![]() ![]() Thanks to my good friend and colleague Joseph, during recent weeks I’ve carried with me a copy of Henri Nouwen’s “Life of the Beloved,” a brief, concisely written reflection on the human condition. Nights spent with bells and candles in a woodframed church with Native people up along Washington State’s Skagit River, days helping lead a retreat at a Benedictine monastery north of Santa Fe, a presentation to a tribal council on the edge of Michigan’s Keweenaw Bay, a morning meeting at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, a few blocks east of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. I’ve been traveling on and off for three months. I’m kneeling, chilled, inside by a wood stove, with kindling and paper, ready to light a fire to create some heat on this blustery December afternoon.Ĭhores, like this one, always prove to be anchoring experiences for me. The forest floor is covered with snow and ice. Also noteworthy is a lovely lyric essay by Brad Land, as well as a tribute to the work of “nature-writer” John Hay, to use an appellation that Peter Matthiessen, in his response to Hay’s work, quite rightly calls “insipid and obsolete.” No such complaint can be made about Ecotone, whose travels to the “lands in-between” will no doubt continue to result in a journal well-worth reading.A wind is blowing outside the cabin door. That said, the journal still has much to offer, including an interview with Mark Doty as well as several excellent poems Doty is, I think, physically incapable of producing so-so work. My only complaint about volume one is that at times it seems quality has taken a second seat to star-power for instance, the piece here by Reg Saner–author of many very, very fine essays–was a disappointment. The remaining pages are chock full of biggies such as Reg Saner, Philip Levine, Bill Roorbach, Gerald Stern, Wendell Berry, and Peter Matthiessen, to name only a few. ![]() As editor David Gessner explains, it’s the edges, “between genres, between science and literature, between land and sea, between the civilized and wild, between earnest and comic, between the personal and biological, between urban and rural, between animal and spiritual” that Ecotone feels are “not only more alive, but more interesting and worthy of our exploration.” Worthy of exploration as well is this first issue, a nicely produced perfect-bound volume weighing in at over 150 pages, with a center section of art devoted to gorgeous collages by Pamela Wallace Toll. Ready to stand at indistinct edges or walk vertiginous margins, the aptly named Ecotone is a brave new offering out of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. ![]()
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