Editor’s Note
How do we describe communities? As this issue began to take shape, I thought continually of the word ‘constellations’. Of the ways we relate to one another and to the more-than-human world, the ways our relationships, power dynamics, identities, and senses of belonging shift—often in tandem—as our communities grow. The pieces in this issue reach towards questions: What does care look like across species, geographies, families, places? How can we care for a world in crisis when we, too, are in need of tenderness?
The places in this issue are vastly different from one another: In ‘Ponderosa’ by Juliana Chow, we move between Oregon and the sleepless territory of early motherhood. In Chié Wach’s ‘ink’, an essay that teases the borders between nature, science, and memoir, we are taken to the very beginning of creation. In these pieces, we see threatened lakes and forests vulnerable to fire. With Lisbeth White, we meet whales in Puget Sound; and with Pragya Agarwal, find our way to the pages of old meteorological texts, and to India, and Scotland, and to rainstorms between. Cities too—in Iqbal Hussain’s ‘Ghost Town’ and Hasti’s ‘Living In’—make an appearance. Places of the material world, but also of our emotional, oneiric, remembered lives.
It feels fitting to me that these pieces had me thinking about community. How we constellate together, sometimes apart, but always in relation. This is the fifth issue of The Willowherb Review—and it will be the last. In 2018, when I embarked on this project—picking up collaborators Dasom Yang, Isabel Galleymore, and Nicole Jashapara along the way—the landscape of nature writing looked very different. It was my greatest hope that The Willowherb would be more than a journal, but a gathering place for a community, a way for writers of colour to stake their claim in a genre that so often didn’t include them. I hoped it could be a discrete intervention into the conversation. In 2018, it was not uncommon to read journalists and readers asking in op-eds or on Twitter: Where are all the nature writers of colour? All is not resolved, of course, but I think we have resolutely answered that question.
To the team—Dasom, Izzy, Nicole—I cannot thank you enough for the time you’ve devoted to this labour of love. I remain ever in awe of your editorial skill, and ever grateful for the brilliant writing you’ve helped to shape. To our writers, thank you for trusting us with your words. It has been a joy to publish them.
To date, The Willowherb Review has published the work of seventy-five writers, three translators, and five illustrators across five full issues and three special issues. We are extraordinarily thrilled to see so many go on to publish books in recent years, some of which we highlighted in Issue Four. We’ve featured Willowherb writers on festival panels at Timber Festival, Kendal Mountain Festival, and Wealden, to name a few, and grown from a Kickstarter funded by 99 backers to an Arts Council-funded space. In a matter of years, we’ve seen how the conversation around inclusion and nature writing has changed.
Most vitally: in five years, we’ve reached seventy thousand readers. To our readers: We’re grateful for every one of you. Thank you for staying with us. Our archive will remain online, and we encourage you to keep reading the writers you’ve met on these pages. Going forward, we hope you’ll remain curious enough to seek out many more.
With warmest wishes,
Jessica J. Lee
Berlin, September 2022