a ravenous desire
for Raisinets.
Poems by Carolyn Welch
Excerpted from California Poems (Moon Willow Press, 2015)
1. Bioluminescence
Big Sur's night glow
Surprises feet in soft whale colors
We linger in blue-green foam,
Thinking it will feel different,
Softer than usual,
But the waves touch us with the same fingers
I saw it once down in San Juan,
The translucent colors crushing water
In their soft jelly mouths.
Up in Big Sur it is rarer, and far below
In the neon sea, blue elves dart
In black water mirages
For a few more years.
2. Wildlife
Ashes are spirits escaping
From the Hades of red Santiago.
They float to my parking lot,
Cling to windshields, suffering.
A deer poses for the camera,
In the arms of a fireman in a yellow suit.
A forest dies in black yawns.
3. Murrelet Song
Marvels in the old growth
Marbles in the pond
He is going down
Down to whiskey town
Where the old men go to die
Biographies
John Atcheson is the author of A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller, and Book One of The Earth Trilogy, which traces a small group's attempt to deal with global warming over the course of fifty years. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, and other major newspapers. He is a frequent and popular contributor to CommonDreams. He has backpacked in some of the most remote areas in North America and is trained in wilderness survival.
Gabriella Brand's short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Room Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, StepAway, Culinate, 3 Elements Review, and Switched-On Guggenheim. She divides her time between the Eastern Townships of Quebec and Connecticut, where she teaches foreign languages. She travels widely, mostly on foot.
Paul Collins lives in Bristol, United Kingdom. After studying chemistry and oceanography, he has spent nearly 20 years as an environmental lawyer. Paul tries to enjoy running and loves gardening.
M.E. Cooper is an undergraduate in English (Creative Writing) and is pursuing a minor in Environmental Science at a local university in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She juggles two part-time jobs: one at a specialized grocery store, the other at LUSH Cosmetics. She shares a house with two of her best friends and a three-legged feline named Kit-Cat. She has also helped conservation efforts for Leatherback sea turtles in Costa Rica. She's had poems and fiction published in the scholarly magazine The Sullivan and plans to write herself into a cozy author life.
Conor Corderoy was born in England in 1957. He spent his childhood on Formentera, the smallest of the Balearic Islands. He spent his teens in Cordoba, southern Spain, where he got his first job at age sixteen, breaking in wild horses. He now divides his time between England and Spain. He is an Incorporated Linguist, a barrister, a psychologist and a Master Practitioner of NLP. He has published three novels.
Charlene D'Avanzo is an award-winning environmental educator and marine ecologist who taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts for 35 years. She won the 2015 Mystery Writers of America McCloy prize for new writers. The first book in her Oceanography Mystery series, Cold Blood, Hot Sea, will be published by Torrey House Press in May 2016. An avid seakayaker, she lives in Yarmouth, Maine.
Michael Donoghue mostly lives in his head, but resides in Vancouver, Canada. His stories have appeared in various anthologies, literary journals, and sci-fi magazines. Michael works in healthcare, where he spends much of his time preoccupied with hand-washing. He can be found on twitter @mpdonoghue.
JoeAnn Hart is the author of the eco-novel Float, a dark satire that combines conceptual art, marital woes, and the fishing industry with plastics in the ocean. Float was published in 2013 by Ashland Creek, an environmentally aware press in Oregon. Hart lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, America's oldest seaport, where fishing regulations, the health of the ocean, and the natural beauty of the world are daily topics of conversation. She is also the author of the novel Addled (Little, Brown 2007), a social satire that intertwines animal rights with the politics of food. Her essays, articles, and short fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals and national publications, and she is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe Magazine. Her work has won a number of awards, including the PEN New England Discovery Award in Fiction.
Janis Hindman is a writer and a teacher of French and English. She has also worked in environmental education. She has lived on three continents and feels that's quite sufficient, although should the opportunity to live in Antarctica arise, she'd give it a thorough pondering. Janis usually writes about Huguenots and Celts, with a sprinkling of Valkyries—quite a heavy sprinkling—so speculative fiction is a glorious meander along a slightly different creative pathway.
Clara Hume's novel Back to the Garden was published in the autumn of 2013 and later was discussed at Dissent Magazine as part of an emerging genre of climate change novels. She also has a short story series, Lost Ages, which reconciles mythological stories with our modern world. Clara writes under a pen name. Her favorite past-times are hanging out with friends and family in the great outdoors, drinking red wine under the stars, and running.
Stephan Malone works at a local ICU in Cape Coral, Florida. His hobbies include 15-30 mile bicycle rides, night/pre-dawn rides in particular, computer repair, and writing. He is the author of Polar City Dreaming (2012, Sunbury Press, futurist eco-non-fiction) and Lulu and the Manatee (2014, KDP Publishing, children's story, fiction). He was also awarded "honorable mention" (top ten stories out of over a thousand entries) for a Halo science fiction short story contest back in 2006. His solarpunk story "Windrunner" was published in The J.J. Outré Review in 2015.
Rachel May coordinates sustainability education at Syracuse University, running faculty development projects and workshops for students on a wide range of topics. Recently she has been teaching a zine-making class called Climatopia, in which students develop imaginary scenarios for real progress on climate change. This story grew out of that project. Rachel is a grateful member of the Downtown Writers Center at the Syracuse YMCA and of the Armory Square Playhouse, which produced a reading of her first full-length play last year.
JL Morin: Novelist and rooftop farmer, JL wrote her Japan novel Sazzae as her thesis at Harvard. It was a Gold medalist in the eLit Book Awards and a Living Now Book Award winner. She is the author of USA Best Book Awards finalist Travelling Light and Occupy's first bestselling novel Trading Dreams. Her novel Nature's Confession is a LitPick 5-Star Review Award winner. Adjunct faculty at Boston University, JL Morin writes for the Huffington Post and Library Journal, and has published in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard Yisei, Detroit News, Agence France-Presse, Cyprus Weekly, European Daily, Livonia Observer Eccentric Newspapers, Harvard Crimson, and more.
Christopher Rutenber is a freelance writer living in rural Michigan. When not writing, he spends his time birding and exploring the nearby trails. Twitter: @CJRTimeTraveler
Robert Sassor combines his twin passions for sustainability and creative writing as a senior director at Metropolitan Group, a social change agency headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Following his years as an English major at Willamette University, Rob conducted research and ghostwrote about a range of social and environmental issues in Washington, D.C., contributing to more than 150 works and two books. Rob's most affecting lessons about conservation occurred in western Tanzania, where he served as the Conservation Action Plan Coordinator for the Jane Goodall Institute. In this role, Rob led a team of eight to develop the conservation plan for the greater Gombe ecosystem and its famous chimpanzees. More recently, Rob assessed the
efficacy of negative versus positive messages in communicating and fundraising for nature conservation, which served as the research component for a Masters in Conservation Leadership at the University of Cambridge.
Anneliese Schutlz: A 2014 Pushcart Prize nominee and former Bread Loaf Scholar, Anneliese has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Winner of the 2013 Meringoff Fiction Award and the Enizagam Literary Award in Fiction, she has been published in Enizagam, the Toronto Star and Literary Imagination, and recognized by New York Stories, Glimmer Train, Ruminate, Nowhere, and the Surrey International Writers' Conference. The first title in her YA climate fiction series, Distant Dream, reached the second round in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough YA Novel Awards, won the 2013 Good Read Novel Competition at A Woman's Write, and is currently under consideration by several agents. Twitter: @anneliesenow
Stephen Siperstein is a poet, cultural scholar, and environmental educator. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Oregon and is completing his dissertation on climate change narratives and U.S. environmental literature. He is the editor of Teaching Climate Change in the Environmental Humanities (forthcoming from Routledge), with Shane Hall and Stephanie LeMenager, and he also directs the Climate Stories Project, an online forum for individuals and communities to share their everyday personal stories about climate change (http://www.climatestoriesproject.org/). His poetry has appeared most recently in saltfront, Poecology, and ISLE, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter @ssiperstein.
Craig Spence is Executive Director with theFederation of BC Writers. Writing and storytelling in one form or another is his passion. He has pursued his vocation as a novelist, journalist, and communications specialist through various phases of his life. He is now giving himself more time to be a personal narrator (or memoirist) and creative writer.
Carolyn Welch, a native Californian, has written over a decade of poetry that explores the Californian surf, mountains, desert, and people. A technical writer, Carolyn dabbles on the side with creativity that needs an outlet, inspired by her observations of nature. Carolyn's poems are unique, musical, and refreshing, from her anatomizing the city of Los Angeles to revitalizing the San Francisco Renaissance and beat poets. Her poem "Sugar Shack" was previously posted at Jack Magazine. Moon Willow Press published her recent collection California Poems.
Keith Wilkinson is an educator, editor, and poet and has published work in a number of literary journals and chapbooks and on his blog. The Sea Wall at Vancuuver Shoal is the first in a series of stories set in a post-apocalyptic world resulting from dramatic climate change. "Choosing a post-apocalyptic setting", Keith says, "allows me to bypass the depressing and psychologically debilitating reality of our current 21st century climate circumstances and focus instead on hopeful possibilities that could emerge in a future after what eco-spiritualist Joanna Macy has termed "The Great Turning," a time when people continue their struggles toward ethical and personal fulfillment in a radically different physical and social environment."The series of stories begins 1,000 years in the future with the youthful Shmuul and Tanka on the shoals ofOld Vancuuver, nearAntrim Sangha (not far from Burnaby's Central Park), and the ruins of theShangri La Glittercast, where the downtown ofOld Vancuuver used to be.
Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate Page 24
