“In English, speakers are actors and objects are acted upon. A persimmon is there to be eaten. For Powhatan speakers, it just as likely might not be there since the persimmon, like other objects of the natural world, has an agency and animacy of its own.”—an essay by Emily Parzybok
“I wanted people to fall in love with nature through words and want to protect it, the way I had as a child, writing on a concrete stoop in a subdivision. In a way, words were my quarry. I mined their layers for meaning, and when I made something beautiful and useful from them, I felt lighter somehow, as if the overburden of living—the debris of its many griefs—had been lifted.”—an essay by Melissa Reeser Poulin
“A poem’s sweetness leads to its own devouring.”—an essay by Jehanne Dubrow
“It isn’t enough to hold someone’s sorrow in your body till it ferments into song. Witnessing isn’t enough. You must become the sorrow.”—an essay by Claudia F. Saleeby Savage
Jehanne Dubrow on the paintings of Jerzy Duda-Gracz
by Julie Marie Wade | Contributing Writer
