{"id":24339,"date":"2013-12-05T13:15:45","date_gmt":"2013-12-05T19:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=24339"},"modified":"2025-10-29T19:10:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T02:10:16","slug":"saltfront-new-literary-journal-explores-human-habitats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/saltfront-new-literary-journal-explores-human-habitats\/","title":{"rendered":"Saltfront: New Literary Journal Explores Human Habit(at)s"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"saltfront_blog\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is more than one definition of\u00a0saltfront<\/em>\u00a0but the one adopted by the new Utah-based literary journal which carries the term as its name is this:\u00a0an entrance to a non-discrete zone between defined ecosystems<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Saltfront<\/em>, which debuted in September, is in fact a venture that finds its sense of literary place \u201cin-between\u201d systems, ecological and otherwise. Its submission guidelines, termed \u201cbearings and positions,\u201d attempts nothing less than a sea-change of the lexicon, the approach and the meanings of environmental writing and activism. Michael McLane, one of the founding editors, explains that the journal, which grew out of the work of graduate students in the University of Utah\u2019s Environmental Humanities program, is \u201ca reaction to an unsatisfactory discourse\u201d in old school environmentalism epitomized by activist organizations like the Sierra Club and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). The bi-annual aspires to \u201cstories,\u201d says McLane, \u201cof how people are living within these [ecological] changes\u2026trying to remember the human element in all of this not just the catastrophe we\u2019ve seen but that we are a creative and adaptive [species] through it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moving beyond conservation, traditional notions of \u201cwilderness\u201d preservation and the bio-regionalism of the revered novelist, eco-activist and farmer Wendell Berry, the editors of\u00a0saltfront\u00a0<\/em>are, according to McLane, looking more to the notion of \u201cembodiment rather than the environment.\u201d The hope is that this bias for cultivating (and mining) the senses will propel the environmental conversation into a re-negotiation and re-navigation of what is essentially a new world.<\/p>\n

The antidote to what sounds like a project spawned in a seminar of humanities graduate students on high doses of caffeine is the selections themselves, most of which, in the first issue, are from the pens of local writers. Celebrated environmental author\u00a0 and godmother of the UofU Program Terry Tempest Williams makes an appearance with her adopted Rwandan son Louis Gakumba in \u201cForamen\u201d\u2014reportage and personal reflections by both on two different genocide memorials, one in Kigali, Rwanda and the other on the Washington DC mall. Another short piece is included by the team\u2019s husband\/father Brooke Williams. More reporting\u2014really mapping\u2014in the form of poetry by Robin Rothfeder details \u201cTar Sands Country as Seen from Outer Space.\u201d There is even a section of haiku.<\/p>\n

One standout work is \u201cPostcards from Fire,\u201d a suite of downwinder prose poems by McLane himself addressed to his mother (\u201cYour thyroid will be quickly forgotten. There will be pills, but that is charted territory\u201d). Another is the compelling, extended novel excerpt from another contributing editor Eric Robertson (\u201cRebecca birthed every ewe in that herd. She was a young woman who had never been at a mother\u2019s breast, never lulled to sleep, never picked up, only put down.\u201d) Robertson is arguably the visionary behind\u00a0saltfront<\/em>\u2019s stated intentions and the journal\u2019s catchy tagline: \u201cstudies in human habit(at).\u201d Among others represented are Maximilian Werner, Jeff Metcalf, Kelsey Sather and Annie Gilliland.<\/p>\n

A new journal of this kind, themed as it is, (though, admittedly, somehow expansively nonetheless) begs the question of just how literary as opposed to academic\u00a0saltfront<\/em>\u00a0will end up being. And too, just how revolutionary will\u00a0saltfront<\/em>\u00a0be with its stated impulse, according to McLane, toward eco-lit that is animated by social justice? \u201cWe are deeply enmeshed,\u201d he says, \u201cin that place between the Think Globally\/Act Locally movement and the idea that nothing is really local anymore, [especially] the structure of markets, etc.\u201d In other words, he seems to be saying, humans matter. There is no ethic in this tribe to return to some pristine earth devoid of the species that has brought us both the Dalai Lama and Justin Bieber.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re completely uninterested in the separation between humans and nature,\u201d says McLane. \u201cThat duality isn\u2019t useful anymore.\u201d With this compass, the journal intends to reach new audiences, though, he admits, readers will still see some of the old jargon. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to determine [just how much].\u201d<\/p>\n

Saltfront<\/em>\u2019s second issue, to be released in April, will feature a range of writers that extend far beyond the Great Basin. Early pieces that have been accepted include meditations on the tar sands of Canada to, again, Rwanda. And what about the new audiences for this new kind of eco-lit? Who are they? McLane recalls a turning-point class that many of his fellow-students-turned-editorial-contributors had with Tempest Williams at the U. One day they were watching a film about a 16-year old kid from Oakland, California who was narrating what it was like to live in a neighborhood rife with the environmental effects of hair product manufacturers and dry cleaners, and it occurred to the class, why should this individual care about the environmental movement as (then) currently constituted? \u201cRich white people want to protect wilderness,\u201d the narrator says, \u201cbut they don\u2019t realize what kind of pollution we all live with every day, virtually everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

saltfront<\/em><\/strong>\u2019s Bearings and Positions<\/strong>
\n* \u00a0We aspire to creative lives amidst the shared realities of death, failure, fragment,\u00a0uncertainty, mediocrity, and\u00a0birth.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0We support stories of survival and meaning rooted in dirt and grass, bone and flesh.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0We choose to build our homes and stories as if in a hammock\u2014anchored but free to move within a confident suspension.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0For now, we set aside conventional uses of the terms \u201cnature,\u201d \u201cwilderness,\u201d and\u00a0\u201denvironment.\u201d<\/p>\n

* \u00a0We adopt a pragmatic idealism in order to confront future challenges and provoke the\u00a0youth.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0We view unchecked growth of all kinds as chronic forms of social and cultural malnutrition.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0We seek direct mediation through our senses, in order to reorient, reimagine,\u00a0and rehabilitate\u00a0our relationships.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0We imagine body, sky, and earth as a single landscape. \u00a0Further contamination of place is not an\u00a0option.
\n———————–<\/p>\n

saltfront<\/em>\u00a0is published in September and April and is available in print and PDF format. You can order it online at\u00a0Lulu.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n