In a hard time or a good time, the moon is a steady solace. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve been looking forward to this, Ecotone’s Moon Issue, for years—and I’m thankful to be able to share it with you at this moment, when that solace feels ever more needed.
Approximately twenty-five lunar cycles ago, I gathered with our MFA editorial team, Ryan Bloom, Becca Hannigan, Maggie Boyd Hare, Emily Krauser, and Summer Wrobel, to write the call for work for this issue. We dreamed together through wide-ranging discussions of the kinds of things a Moon Issue might include. “We’re thinking,” we wrote,
of how we perceive the moon—as a beloved celestial body, as a guide, as a source of light, as a resource some wish to mine or tame as human exploitation of Earth’s resources continues.
We were thinking too of
phases and cycles—of water, of plants, of people and animals, especially but not only people and animals with ovaries, or whose bodies are otherwise moved by the moon.
In response to the call, we received plenty of work that realized the hopes we’d expressed, as well as poems and stories and essays we could not have imagined and were delighted to see.
Among the things we knew we wanted: bedtime stories, meditations, harvests, discovery, gravity, lunar meter and lunar rhymes, the night shift, speculative fiction, spirituality, climate science, solitude, sentiment and straightforwardness, romance, general abundance, abundant Os, Moon Boots, Moon Pies, a minimum of lunar colonization and a maximum of lunar appreciation. I’m happy to say all these wishes were fulfilled, except for the Moon Pies and Moon Boots, which I have sneaked in right here. And we didn’t say it then, but a Moon Issue definitely ought to have cats. Having sneaked their own way in—a personal happiness of mine no matter the issue—are not one cat, not two cats, but four, plus two kittens.
During a conversation about what kind of poetry we hoped to see, poetry editor Maggie Boyd Hare suggested that work in the French repeating forms—rondeaux, rondelets, kyrielles, and the like—felt especially moonly. I agreed and, apparently, so did quite a few poets. We received a wealth of work in these forms, and it was a true delight to read. We’re thankful to everyone who shared theirs.
I have an abiding love of and fascination with these forms as they appear in English. With their refrains (repeating lines), repetends (repeating words or phrases), intense rhyme schemes, and metrical force, they seem alight with possibility. They emerged as song-poems in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and over time came to be used primarily for recitation and the page. They began making their way into English as early as the 1300s, and though they have had a somewhat low-key presence in the language, it has been an abiding one, from Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Wyatt to iconic late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rondeaux—Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”—to the renaissances of villanelles and sestinas of the early twenty-first century, which led to multiple anthologies of work in those forms. Some of us will remember a card tucked into many subscription-renewal notices sent by Poetry years ago, bearing A. E. Stallings’s “Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther”—a platonic example of the form—beginning “Why should the devil get all the good tunes?”
Given that simultaneous abundance of possibility and constraint, I’m interested in the ways these forms can speak to place, environment, and the climate crisis. Or sing to, more properly—and in our long planetary emergency, there is plenty of singing to do.
These forms are particular, and their variations are legion. Given that simultaneous abundance of possibility and constraint, I’m interested in the ways they can speak to place, environment, and the climate crisis. Or sing to, more properly—and in our long planetary emergency, there is plenty of singing to do. Derek N. Otsuji’s rondeau, a song about the song of a now-endangered tree snail on the island of O‘ahu, also asks us to dwell on linguistic and familial connection to place. Amit Majmudar stacks up a kyrielle and a sonnet for his exhortation against environmental destruction, made more potent by its repetends and trochaic meter.
In addition, in this issue—edited by our current team, including poetry editor Aslan Gossett—you’ll find rondeaux by Allison Joseph, Jason Gray, Nathaniel Perry, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey, two rondels from Katharine Whitcomb, rondelets by Susan McLean, Carolyn Oliver, and Jimmy Kindree, and a sestina by Alejandro Lucero. Some of these poems hew to their constraints with precision and grace—as in Ramsey’s poem of a woebegotten gardener, with its finely made amphibrachs—and others expand or alter the form in question to fit the poem’s purposes—as in Perry’s “73 (Song, with Wrens’ Wings),” which shifts the rondeau’s form and rhyme scheme to make room for three vital refrains as well as the usual repetend. Each of them, I reckon, is a wonder.
Of course the moon is bigger than one set of poetic forms or even one literal subject. I’m pleased that this issue features two profound and elegant poems from Linda Hogan, a perfectly cadenced pancake poem from Molly Peacock, and three small songs from Hailey Leithauser, along with many more. Poets, you really came through for the moon. I knew you would.
Another kind of work we’ve been dreaming about recently is flash fiction and nonfiction. Though we’ve published short and very short prose for years, and have encouraged submissions of middle-length stories and essays, associate editor Michelle Donahue and I are excited to be featuring more flash. This is for both aesthetic and pragmatic reasons. We’re interested in what can be said with and about place in these briefest of prose forms, with their encouragement of risk and play. And they support our teaching mission: A short prose piece can offer a great space for emerging editors to begin thinking with writers about their work. In this issue, we love the range of ideas and feelings Lee Conell’s “Non-erotic Space Fantasy” evokes in its three nuanced and often funny pages—about class, about imaginative work, about interspecies communication, and about love.
Beyond flash, we have a fairy tale magically remade by Clare Beams, which, as the best fairy tales do, imparts wisdom and warning via a fetching narrative—in this case about how we prepare children, especially girls, to meet the world. Of a very different world but with themes that are interestingly in conversation, Lauren Hohle’s “Missing Girl” brings us a stunning story of childhood in the late twentieth century, with spot-on revelations about how young people are socialized in US culture. And from Keri Miller, we have exquisitely detailed historical fiction in the form of a swampy, climate-crisis-inflected ghost story. In other words, this issue will satisfy just about any kind of craving for summer reading you might have.
In a pathbreaking essay, Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas recounts two stories told to her by two fathers in Ecuador and Colombia, weaving together a narrative of traditional medicine, colonial and patriarchal violence, parents’ love for their children, and the ways we make sense of the world at the personal and the societal level. And Elissa Favero, in an essay infused with moonlight, contemplates her parents’ relationship and their move from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States through the lenses of dancing, visual art, and the ways plants and animals respond to the lunar cycle.
As our fellow beings respond to the seasonal shifts caused by anthropogenic climate change, this kind of close, long-term observation feels more relevant than ever.
For our Map this issue, Kristen Case offers a marvelous essay on Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar, his late-life charts recording phenological observations over multiple years. We’ve reproduced two pages of those charts as well as a selection of Kristen’s careful transcriptions of them. As our fellow beings respond to the seasonal shifts caused by anthropogenic climate change, this kind of close, long-term observation feels more relevant than ever. And our art feature this issue comes from glass artist Amber Cowan, whose luminous tonal assemblages of blown and flameworked glass, combined with vintage pressed-glass figures and vases, are awe inspiring and, like a certain celestial body, a pleasure to gaze upon.
We say farewell this spring to two irreplaceable members of our editorial and design teams: co–fiction editors Brinson Leigh Kresge and Tristan Steffe. This duo has embodied the spirit of collaborative editing—bouncing ideas off of each other, reading submissions ardently and with care, facilitating lively discussions of work for consideration, discussing edits for work we accepted, and each making those edits with precision, generosity, and imagination. In Tristan we also lose an intuitive and joyful designer—a mainstay of our interior layout and the creator of graphics that have helped to share our contributors’ work more widely. We will miss them as they depart for future things, and only ask that they stop back by once in a blue moon, or else we’ll have to come looking for them.
I’ll close with a few questions, drawn from our call for work—questions the work in this issue helps me answer, questions you might, on a moonlit night, want to answer for yourself.
What do we project onto the moon, and what does the moon project onto us?
How does the moon help you feel or think about time?
How might the moon help us live in and through the climate crisis? How do its phases support us in the face of vexations?
What can we learn from our shadows?
What kind of dances do you do by the light of the moon?
What makes you howl?