We at Ecotone are lucky, in this era of screens, to work in the same place together. For the past twenty years, this magazine has been made in the same hurricane-tested, development-­threatened community near what’s now called the Cape Fear River, a place we now know has been inflected for longer than that by PFAS chemicals. It’s a beautiful and rich place too, home to a wild diversity of more-than-human beings. We meet and edit and lay out the magazine near a stand of longleaf pines; if I’m working late at home, I do it in the company of a chuck-will’s-widow’s calls, as well as hundreds of frogs.

Why do we do this work? There are many possible answers to that question but, for me, the answer at the foundation is: Y’all, we do it for love. Love of good writing and art, love of print culture and the craft of editing, love of reading, love of the more-than-human world. Happily, good writing and art are all around us. The proliferation of little magazines and presses means we are spoiled for choice—yes, sometimes I read work in them that I don’t adore, but sometimes I find something I cannot be without. And either way, that abundance reflects the fact that people want to make the things they’re called to make, and to share them. That is, at its best, an act of love itself—the primary one, which we editors strive to support and amplify with our own.

Writers and artists will not be stopped. For the rest of these things, our love is sometimes tinged with worry—about what is happening to the ecoregions we’re part of, about the fate of print in an era when funding for the arts seems more scarce than ever and the price of paper has risen with each issue we’ve printed since 2020, about the fate of reading in a time of digital supremacy and AI. This only makes the work feel more needed.

When I became the editor of Ecotone thirteen years ago, I embraced the goals with which the magazine had begun—to publish fresh and innovative place-based writing, and to offer new editors and designers training in the craft—and I pledged that we would make a new effort to widen our scope, that we would always ask, Whose voices are we missing in writing of place?

On this twentieth anniversary, I’m rededicating us to that twofold mission and that question, and to our more recent commitment to publish work that helps us all to understand and engage with and transform the climate crisis.

On this twentieth anniversary, I’m rededicating us to that twofold mission and that question, and to our more recent commitment to publish work that helps us all to understand and engage with and transform the climate crisis. In 2005, the year of Ecotone’s founding, the global annual temperature for land and oceans was 1.04 degrees Fahrenheit above the twentieth-century average, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. In 2025—the third-warmest year since 1850, when global recordkeeping began—the global annual temperature was 2.11 degrees Fahrenheit above that average.

“The science is clear,” the United Nations writes on its Climate Action site, citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “To avert the worst impacts of climate change and preserve a livable planet, global warming needs to be limited as much as possible and as a matter of urgency.”

What can a literary magazine do to support this literally vital goal? We will keep asking and answering this question. With our 2021 Climate Issue, with our Climate Annotations department, which debuted in that issue, and with our subsequent calls for work, we have sought writing and art that illuminate the climate crisis—keeping it in memory, helping us understand it better, offering ways to encompass it with our imaginations and then take action. These annotations are not prescriptive; they do not berate readers or seek to cause more mental suffering than the crisis has already incurred. Rather, they represent the thought-work and heart-work that each of their authors undertakes in response to a piece of climate science. Beginning with excerpts from IPCC reports and other important sources, writers share how they have grappled with these issues, inspiring us to do the same in the ways that we’re best equipped to. For this issue we have a bouquet, a cornucopia, a feast of such annotations—from contributors including Kathryn Miles, J. Drew Lanham, and Belle Boggs, who also brings an essay from Catcuce Tiger, now a seventh grader in Cherokee, North Carolina, who shares with us his particular connection to place.

Our fiction this issue, which also draws on the climate crisis, comes from two beloved contributors to the magazine and masters of the speculative, Nick Fuller Googins and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri. Their stories, I reckon, will make you smile or break your heart or both.

Nearly all the poems here come from another collection of work, which we’ve been enjoying of late. Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, was released in 2025, and we’re sharing a selection of poems from it in these pages, including writers new to Ecotone as well as some longtime contributors. If you like what you find here, be sure to check out the anthology!

We are particularly happy to share a poem from poet and past contributor Martha Silano, whose fierce and often funny poems of place and relationship we have long loved, and who died last year, two years after a diagnosis of ALS. We miss Martha’s voice and want as many people as possible to hear her words.

In honor of this twentieth anniversary, we’re also debuting a new From the Archives series, in which we’ll reprint work from the magazine’s past. Three fantastic examples kick off the series—a poem of looking back from Camille T. Dungy, an eerily relevant essay from Lia Purpura, and an elemental sequence from Rajiv Mohabir.

And for the first time ever, we’ve printed two covers, one for subscribers in springy green and deep blue, and one dressed up for the newsstand in black and gold.

Finally—or first, really—our cover. Readers of our tenth-anniversary publication, An Ecotone Almanac, will know that I like to feature the printing and type collections of specific letterpress shops on our covers. This issue’s bold typographic cover, designed by art director Michael Ramos, was set and printed by Ben Blount, in wood type from his studio in Evanston, Illinois. And for the first time ever, we’ve printed two covers, one for subscribers in springy green and deep blue, and one dressed up for the newsstand in black and gold.

Blount’s work is also our interior art feature—a set of posters from the pandemic era that resonate newly in this moment. It’s hard to choose a favorite, but I love the green type and, of course, the message of Love Thy Neighbor. That green, for us, expands the traditional interpretation of the phrase to include all our neighbors—the whole more-than-human world along with all the people we live near.

With each issue of this magazine we make I have more thanks than there is room to say, but it feels fitting, this issue, to enunciate more of them than usual.

Thank you to the many students in UNCW’s MFA program—near two hundred, if my math is correct—who have dedicated their time and attention to the magazine over the past twenty years. Much has changed, many have come and graduated and gone, but this team’s devotion to the work we do and the writers we publish, in my experience, has never flagged.

It’s the time of year when we bid farewell to the student editors who have spent some of their precious hours in the program working on the magazine.

It’s the time of year when we bid farewell to the student editors who have spent some of their precious hours in the program working on the magazine. Sara Byrnes served for two years as Ecotone’s graduate assistant and managing editor—her skill at everything from acquiring work to social-media campaigns, and her good cheer, will be much missed. Marah Hoffman, nonfiction editor, acquired an astonishing number of fantastic essays for our upcoming issues, editing several of them with care. Elliot Komisar, poetry editor, also served this semester as a graduate assistant and assistant managing editor; their eye for a good poem, and for a good edit of that poem, is unique in its keenness and compassion. Aslan Gossett, poetry editor, led the selection of the poetry for this issue and others with wit and joy. And Justine Payton, nonfiction editor, devoted great energy to researching and acquiring many of the climate annotations in this issue. To them and to departing design team members Nicole Callahan and Barbara Yauss, we say, thank you, and safe travels!

Thank you to the UNC Wilmington Department of Creative Writing, which saw its own need for a graduate-supported literary magazine two decades ago, and proceeded to make it ever more possible for this one to exist. Thanks to our founding editors, David Gessner, Kimi Faxon Hemingway, and Heather Wilson, and to the faculty members who have worked on the magazine over the years, including Michelle Donahue, Michael Ramos, Emily Smith, Beth Staples, Sophia Stid, and Caitlin Taylor. In another first for this issue, Kimi has co­written our Out of Place column alongside David—it’s a treat to have her voice as part of these pages again.

Thank you to Megan Hubbard, who has managed the magazine’s financial transactions for almost its entire life, and to Siobahn Daugherty, who ensures that our subscribers and contributors are well taken care of.

Thanks to the many writers who have sent us work to read, sometimes repeatedly, over the years. We know it’s an act of faith each time, and we are so glad that you think of us. And thank you to the more than nine hundred writers who’ve collaborated with us in the editorial process and shared their work in our pages. It is an honor and a pleasure to share your words with the world.

Alongside uncertainties and traumas too numerous to count, alongside ecological violence both specific to our ecoregion and widespread, alongside a river and an ocean whose rights, like those of the humans who love them, are being eroded but who continue to support us and to astound us with their richness and beauty, alongside our readers, whom we treasure, alongside the writers who send us work, whom we appreciate, alongside our contributors, whom we celebrate, the Ecotone team carries out the work of making a magazine. It’s one thing to do, in the face of it all. Often it’s a pretty great time.

Here’s to another twenty years, one in which the climate crisis is countered, as Boggs suggests in her Climate Annotation, by specific, widespread, creative varieties of climate resilience. And by what makes a magazine and a planet thrive: love.

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