Orion Magazine

REVIEWS EDITOR: Kerri Arsenault EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Amy Brady DATABASE ASSISTANT: Greenlee Brown INDIVIDUAL GIVING COORDINATOR: Tracie Butler-Kurth EDITOR-AT-LARGE: Christopher Cox POETRY EDITOR: Camille Dungy PROOFREADER: Amanda Elkin BUSINESS MANAG

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 pla

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 di

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 p

IN LATE JUNE, the thrum of annual cicadas, or chicharras, as we call them here in San Antonio, becomes the dominant sound of summer. The air percolates with percussion as males buckle their ribs to make mating calls. If a female likes a male’s drummi

I LOVE TO look at dill. I love to handle it, chop it. It’s an elegant shape. Its featheriness is touchable; I brush it on my cheeks when no one is looking. Its brightness when fresh soothes my eyes. It looks especially lovely beside a newly sliced le

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

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, b

Not by amulets but by words and scents and signs:the air awake and still, blue as flag or water hyacinth.Tone of neutrality. Color of equality. A middle spacewhere like things congregate, all motion all energy— as the bond was with my Lord and his Ap

Should I answer themwhen this couple from PhoenixBirds of Cape Cod booklet in handasks me if I’ve ever seenso many birds in my life should I say as they sharea heavy pair of binocularseager as first graders huddledin the cold breeze with its smellof

THE JULY SUN is heavy and warm. This, despite a steady northwest breeze rolling off the Mackenzie River Delta and, just beyond, the Arctic Ocean. I am among a procession of heavy-duty RVs and truck campers and motorcycles and diehard cyclists—all of

Every day we are exploring more of the forest park across the road from us, relishing it in small sections, getting to know it like a friend. We have found secret paths among the jays and rooks. We have climbed banks of leaf litter, strayed far off p

promises the sound of the tide coming in. Never mindthe no-swim advisory, the sidewalks and parking lotsstrewn with yellow and black crime scene markerson the regular, the reappearing swastikas or the fact that a quarter of humanity will run out of w

1. I wanted to be a woman in the woods. I ended up in jail. 2. This is a story with no obvious beginning. Like a river of disputed origin. Let’s start in a hospital bed where a young woman has been watching blood clots work their way down a catheter

Minerva, calm me down. I am tryingto remember the way the deer alwaysemerged every time I thought of them.And how bones would surface in the dirtat the marsh. I’m sniffing pine conesback to the forest floor. Rubbingfingers together to make moss. Smok

With lead gifts from Kennon McKee, Lindy Keiser, and The Clements Foundation, Orion has launched its first endowment. The Orion Fund for Women Writers, established by Madeline Miller, is dedicated to fostering the next generation of female, female-bo

Here the melting, there the glacieralready gone. All these years, I’ve watchedmy body as if from a distance nearly geologic: the comings and goingsof a thousand tiny fossils against my flesh.Last night, beside my sleeping wife’s form in the ageless g

I come from the fieldsthe flowery stink of alfalfa hot breath of wheat I come from the ditchescome dirt-hipped & mud-veined squelchof watersnakes & frogs pop of snailsbeneath soaked sneakers August lightstill scours the burnt hills behind my eyesever

Jaime Cortez Black Cat EVERY SENTENCE in this collection balances gymnastically, expertly on the thin blade of hilarity and mourning, happiness and despair. Cortez’s recurring character, Gordo, a young innocent boy, is surrounded by masculinity that

Max Liboiron Duke University Press “WASTE IS A PRODUCT of a larger system,” Max Liboiron said in a waste symposium this spring. And that larger system, in short, is colonialism. But pollution isn’t colonialism’s side effect—it’s an “enactment of ongo

Hebe Uhart Translated by Robert Croll Archipelago Books Uhart centers creatures big and small in short narratives that are chambers of joy, like the mouse Thoreau lured to his shirt pocket with cheese. Less natural history and more wondrous secret ki

David Searcy Random House WHILE MANY of us suffer under the weight of 24/7 digital convenience, Texas stargazer, artist, and founding member of The Friedrich Schmiedl Rocket Club, David Searcy, plinks out thoughtful texts on a 1959 Swiss Hermes 3000.

Te-Ping Chen Mariner Books ABOUT 1.4 billion people live in China, equivalent to almost 18 percent of the world’s population, yet the headlines about China (in the United States anyway) are almost always political in nature, sometimes othering in the

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was the most honored American photographer of the twentieth century and a prescient voice in the fight to preserve America’s wilderness. Rebecca Altman serves on the Science and Environmental Health Network board of directors.

WHEN THE LAST snowmelt runs down the street and spring peepers have their song, I know the promise of warmth on my skin presses near. Stars! In the grass! my son used to point and say when he toddled about our lawn, which my husband and I took as bot