Dear readers,
We hope you are keeping well and safe. As we navigate the new reality of the coronavirus pandemic, we are following advice from the CDC, the state of North Carolina, and UNC Wilmington, and Ecotone’s staff are working from home to bring you new writing and art of place. In the hope of mitigating a little of the stress and strangeness of this time, beginning this week, we are temporarily lowering our paywall. Our recent issues, including the Love Issue, are now free to read online. We’ll keep them that way for at least two months.
The Love Issue explores love in its messiest, most magical, most taken-for-granted permutations, with stories and essays from Silas House, Jennifer and Amanda Tseng, and Susan McCarty, and lots and lots of poems in fourteen-line forms, from writers including A. E. Stallings, Amit Majmudar, and Ashley M. Jones. Shown here is a hanky by Andrea Narno from our art feature for the issue, the Queer Ecology Hanky Project. Don’t miss it!
You can also check out issue 27, featuring three stories that were finalists for the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction; the Body Issue, with two essays since published in Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism, from Lookout Books; and issue 25, which is now sold out in print.
If you’re a teacher and are moving courses online, please feel free to share the work in these issues with your students, and to make use of the guides posted as part of our Teach Ecotone initiative. More lesson plans and prompts are soon to come!
We are able to send most orders, albeit a bit more slowly than usual, and are carefully following safety protocols in doing so. Visit our website to subscribe or renew for yourself or a friend, and we’ll send the Love Issue along. Inside each copy you’ll find a fold-up fortune teller, designed for us by cover artist Vanessa Adams. (Some things are best in print, after all.)
We hope the writing and art in these recent issues will provide some comfort and diversion.
Happy reading, everyone, and take care.
Anna Lena Phillips Bell
and the Ecotone team