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Orion - Digitally

March 21, 2008

We are pleased to announce the launch of Orion Digital—offering subscriptions to the same visually stunning magazine, but in digital format that is viewable in a browser and by downloading to read offline. We’re offering the digital version at an introductory price of $10 for a six-issue, one-year subscription. The digital option will be especially welcomed by our non-U.S. subscribers, who often have to wait much too long for their issue to arrive. The digital edition saves a bit of carbon, as well as giving immediate access to an issue’s content, offering readers a chance to share articles, and full search capabilities. To subscribe, click here. 

Burroughs Award for Orion and Chris Cokinos

March 05, 2008

Chris Cokinos’s “The Consolations of Extinction” (Orion, May/June 2007) has won the 2007 John Burroughs Essay Award. This award is given annually by the John Burroughs Association to an natural history essay whose content and style reflects the work of John Burroughs.

Essays appearing in Orion have won the essay award in each of the last three years and five out of the last six. Previous Orion winners are:

• 2006 David Gessner, “Learning to Surf” (March/April 2006)
• 2005 Judith Lowry, “Birdsong Ripens Berries, Wind Brings the Seeds” (May/June 2005)
• 2003 Freeman House, “Afterlife” (May/June, 2003)
• 2002 Jeff Lockwood, “Voices from the Past” (Summer, 2002)

Congratulations to Chris and to the essay’s editor, Jennifer Sahn.

“Global Warming Is Colorblind” Reprinted in Utne Reader

March 05, 2008

Jennifer Oladipo’s ”Global Warming Is Colorblind” is out in the March/April issue of Utne Reader. We’re glad to see the article, published in the November/December 2007 issue of Orion and which had a lively discussion on Orion‘s website, receive even more attention. 

McNally Robinson Bookstore Staff Pick

February 26, 2008

The Future of Nature:
Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine
Selected and Introduced by Barry Lopez
(Milkweed Editions, $18.00)

One of the casualties of the increasing, and increasingly heard, rhetoric of environmentalism has been our nation’s literature of nature. Orion magazine has become one of the few places to find the contemporary likes of Thoreau, Muir and McPhee.These essays are urgently political, quietly personal and, despite some questionable anthropomorphism of salmon or trees, deeply human discussions of our place in the world around us.

Thanks to Ginger Strand for informing us about this…

Scott Russell Sanders in Best American Essays

February 23, 2008

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Scott Russell Sanders’s story “Conscience” (Orion, Jan/Feb 2006) was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace.

For those of you who are keeping score, Scott has had more full-length articles in Orion than any other author. 

Orion Readers Write Songs Too

February 04, 2008

After reading Bill McKibben’s The Unsung Solution (November/December 2007), a reader writes:

Dear Orion,

As a folk musician, I took Bill McKibben’s statement that there were “no folk songs about waste heat recovery” as a personal challenge. The resulting opus can be heard at my website, under the heading “free songs.”

As listeners may surmise, it was written and recorded in less than an hour.

Thank you,

Amy Martin
http://www.amymartin.org/music.html

If you click on that link and scroll down to “Waste Heat Recovery” you can listen to her song.

Thanks, Amy. 

New Web Exclusives on orionmagazine.org

January 24, 2008

We’re pleased to announce two new web exclusives available at orionmagazine.org.

The first is Dispatches from Alaska, written by Seth Kantner. Seth’s dispatches, which appear every two weeks or so, will give a view of life in the far north different than any other. Seth is the author of the tremendous novel Ordinary Wolves, a book that any Orion reader is bound to enjoy.

The other is The Butterfly Big Year, by Robert Michael Pyle. Bob, who until recently was the author of the Orion column The Tangled Bank, will spend 2008 trying to find as many species of butterflies in the U.S. and Canada as he can. His roughly biweekly reports will tell us what he’s seeing.

Caption: Seth Kantner

Caption: Bob Pyle (with Orion Editorial Assistant Hannah Fries)

Richard Louv Wins Audubon Medal

January 22, 2008

We’ve just learned that the National Audubon Society will award author Richard Louv with its Audubon Medal for sounding the alarm about the health and societal costs of children’s isolation from the natural world – and for launching a growing movement to remedy the problem. ”Leave No Child Inside,” an excerpt from Louv’s influential book, was published in the March/April 2007 Orion .

Two Orion Essays included in Best American Anthology

January 22, 2008

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We’ve only just become aware that two essays we published in 2006 are featured in the 2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, and another was listed among the Notable Science and Nature essays for 2006.

Both Jeffrey A. Lockwood’s “The Nature of Violence” (January/February 2006) and Lynn Margulis’s and Emily Case’s “The Germs of Life” (November/December 2006) are featured and reprinted in the book.

Victoria Finlay’s “The Tears of Trees” (July/August 2006) was a Notable essay.

Congratulations to all the authors! And to us—that’s a strong showing.

The Tortilla Cycle Reprinted

January 22, 2008

Rebecca Allen’s “The Tortilla Cycle” appears in a reprint in the January/February 2008 World Ark—the publication of Heifer International, a charity that has quite a few devoted fans and contributors at Orion. The article was first published in the May/June 2007 Orion.