Orion Summer 2021

GRATITUDE AND PRAISE AS THE SEASON of sunlight sprawls before us, we reflect on what a tremendously difficult year it’s been. But even the most challenging times are not without their gifts. Friends and contributors brought new and vital books into the world. In Beloved Beasts, Michelle Nijhuis chronicles the conservation movement’s early and recent efforts to save endangered species. Kathleen Dean Moore reignites that determination by celebrating every loon call, whale song, and wolf howl in Earth’s Wild Music. In Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu reflects on notions of identity and belonging across cultures. And Laurel Nakanishi considers the relationships between stories and place in her debut poetry collection, Ashore. Congratulations to contributing editor Ross Gay and recent contributor Jonathan Slaght on their PEN America Literary Awards for their respective Be…

Somewhere in North Carolina is a very large house once owned by a very wealthy man whose name I forget. Perhaps you’ve been there. It’s a large house with many corridors, and you pay money to walk through them. The original residents are long dead, but their possessions remain intact, displayed to affect the liveliness of years past, and I found myself, on visiting the house many years ago, quite swept up in the phantom scenes. On leaving, you can purchase reproductions of the ivory keepsakes and velvet tablecloths in the house’s gift shop. For an additional fee, you can stomp grapes outside in the same buckets the wealthy man’s servants once used to make his wine. Despite the resentment I ought to have harbored toward this gravestone of capitalist…

Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how we think about nature. Guided by award-winning instructors, these gatherings provide an intimate space to spark creativity and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with place. For information about upcoming courses, visit orionmagazine.org/workshops. “Taking this workshop was one of the best things I have done for myself.” “A profound experience during a trying time.” “I loved connecting with our group, and learned so much.” “I am leaving this workshop a better writer and person.”…

I’M TANKED UP on jasmine green tea and honey, ready to hike into a dense, rural Rhode Island forest as an ecological survey observer, my bright red rain boots patterned with paisley umbrellas marking me immediately as a bit of a straggler given to distraction. It’s five a.m. on a Saturday, slightly misty with the dank promise of a humid June day. I try in vain to keep up with a team of enthusiastic ecologists and breathless birders with impressive gear but promptly find myself alone in the woods. The properly attired naturalists have dispersed around a bend in the forest path, melted into the thick green with nets, binoculars, and buckets, and abandoned me—my thermos, pen, and notebook in hand. The forest air is so oxygen-rich it tickles the…

AN ISLAND provides refuge for refugees. Their roofs, tablecloths, and bedsheets wave from the port’s breeze. Temporarily permanent, adjacent to the water, each tent kneels behind the mayor’s office and in front of a tenth-century castle. The locals park close by. A yank of emergency brake sounds like the pull of a zipper in winter. The locals gather at outdoor cafés that overlook the port and the people walking along its perimeter. Their coffee awaits. Frappé, sweet, but no milk. And please, bring an ashtray. They mumble with small filters suffocating between puckered lips to a server working for tips that aren’t left. The coffee comes. The ashtrays follow. Lighters flick. The locals inhale. Isn’t it crowded? I’m asked. Dangerous? We walk the stone path across the road from the…

Teresa Jordan came to art late in life, as a meditation. Nearly every day she draws or paints some one thing, closely observed, as a way to find beauty in even the smallest components of our world and calm in the midst of chaos. Recently, adapting to time constraints born of the pandemic, she decided to focus on one subject—birds—and to work on an iPad rather than with oils. Because she is an observational painter and because birds make for twitchy life models, she works from her own photos or, more often, from bird videos she studies minutely, advancing frame by frame to catch just the right gesture. She prints this work on fine art paper using Epson UltraChrome® pigment inks. You can learn more about her art and writing…