Emergence Magazine – Literary Hub

Hear a New Short Story from Laia Jufresa

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 09:04:59 +0000

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

This week, we share a short story by Mexican author Laia Jufresa, translated by Sophie Hughes, that imagines the chaos of a world ravaged and divided by climate change. In “Be Dammed,” thousands of climate refugees find themselves forming settlements on boats as they wait endlessly to cross a heavily guarded border in pursuit of safety. One woman, tasked with holding prayers for their salvation, negotiates the entanglement of faith and politics as she considers who, or what, truly has the power to change their circumstances.

Read this short story.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Laia Jufresa was born in Mexico City and grew up in the cloud forest of Veracruz and Paris. She is the author of El Esquinista and Umami. In 2017 she was named one of the Bogotá39, the thirty-nine most promising young writers in Latin America. Her fiction has appeared in Vogue, Words Without Borders, and McSweeney’s, and her nonfiction in El País, Netflix, and BBC Radio.

Sophie Hughes has translated over twenty books by Spanish and Latin American writers, including Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán, José Revueltas, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times and is the recipient of the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize.

Juan Bernabeu is an artist and illustrator trained in Valencia, Berlin, and Italy. He communicates through line and drawing, using patterns and color to bring images to life. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, This American Life, and elsewhere.

Anna Badkhen on Imprints of the Past

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 08:01:04 +0000

What can we learn from imprints in the earth about the ancient presences that left them behind? Acclaimed author Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the earth from the near and distant past, from the buffalo wallows of North America to the treasure-hiding game sekretiki she played as a child, from the histories held in whale earwax to the map of our human becoming in the Bouri Peninsula of modern-day Ethiopia. Reading each of these imprints as a kind of porthole—a window into memory, with all the retellings and reinterpretations characteristic of our messy, continual search for meaning—Anna wonders what lineage of impressions we might leave for the future.

Read this essay.

Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Anna Badkhen is the author of seven books, most recently Bright Unbearable Reality, which was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award and for the 2023 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. Her essays have appeared in New York Review of Books, Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Orion, and The New York Times. Anna was born in the Soviet Union and is a US citizen.

Studio Airport is Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters. Together with a small team of creatives, they run a design practice based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The studio has been recognized with international awards for projects such as Hart Island Project (New York), Amsterdam Art Council, and Greenpeace International.

A Short Story from Masatsugu Ono and Emergence Magazine

Emergence Magazine — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:00:02 +0000

In this short story by Japanese author Masatsugu Ono, translated and narrated by Sam Malissa, a woman and her young son move to an abandoned seaside village along Japan’s eastern coast, where they’re met by the well-meaning attention of its curious last inhabitants and their wise old dog. As a typhoon rises from the sea, reality, memory, and illusion begin to collapse into one another—and the pair find themselves increasingly inseparable from the mysterious landscape.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Masatsugu Ono is an author, translator, and professor of literature at Rikkyo University. His works include Boat on a Choppy Bay, which won him the Mishima Yukio Prize, and A Prayer Nine Years Ago, winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest literary honor. His translations include Marie NDiaye’s Rosie Carpe, and Edouard Glissant’s Introduction to the Poetics of Diversity.

Sam Malissa holds a PhD in Japanese literature from Yale University. His translation of The End of the Moment We Had by Toshiki Okada was featured in The New York Times. Other translations include Bullet Train and Three Assassins, by Kotaro Isaka, and short fiction by Shun Medoruma, Kyohei Sakaguchi, and Hideo Furukawa.

Natalie Rose Richardson on Birdwatching and Attention

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:04:24 +0000

In this week’s essay, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to experience a quality of attention that birdwatching can cultivate. Learning from Chicago historian Sherry Williams, who has piloted programs exploring the relationship between bird migration and the Great Migration, and J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and poet whose work engages confluences of race, place, and nature, Natalie follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina that brings the practice of birdwatching together with her own layered history. In landscapes both new and familiar, she shows us what’s possible when we bear witness with eyes wide open.

Read this essay.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Natalie Rose Richardson was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. Her poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, Brevity, Orion Magazine, Arts & Letters, The London Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She has received awards, residencies, or fellowships from Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Foundation, The Newberry Library, The Luminarts Foundation, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the National Student Poets Program, among others. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize and a Best New Poets nominee.

Stephanie Krzywonos on Re-imagining Antarctica

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:00:45 +0000

Visiting the Ross Ice Shelf across several seasons, Stephanie Kryzwonos interrogates the heroic narratives of male exploration and conquest—written almost entirely by white men—that gender the land through feminine tropes. Might these characterizations, borne of a colonizing hunger to conquer and subdue, say more about the culture they come from than about the land they describe? What would happen, Stephanie asks, if we moved beyond fantasies and savior complexes, and instead approached Antarctica as a living place with agency?

Read this story.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Stephanie Krzywonos is a Xicana nonfiction writer. Her forthcoming debut book is Ice Folx, an intersectional memoir set in the Antarctic underworld. She has written about her experiences on “the Ice” for Sierra Magazine, Ofrenda Magazine, The Willowherb Review, Kosmos Journal, The Dark Mountain Project, The Behemoth, and The Antarctic Sun.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee on Stepping into the Liminal

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:13:35 +0000

When we are both left with the fragments of a dying world and given glimpses of an emerging one; when there is so much beauty and destruction to be witnessed, how can we find our bearings? In this talk, given at Emergence’s recent Shifting Landscapes retreat held at Sharpham Trust in Devon, England, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee offers a frame for how we might navigate our current moment of unprecedented transition and transformation. Speaking to what can take root when we truly open ourselves to grief, love, and ultimately kinship with the living world, he urges us to step into the liminal—the space between worlds—to recognize an invitation into new ways of being.

Read the transcript.

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Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an Emmy and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker and a Sufi teacher. His films include: Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, The Atomic Tree, Counter Mapping, Marie’s Dictionary, and Elemental. His films have been screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum, and featured on PBS POV, National Geographic, and New York Times Op-Docs. He is the founder and executive editor of Emergence Magazine

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder on How Words Shape Our World

Emergence Magazine — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 08:07:36 +0000

How do words shape our world? In this week’s narrated essay, writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder visits the wind-sculpted dunes of Nebraska’s Sandhills, considering the prophecies that collided across the American Great Plains in the nineteenth century. Tracing the histories of violence, conquest, and degradation that have played out there, Chelsea locates the points at which human and wilderness were separated. Wondering what words, what prophetic voices are needed to guide us out of an entrenched dualism, she calls us to remember that we have always been intimately linked with the cycles of our ecosystems.

Read this essay on our website.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is a writer based in northern New England whose work explores the human relationship to place. Her essays have been featured in Crannóg Magazine, Inhabiting the Anthropocene, and EcoTheo Review. Her forthcoming book is Rebirth: Mothering Through Ecological Collapse.

Russel Albert Daniels (Diné and Ho-Chunk descent) is a documentary photographer based in Utah whose work stands in the currents of art, reportage, and decolonization. Daniels aims to bring visibility to Native American and underserved communities. His projects explore identity, sense of place, and history.

Melanie Challenger on Listening to Other Species

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 08:18:04 +0000

How might our human systems work differently if they were adapted to receive input from the nonhuman creatures they involve and impact? In this week’s narrated essay, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger considers what it would take to expand the democratic imagination to include and represent animal voices in the decisions that affect them. Advocating for a quieting of our own narratives so that we might recognize political signals from the behaviors of the vast community around us, she envisions the revolutionary mechanisms which could make present the expressions of animals within our systems of power.

Read this story on our website.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Melanie Challenger works as a researcher and broadcaster across environmental history, bioethics, and philosophy of biology. Her books include How to Be Animal: What It Means to Be Human; Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Nonhuman Existence; and On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature, which received Santa Barbara Library’s Green Award for environmental writing. She hosts the podcast Enter the Psychosphere, on diverse intelligences in the natural world, and serves as deputy chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and a vice president of the RSPCA. Melanie is also a founding member of Animals in the Room, a project that seeks to expand democratic imaginations to explore how animals can be present, participate, and be represented in the decisions that affect them.

Annie Marie Musselman is a photographer whose work is inspired by a belief that true kinship with animals can transform our lives for the better. Her award-winning photo books include Finding Trust, Wolf Haven, and Lobos: A Mexican Wolf Family Returns to the Wild. Anne Marie’s work has appeared on the covers of Audubon, Smithsonian, and Outside magazine, and inside The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, and The New York Times, among others.

Ancestral Structures on the Trailing Edge

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 08:47:44 +0000

Histories are enduring presences. No matter how deeply they are buried, they remain. In this week’s narrated essay, author Lauret E. Savoy meditates on the history of the Chesapeake region and the vestiges of collision and rupture that continue to mark its physical and cultural terrains. Surfacing ancient geological movements alongside the deliberate construction of race in colonial America, she considers the entwinement of tectonic and human histories—the ancestral structures that remain in plain sight and out of view.

Read this essay on the Emergence Magazine website.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Lauret E. Savoy is the author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, winner of the American Book Award and the ASLE Creative Writing Award. She co-edited The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, co-authored Living with the Changing California Coast, and compiled and edited Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology. Lauret’s life and work draw from her need to put the eroded world into language, to re–member fragmented pasts into present. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she explores the stories we tell of the American land’s origins—and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land.

When the Earth Started to Sing

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 08:49:55 +0000

In this audio experience by biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell, we are invited to be attentive to the songs and stories that thrum in the air around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution—a lineage of language—in the trills, hoops, barks, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David shares the connection to both deep time and the more-than-human world that can be found when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra. Made entirely of the tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound, this experience combines human speech with other voices to immerse our senses and imaginations in the generative, provoking, and unifying power of sound.

If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. And listen to our interview with David, “Listening and the Crisis of Inattention” on our website.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

David Haskell is a writer and a biologist. His latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken, explores the story of sound on Earth and is a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the PEN E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. The book is also an Editor’s Choice at The New York Times. His previous books, The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees are acclaimed for their integration of science, poetry, and rich attention to the living world. Among their honors include the National Academies’ Best Book Award, John Burroughs Medal, finalist for Pulitzer Prize, Iris Book Award, Reed Environmental Writing Award, National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, and runner-up for the PEN E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Haskell received his BA from the University of Oxford and PhD from Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, a Guggenheim Fellow, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, USA.

Daniel Liévano is an editorial illustrator and author based in Bogotá, Colombia. He is deeply inspired by semiotics, linguistics, and the meaning of language. Notable clients include The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic, Penguin Random House, and Radioambulante. He won a Gold Medal from The Society of Illustrators for his first graphic novel, Gravity, and the AOI World Illustration Award for the animated illustration accompanying “When the Earth Started to Sing” for Emergence Magazine.