All posts tagged: Essay

Pushcart Prize 47

Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses

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Some personal writing news to cap off 2022: I’m honoured to have the title essay of my upcoming collection, “Utter, Earth”, published in the latest Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses. The series has been published every year since 1976 and is “is the most honored literary project in America – including Highest Honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.” “A state-of-the-art, essential report on current literary trends.” Kirkus Reviews One of my favourite perks about being part of this project is that going forward, I’ll get to nominate works I love for inclusion in future editions. Essays, short stories, poetry: Here’s some extra motivation to seek out some great ones in 2023!

Sergeant Major Fish Shoal

A School is a Type of Shoal, wildness journal

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My latest essay is part of issue 30 of wildness, a UK-based online journal featuring work from both established and emerging writers that embraces the mysteries of the self and the outside world. Come for the fish shoals, stay for the bird flocks and the many things related or distant in this piece about community, contact, and communion: “…While to shoal is to be social, which permits some degree of ragtag in makeup and disposition, to school is to sweep in unison together, to glint in the faces of would-be-foes together, dazzling the world with coherence. This level of coordination demands constant vigilance, should, for example, a silver sprat take its eyes off its nearest compatriot, it may find itself suddenly not schooling at all but struck against kin and stricken from the collective, beyond which sailfish patrolling for truants may herd it off with sails and speed and general stealthiness. If enough eyes are corralled away, the entire school can lose its accreditation, ceasing to possess those emergent qualities afforded with being legion, like …

Lesser Short Nosed Fruit Bat Newborn

Yes, You can Leave The Hospital Without Naming Your Baby

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Some publication news: I’m super honoured to have a piece of creative nonfiction up at the latest issue of The Willowherb Review, a fantastic UK-based publication focused on providing a platform for nature writing from writers of colour. Some of you might recall that I also had another piece titled El Lugar de Los Sueños in Willowherb last year. Instead of another personal meditation, I wanted to embrace a completely opposite style. Whimsy fuels this slightly manic and ridiculous piece’s attempt to jam as many creatures into a single work (29 at last count). The conceit around names and naming is an attempt to honour those we share this planet with, those who have since passed, and those still in the process of discovering themselves through living. Here’s an excerpt: “…In the wild reaches even less care is taken in the naming process. This is more understandable given that there are so many mushrooms and so many weevils, and everything adjacent to groups or branching from clades deserves a station within life’s grand catalogue. Blurry-eyed taxonomists …

Southern White Rhino

Second Best is Best, Gulf Coast Online

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I’m particularly excited to announce that a new essay published online over at Gulf Coast, a journal co-founded by one of my favourite writers, Donald Barthelme. “Second Best is Best” is one in a collection I’m working on where I try to cram as many creatures and entities into a single piece of prose as possible and still have it be semi-coherent. Inspired by the whimsical journeys of Amy Leach’s Things That Are and the mental leaps in so much of Italo Calvino’s work (both writers I’ve written about in Ekostories), I wanted to craft something that highlights the riotous and irrepressible nature of this planet and its inhabitants, even as we live through tumultuous times. Here’s a quote: “Sometimes being at the top isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, like if you were declared the world’s tallest mountain one day by a Bengali mathematician and then named for a British surveyor you will never meet. The natural outcome of this is that tourists will start clambering over you, ascending your north and …

Isla San Francisquito

The Willowherb Review: El Lugar de Los Sueños

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I’m pleased to have a new essay out in the latest issue of The Willowherb Review, a publication celebrating nature writing from emerging and established writers of colour: “Why ‘Willowherb’? Chamaenerion angustifolium, commonly known as rosebay willowherb or fireweed, is a plant that thrives on disturbed ground. Its seeds do well when transported to new and difficult terrain, so some—not us—may call it a weed.”  About The Willowherb Review This issue explores the theme of habitation: What does it mean to inhabit a space? El Lugar de Los Sueños strives to weave natural history and personal meditation of one place, La Paz and the surrounding Gulf of California, into a coherent whole, mimicking the holistic stylings of The Log of the Sea of Cortez, the muse text that lies at the heart of the piece (and one I’ve explored before here on Ekostories). I was keen to revisit a location from a few years back, to retrace and revive the words of a beloved work, and also to form a new reality of a space I …