Hi everyone,

It’s almost the end of spring semester here in Pittsburgh, PA and I am READY for it!

I love reading with students, but I am ready to return to my own obsessions. I’ve spent this semester with my environmental imagination students reading and thinking about wonder as a methodology. How might we amplify wonder and awe instead of conflict? How might we imagine into pleasure, desire, strangeness, and curiosity rather than extinction or apocalypse?

Also, can we have fun? Fun! Fun.

Reading Simone Weil taught me so much about attention and tenderness. At the top of every notebook, I remind myself attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. The course is demanding. Wonder demands attention and an attentiveness to reading and making language. Here, I hear Robin Wall Kimmerer urging us to unlearn hurrying. What is made “natural” and “unnatural” is made, consumed, and archived. Can we be careful about it? Can the making be a gift rather than a commodity experience?

So it was with attention and generosity that we read. We tended to the way other writers and imaginations have cared for the places and environments closest to them. From Netflix’s My Octopus Teacher to Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon to Hiromi Ito’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank, tr. Jeffery Angles, my students have been considering not only how to write in the wake of these works but how to be better stewards of their own imaginations. This is what I want for The Fourth River. One of the challenges of nature writing is to not merely observe nature but to see yourself as part of an ecosystem, as part and participant in the natural world. To read yourself, maybe? To read yourself and write from that interiority and intent? Idk. As a BIPOC writer, the work of having to teach my imagination how to survive an ecosystem that repeatedly erases my identity, language, and body is not new. Reading has taught me that language is a framework structure which invites play, rupture, and a kind of delight I’ll call wonder.

Let’s cultivate wonder.

Wonder is just as much about delight as it is about the disturbance of things. If I’ve taught students anything this semester, it’s that nothing is too strange, too weird to be a part of the framework. Nature is always working towards the strange and unfamiliar, it would have to, yes? To get at a more sustainable version of itself, always reevaluating its own survival.

I’d like to CC this video of the dog vomit slime mold I recently shared with students (https://www.instagram.com/reel/CM6ASliArtT/?igshid=15ya3q0bit1ie). Whenever I think I’m being wild, I look towards insects, plants, or vultures for a new lesson. I don’t like birds, but I have to admit affection for the red bearded vulture!

This is a long way of saying reading is the first act of writing.

Thank you for reading with us.

The work in issue O.10 was submitted between July and September, an eternity ago. This year especially, it felt like the simplest tasks have been the most difficult. I am thankful to our contributors who have kept on the work of making art, writing, and reading. I’ve asked them for a note on their creative processes so that we might continue the work of teaching our imaginations some new survival. These notes are meant to provide a tiny glimpse into creative methods. Thanks to the contributors for kindly sharing with us.

The Fourth River wouldn’t be possible without the work and commitment of my colleagues and the MFA students at Chatham. Thank you for your patience and dedication. Thanks to the poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction editors: Sheila Squillante, Heather McNaugher, and Marc Nieson. Thanks to the MFA students who worked with care on this issue. Thanks to managing editor Valentine Sargent. Thanks to everyone who has found company with us.

Warmly,

Leia Penina Wilson

Editor-in-Chief