Transition & Transformation | Fall 2024 Issue
As frost-tipped winds and longer nights descended upon us here in Central New York, our editorial board took this autumn as an opportunity to slow down and make space in our lives to honor the changes happening around us. While the words we chose for our theme, transition and transformation, often suggest growth, progress, and hope, this season had us also sitting with feelings of loss, mortality, and yearning.
In our call for this issue, we encouraged writers, poets, and artists to interpret the theme broadly–from embodied transitions, ecological grief, and the painful beauty of transformation to newly imagined futures and beyond. In the pages below, you’ll encounter an exciting collection of pieces that grapple with the myriad complexities of change. Here you’ll find a darkly hopeful vision of a dystopic future, poetic meditations on beloved places both at home and afar, essays grappling with maternal love and grief, reflections on the ways cross-country bike tourism builds intimate connections to local communities (human and nonhuman), a videopoem that chronicles ongoing life near a Superfund site, photography and artwork that show us the everyday in new ways, and much more. We hope you enjoy the invitation to slow down, to re-connect, to grieve. Thank you for being here.
Fall 2024 editorial board: Evelyn Pae, Alyssa Tavarez, Willow B., Alex Cichoskie, Olivia Dombek, Aubrie Methvan, Zoe Weaver, Erin Hassett (Managing Editor), & Addie Hopes (Faculty Advising Editor)
Poetry
“Medicine” by Loralee Clark / “Inescapable” by Sandy Feinstein / “Petit Manan” by Leila Nath / “Poems from Nashawannuck Pond” by David Ram / “River Reflections” by Scott T. Starbuck / “Skins: Crip Drift Leadville” by Petra Kuppers
Nonfiction
“Ay ay, Mama” by Stephanie French / “More than Spinning Wheels” by Erin Hassett / “Appetite for Maternal Care” by Sushmita Samaddar
Fiction
“After the Rockets Have Gone” by Victor Wang / “Song of Coal” by Josie Quinn
Visual Arts
“Church at the Edge of the Treeline” by Tea Endols / “Nature Surrounds Us” by Leila Kuhns / Photography Gallery by Rebecca St. Pierre
Cover art: “Towards the Light,” by Rebecca St. Pierre
Song of Coal | Josie Quinn
She was a servant of death. Her charcoal beak pulled apart corpses, freeing their souls back into the world around them. ...
Skins: Crip Drift Leadville | Petra Kuppers
In this videopoem, two humans and a tree dance, feel, see and explore together in Leadville, [...]
River Reflections | Scott T. Starbuck
Multitudes of hands / open and close / like sea anemones ...
Poems from Nashawannuck Pond | David Ram
I hadn’t thought much of the wind today / before I pushed into the pond and found / how little, mind you, how little the wind / thought of me
Petit Manan | Leah Nath
boardwalk greasy with entangled seaweed, the rickety path to my summer blossomed open towards ...
Nature Surrounds Us | Leila Kuhns
Leila Kuhns has been working with many media types for over five years. She has focused on [...]
More Than Spinning Wheels | Erin Hassett
Covered in dust, sweat, and bicycle chain grease, we finished the second day of our bike tour at an unexpected desert oasis somewhere in California along the Mexico border.
Medicine | Loralee Clark
If there is enough bark left, / if its trunk lying nearby / or if you were the one to fell it / you might be able to tell a tree’s identity ...
Inescapable | Sandy Feinstein
Church bells pealed canonical hours / matins, lauds, praise be for sunrise / prime, terce, sext / become silent graphics
Gallery | Rebecca St. Pierre
Rebecca St. Pierre is a Canadian photographer, digital composite artist, and writer. Nature is her [...]
Church at the Edge of the Treeline | Tea Endols
Tea Endols is a 20-year-old Transmasc Storyboard Artist and Animator from Edmonton, Canada. In 2023 he received [...]
Ay ay, Mama | Stephanie French
After my first child died unexpectedly in Namibia when she was 17 days old, it took me over a year to be ready to try to conceive again. ...
Appetite for Maternal Care | Sushmita Samaddar
In 2018, I returned to India as a newly minted master’s student from the UK, and I confessed to my mother over our first meal together that I could no longer eat her Sunday chicken. ...
After the Rockets Have Gone | Victor Wang
It was a difficult journey with the highways in disrepair, entire sections washed away into the hillside; nothing concrete could be forever. Still, he had to go––for what was left in the calcified highlands behind him was a form of loneliness he could no longer bear.