investors who have thousands to invest; and the rest, who feel this is a critically important movement but who can only afford to invest a few hundred dollars. And the loans can be similarly sized, such as a few hundred dollars to put toward building a root cellar, or a whole lot more for a big piece of farm machinery, or land. It’s more work than traditional investing, but then again farming is hard work, too. But it’s gratifying. I’m putting seeds in the ground. It may not rain, but I’m still putting seeds in the ground.

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And the Poetry Continues…

April 30, 2012, by Hannah Fries

If you are sorry to see National Poetry Month slipping away, along with Orion’s poem-a-day feature, despair not! There are four fresh poems awaiting you in the brand new May/June 2012 issue of Orion.

Fans of Mary Oliver won’t be disappointed by her “Life Story,” a shape-shifting meditation on belonging to place and nature; Eva Hooker’s “Prairie, Under Full Moon” will leave you restless and drunk on language; and if you don’t have spring fever yet, Michael Hettich’s “The Garden” might make you drop your magazine and head straight for the back door.

And in this issue, we introduce you to poet Susan B. A. Somers-Willet with “Tallahatchie,” her first piece to appear in Orion. The poem, written for Emmett Till, is a mirror, as the Tallahatchie River has made a mirror of the boy’s murdered body. Asked for some background on her poem, Susan wrote:

“Tallahatchie” is a central poem in my manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Glass Casket, which takes as its anchoring points photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison and photographs of lynching. In these poems, I explore the documentary and political uses of these images with the truly complex emotional responses we have in looking at them. “Tallahatchie” is an unrhymed sonnet whose language literally folds upon itself, describing Emmett Till’s funeral portrait and the location of its circumstance in the first half and my response as a white Southern female viewer in the second half. I wish to explore how these images of others in pain are not apart from us: they mirror us and inform how we see ourselves.

Hannah Fries is poetry editor of Orion.