and found a universe of life.

THE DRY COUNTRY IS fond of yellow as its accent color. The landscape primarily clothes itself in tones of earthy strata and the soft neutrals of grassland, but yellow is always part of the ensemble, ...

When we write about landscapes we know well and inhabit, it is easy to stop truly seeing and fall into habits surrounding language, image, and form. When this happens, poets need to find ways to ...

The genre of environmental writing has been expanding in recent years.

Many of us have enjoyed long journeys (expeditions, treks) that involve radical changes of setting and habit. Much excellent writing has come out of this type of movement (think Robert Macfarlane, ...

Meditations on time and rebellion against the straight line ...

FOR YEARS, when looking for a bedtime book to read with my young children, I inevitably drifted toward the Jon Klassen section of the shelf. It didn’t matter if we were reading about missing hats, ...

We like to imagine—in our humanness—waves as traveling water bodies. But that isn’t quite accurate. Waves are kinetic energy from vibrating water particles interacting through seawater. The particles ...

To depict a loveless and macabre world—a world of the scarecrow acting as the Lord of blood-thirsty crows, of the harridan decked out as a beauty queen . . . a world of debased flesh and servile ...

LAKE SUPERIOR ON A CALM DAY has a depth clarity of over a hundred feet. In shallow waters, boulders appear to be just below the surface. Near shore, trash creates a timeline of occupation: plates, ...

I HAVEN’T BEEN SLEEPING MUCH LATELY. I’ve read that those of us who don’t sleep well might be the descendants of our ancestral night watchers—those who learned to stay awake or sleep light to keep the ...

We are proud to announce that this essay won the 2026 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for the best food-related personal essay. You can read some of Erica Berry’s thoughts on winning, and ...