Editor’s Note
After an extraordinarily busy year for The Willowherb, I find it hard to believe we are only at our second full issue. In 2019, we embarked on a year of collaboration: working with the Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture ‘People’s Forest’ programme to commission new artists and writers on Epping Forest, taking the journal and its writers on tour to festivals at Wealden, Timber, Kendal, and most recently, with Caught By The River’s series of Social Clubs. Writers from our first issue were nominated for and then won awards: a Pushcart nomination for Jennifer Neal’s In Search of Better Skies and both Michael Malay and Nina Mingya Powles shortlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize. Nina was recently awarded that prize, and I could not be more excited to read the book she will write, titled the same as her essay here, Small Bodies of Water. Perhaps most memorably, this year saw The Willowherb awarded its third year of funding from the ever-gracious Robert Macfarlane, who contributed a portion of his Wainwright Prize winnings to support the writers we publish. Frankly, I could not have dreamed of such an exceptional second year for the journal. Thank you to all who made it possible.
Somewhere, we found time to put together this issue—Embers—to close out the year. We were overwhelmed by the quality of submissions, and as we read a theme emerged: memories, nostalgia, but somehow shapeshifted, burned down to a gleaming—sometimes discordant—kernel. For Dasom Yang, the remnants of Japanese colonialism cleave through a childhood memory. Melissa Fu tracks actual burnings: of the forests of her childhood and of places far-flung, global. Jini Reddy returns home to find a river from her past transformed, and in a series of spare glimpses, Jinling Wu examines the ways our past and present places can sometimes be incommensurable and cutting. Occasionally there is sweetness: the frailty of moss, the memory of mango juice. But memories can be deceiving: these pieces show us the hazards in romanticising a landscape, and the power in examining these dangers. They ask how best to speak about the past and how to pass on these stories to those that follow.
Thanks as ever to the team who makes this journal possible: Dasom Yang and Isabel Galleymore. The writers here have nearly all reached out with thanks for your incisive, detailed edits. I for one could not do this without you. Thanks also to all who funded this issue through our original Kickstarter back in 2018. If you’d like to support us now, you can contribute via PayPal here. All money received goes to paying writers, illustrators, and our editorial assistants for their work.
Thanks most of all to our readers. I wish you well as you explore these writers’ words.
Warm wishes,
Jessica J. Lee