Emergence Magazine – Literary Hub

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee on Remembering Earth

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:02:59 +0000

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

We have forgotten the covenant of primordial love and reciprocal care with the Earth that existed from the beginning in favor of a story that casts humans as the center of the cosmos. As the fallout of this narrative culminates in the unprecedented transformation of our outer landscapes, our inner landscapes are also shifting in ways that demand our attention.

Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2023, this talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks to the possibility of profound inner transformation amid the great changes engulfing the Earth. Exploring the need to step away from a humancentric paradigm and towards a remembrance of the Earth as a divine being, Emmanuel asks: As so much falls away, what can we offer to the Earth? How can we place Earth back at the center of the story? What opens when love once again becomes present between us?

Read the transcript.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an Emmy- and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker and a Sufi teacher. His films include: Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, The Atomic Tree, Counter Mapping, Marie’s Dictionary, and Elemental. His films have been screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum, and featured on PBS POV, National Geographic, and New York Times Op-Docs. He is the founder and executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

A Path Older Than Memory

Emergence Magazine — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 09:02:31 +0000

In this conversation, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Salopek, who is a decade into a remarkable journey retracing, on foot, the migration pathway taken by the first humans out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Speaking to us from the Liaoning province in northeastern China, Paul shares how moving at three miles per hour has deepened his personal relationship to time. As he becomes attuned to what he terms “sacramental time,” the boundaries between the physical and metaphysical begin to blur into an expansive experience of timelessness.

Read the transcript.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Paul Salopek is an award-winning journalist who is currently on a years-long journey retracing the path of the earliest Homo sapiens on foot from the Horn of Africa toward the tip of South America. Paul has been recognized with two Pulitzer Prizes, the George Polk Award, the National Press Club Award, and the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage in Journalism, and his foreign correspondence has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The American Scholar. He has been a McGraw Visiting Professor at Princeton University and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh on How Motherhood Taught Her About Mammalhood

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 09:06:36 +0000

In this narrated essay, Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood bring her into an emerging realization of her own mammalhood. When she encounters her animal self, deeply embedded in the ecosystems around her, it transforms everything: her sense of home and safety; what it means to feel, to act, to care through the ancient, feral knowledge of instinct. Listening for teachings from the Earth, Kerri feels her way through the anguish and tenderness of raising a child in a burning and breaking—and beautiful—world.

Read this essay.

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Kerri ní Dochartaigh is the author of Thin Places, winner of the Butler Literary Award and shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Born in Derry-Londonderry, at the border between the North and South of Ireland, she has written for The Guardian, The Irish Times, BBC, Winter Papers, and others. Her latest book is Cacophony of Bone.

Duri Baek is an artist from South Korea, whose paintings reflect the light in nature. Her work has been exhibited at galleries throughout Seoul and has appeared in publications such as Noema Magazine. Her solo exhibitions include Cheon-yi, A Light Collector, and Photosynthesis.

Hear a New Short Story from Laia Jufresa

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 09:04:59 +0000

This week, we share a short story by Mexican author Laia Jufresa, translated by Sophie Hughes, that imagines the chaos of a world ravaged and divided by climate change. In “Be Dammed,” thousands of climate refugees find themselves forming settlements on boats as they wait endlessly to cross a heavily guarded border in pursuit of safety. One woman, tasked with holding prayers for their salvation, negotiates the entanglement of faith and politics as she considers who, or what, truly has the power to change their circumstances.

Read this short story.

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Laia Jufresa was born in Mexico City and grew up in the cloud forest of Veracruz and Paris. She is the author of El Esquinista and Umami. In 2017 she was named one of the Bogotá39, the thirty-nine most promising young writers in Latin America. Her fiction has appeared in Vogue, Words Without Borders, and McSweeney’s, and her nonfiction in El País, Netflix, and BBC Radio.

Sophie Hughes has translated over twenty books by Spanish and Latin American writers, including Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán, José Revueltas, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times and is the recipient of the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize.

Juan Bernabeu is an artist and illustrator trained in Valencia, Berlin, and Italy. He communicates through line and drawing, using patterns and color to bring images to life. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, This American Life, and elsewhere.

Anna Badkhen on Imprints of the Past

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 08:01:04 +0000

What can we learn from imprints in the earth about the ancient presences that left them behind? Acclaimed author Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the earth from the near and distant past, from the buffalo wallows of North America to the treasure-hiding game sekretiki she played as a child, from the histories held in whale earwax to the map of our human becoming in the Bouri Peninsula of modern-day Ethiopia. Reading each of these imprints as a kind of porthole—a window into memory, with all the retellings and reinterpretations characteristic of our messy, continual search for meaning—Anna wonders what lineage of impressions we might leave for the future.

Read this essay.

Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES.

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Anna Badkhen is the author of seven books, most recently Bright Unbearable Reality, which was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award and for the 2023 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. Her essays have appeared in New York Review of Books, Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Orion, and The New York Times. Anna was born in the Soviet Union and is a US citizen.

Studio Airport is Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters. Together with a small team of creatives, they run a design practice based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The studio has been recognized with international awards for projects such as Hart Island Project (New York), Amsterdam Art Council, and Greenpeace International.

A Short Story from Masatsugu Ono and Emergence Magazine

Emergence Magazine — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:00:02 +0000

In this short story by Japanese author Masatsugu Ono, translated and narrated by Sam Malissa, a woman and her young son move to an abandoned seaside village along Japan’s eastern coast, where they’re met by the well-meaning attention of its curious last inhabitants and their wise old dog. As a typhoon rises from the sea, reality, memory, and illusion begin to collapse into one another—and the pair find themselves increasingly inseparable from the mysterious landscape.

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Masatsugu Ono is an author, translator, and professor of literature at Rikkyo University. His works include Boat on a Choppy Bay, which won him the Mishima Yukio Prize, and A Prayer Nine Years Ago, winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest literary honor. His translations include Marie NDiaye’s Rosie Carpe, and Edouard Glissant’s Introduction to the Poetics of Diversity.

Sam Malissa holds a PhD in Japanese literature from Yale University. His translation of The End of the Moment We Had by Toshiki Okada was featured in The New York Times. Other translations include Bullet Train and Three Assassins, by Kotaro Isaka, and short fiction by Shun Medoruma, Kyohei Sakaguchi, and Hideo Furukawa.

Natalie Rose Richardson on Birdwatching and Attention

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:04:24 +0000

In this week’s essay, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to experience a quality of attention that birdwatching can cultivate. Learning from Chicago historian Sherry Williams, who has piloted programs exploring the relationship between bird migration and the Great Migration, and J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and poet whose work engages confluences of race, place, and nature, Natalie follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina that brings the practice of birdwatching together with her own layered history. In landscapes both new and familiar, she shows us what’s possible when we bear witness with eyes wide open.

Read this essay.

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Natalie Rose Richardson was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. Her poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, Brevity, Orion Magazine, Arts & Letters, The London Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She has received awards, residencies, or fellowships from Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Foundation, The Newberry Library, The Luminarts Foundation, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the National Student Poets Program, among others. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize and a Best New Poets nominee.

Stephanie Krzywonos on Re-imagining Antarctica

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:00:45 +0000

Visiting the Ross Ice Shelf across several seasons, Stephanie Kryzwonos interrogates the heroic narratives of male exploration and conquest—written almost entirely by white men—that gender the land through feminine tropes. Might these characterizations, borne of a colonizing hunger to conquer and subdue, say more about the culture they come from than about the land they describe? What would happen, Stephanie asks, if we moved beyond fantasies and savior complexes, and instead approached Antarctica as a living place with agency?

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Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

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Stephanie Krzywonos is a Xicana nonfiction writer. Her forthcoming debut book is Ice Folx, an intersectional memoir set in the Antarctic underworld. She has written about her experiences on “the Ice” for Sierra Magazine, Ofrenda Magazine, The Willowherb Review, Kosmos Journal, The Dark Mountain Project, The Behemoth, and The Antarctic Sun.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee on Stepping into the Liminal

Emergence Magazine — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:13:35 +0000

When we are both left with the fragments of a dying world and given glimpses of an emerging one; when there is so much beauty and destruction to be witnessed, how can we find our bearings? In this talk, given at Emergence’s recent Shifting Landscapes retreat held at Sharpham Trust in Devon, England, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee offers a frame for how we might navigate our current moment of unprecedented transition and transformation. Speaking to what can take root when we truly open ourselves to grief, love, and ultimately kinship with the living world, he urges us to step into the liminal—the space between worlds—to recognize an invitation into new ways of being.

Read the transcript.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an Emmy and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker and a Sufi teacher. His films include: Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, The Atomic Tree, Counter Mapping, Marie’s Dictionary, and Elemental. His films have been screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum, and featured on PBS POV, National Geographic, and New York Times Op-Docs. He is the founder and executive editor of Emergence Magazine

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder on How Words Shape Our World

Emergence Magazine — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 08:07:36 +0000

How do words shape our world? In this week’s narrated essay, writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder visits the wind-sculpted dunes of Nebraska’s Sandhills, considering the prophecies that collided across the American Great Plains in the nineteenth century. Tracing the histories of violence, conquest, and degradation that have played out there, Chelsea locates the points at which human and wilderness were separated. Wondering what words, what prophetic voices are needed to guide us out of an entrenched dualism, she calls us to remember that we have always been intimately linked with the cycles of our ecosystems.

Read this essay on our website.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is a writer based in northern New England whose work explores the human relationship to place. Her essays have been featured in Crannóg Magazine, Inhabiting the Anthropocene, and EcoTheo Review. Her forthcoming book is Rebirth: Mothering Through Ecological Collapse.

Russel Albert Daniels (Diné and Ho-Chunk descent) is a documentary photographer based in Utah whose work stands in the currents of art, reportage, and decolonization. Daniels aims to bring visibility to Native American and underserved communities. His projects explore identity, sense of place, and history.