Evan Winchester is originally from Sacramento, where he once worked for California State Parks. He now lives in Oakland. Last spring, he completed an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Since 2008, he has produced theater in the Bay Area with PianoFight Productions and his sketch comedy group Mission CTRL, including last summer’s ballet horror comedy, Duck Lake. Tweet at him @HeyMissionCTRL.
 
 
 

 
Tess Taylor grew up in El Cerrito, California, and holds graduate degrees in writing from New York University and Boston University. Her chapbook of poems, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Literary Imagination, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. She was the 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Fellow in Lenox, Massachusetts. After 17 years away, she lives again in El Cerrito. Her book of poems, The Forage House, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

 
 
harold terezón was born in East L.A. and raised in Pacoima, California. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University. He was awarded the PEN USA Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship in 2006. His work has appeared in Blue Print Review, Amistad, Strange Cargo: An Emerging Voices Anthology, Rushing Waters Rising Dreams: How the Arts are Transforming a Community, Puerto del Sol, among others. harold is a Teaching Artist for WritersCorps where he teaches poetry at a middle school and high school in San Francisco. He often returns to the Salvadoran Corridor in Los Angeles to remind students about the importance of poetry, community, and higher education. He is currently working on his first collection of poetry, 13816 Judd St.
 
 
 
Tim Kahl is the author of Possessing Yourself (Word Tech, 2009) and The Century of Travel (Word Tech, forthcoming). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup and the poetry video blog Linebreak Studios. He is also editor of Bald Trickster Press and Clade Song. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He currently houses his father’s literary estate—one volume: Robert Gerstmann’s book of photos of Chile, 1932.
 
 
 

 
Sarah Ciston runs BootlegBooks.net, an editing and design studio that helps independent authors and publishers go rogue. She is managing editor of the small-batch literary magazine We Still Like, and her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Arroyo Review, Poecology, and Invisible City Audio Tours.

 
Murray Silverstein’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in RATTLE, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, ZYZZYVA, Fourteen Hills, Pembroke Magazine, Elysian Fields and other journals. His first book of poems, Any Old Wolf (Sixteen Rivers Press), received the 2007 Independent Publisher medal for poetry. Also for Sixteen Rivers Press, Silverstein served as executive editor for the anthology, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. His poems have recently appeared in Chapter & Verse, Poems of Jewish Identity (Conflux Press), and a second collection, Master of Leaves will be published by Sixteen Rivers in 2014. A practicing architect and co-author of four books about architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press), Silverstein lives in Oakland, California.
 
 
 

Sharon Coleman is a fifth generation Californian and has a penchant for learning languages and word roots.  Her poems and blink fiction are scattered generously across paper journals and electronic ones, including Poecology. Her chapbook Half Circle comes out in 2013 from Finishing Line Press. Richard Silberg says of it: ”I see two facets in these poems. One is a haunting, dreamlike symbolism that melds animal and human, vegetal and human, that slips between worlds, linguistic and material, living and dead. The other is narrative, its stories hard-edged, sparely told, that keep twisting suggestively in the mind once read.” She’s also writes for Poetry Flash, is a member of the Northern California Book Reviewers, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart and the Micro Awards.

 
 
 
 
 

Kristi Moos is the editor of Poecology. She is the author of Oakland Poems (Deep Oakland Editions 2010) which won the Harold Taylor Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Prairie Schooner; Denver Quarterly; New American Writing; Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University.

Before I started Poecology, I Googled “ecopoetry”, “ecoliterature” and other “eco” terms. I found many websites that debated definitions. But I couldn’t find many pages devoted to the reading of Eco-Literature. What I hoped to find was a website dedicated to publishing and promoting writing about place and ecology. I wanted to find an online community with an archive of published eco-poets, eco-fiction writers, environmentalists. I wanted to read what everyday people were writing to celebrate the places and natural resources around them.

Poecology is becoming just that: a reservoir for ecological writing, a place where writers and readers can come to explore definitions and create their own. It’s becoming a digital place for discovering physical spaces, species, and environmental issues. A website like Poecology can help us share our wealth of creativity and knowledge about the planet.

But we’ve only just begun. Our small staff of four volunteers has been working hard on exciting new plans to transform Poecology into an innovative digital literary space that will revolutionize how we read and understand place-based literary arts. Beyond the world wide web, we have plans to bring Eco-Literature to communities across the world. However, launching these programs requires financial resources we don’t have. We need help getting off the ground.

Make a gift to Poecology today. Your financial support will make our plans a reality. Thanks to Intersection for the Arts Incubator, donations to Poecology are fully tax-deductible. Click here to donate to Poecology through Intersection for the Arts’ secure donation page. Select “Poecology” from the drop-down menu.

If you are interested in supporting Poecology and would like to learn more about our project development plans, email us at info@poecology.org.

We’ve come a long way in two years. We are ready to make the next two years unforgettable. Thank you for your support.
 
 
Kristi Moos
Editor, Poecology

Jane Hirshfield
Camille T. Dungy
Sean Hill
Tess Taylor
Tim Kahl
Murray Silverstein
Sharon Coleman
Rebecca Mayer
Christopher Martin

and many more. Stay tuned!

 
There aren’t many genuinely dead places. Nor is Braddock, Pennsylvania – though a person with options is not likely to settle there. The word “miasma” comes to mind when I try to conjure up the town, three hundred miles distant. The first image I had approaching Braddock was of fog drifting along the low hills – a winding shroud that seemed to close it off from the rest of the world. Rain drizzled out of nowhere, as if it were a special property of that place alone. I saw no one drifting or shambling along the small downtown. It was as if everybody who had lived in Braddock had agreed to walk away at the same time.

As I drove along its shuttered main street – whatever its name was – I studied the faded grandeur: a bank in rusticated brownstone; great, cloud-piercing steeples; good businesses that had failed, not in a hurry, but in the anxious way of organisms whose life support is cut off one breath at a time. A corner building had collapsed, though nobody was around to shore it up. Law enforcement officials had dangled crime scene tape around it – a color-note that was jarring amidst the monochromatic haze.

I drove up the residential streets and finally saw people: in this case, a black family unloading groceries from a car. Their house was in pretty good shape – though it was surrounded by wrack and ruin. As I continued driving, I saw a house without a door and peered into it for a moment. It was – as such places never are in “real” cities – vandal-free. Put a door on the house and you could move right in – assuming you’d want to.

I stopped at a fine-looking church whose forecourt was decorated with a World War II monument. On its base were the names of Braddock soldiers who had made the ultimate sacrifice. They were Polish, Italian, and German names, with a sprinkling of Irish. The church was a mammoth property that was deeper than it was wide and distinguished from its equally ostentatious fellows by an apparent will to live on. Such an enduring expression of faith and community was, in the present context, ironic. The doors were closed for the day, and possibly, for any day without a mass or funeral. When congregations move, they can show a dogged loyalty. Perhaps there was more life in the place than met the eye.

There was an equally spectacular church across the street: a Russian Orthodox pile with onion domes that must catch the sunlight – when there is any – quite spectacularly. It was painted white – a color-note that, like the yellow-tape, stuck out. I kept double-taking it, as if to say “Shouldn’t this be somewhere else?”

In its halcyon days, Braddock was productive in the manner of one-industry towns. During special occasions, its crowded main street was hung with banners as people in long-sleeved dresses and five-dollar suits wandered in and out of restaurants.and ten-cent stores. When a bigshot came to town, everybody showed up to gawk and go crazy.

The soured promise of the steel industry permeates Braddock. Old infrastructures pop up everywhere you look: bridges, tunnels, railroad spurs. Braddock’s ragged stone suggests an earthbound civilization – a civilization that’s too heavy to lift nowadays. All the great mills have been razed and carted away. Remnants of super-heavy machinery litter pothole-filled plazas. Fifty years ago, the fires that so alarmed and mystified William Blake burned day and night, as Braddock slept or spent its money.

The thousands of anonymous laborers who scratched out a living here are not remembered in brass or stone, though their handiwork still abounds. If no steel is actually being produced, it is present in the town’s outlandish emptiness. It is present in the faces of people who are working odd jobs. These faces ponder the glory years when the place was jumpin’. Now, they can’t quite reconcile what they see with the images in their mind’s eye. Steel is present in the dank colorations and preposterous monumentality of an architecture that sits around waiting for occupants. In Braddock’s gaps and vacancies I perceive something of what America has lost and is not likely to regain: the gaps between river and railroad; the connections that seem only half complete, like the severed limb an amputee senses as he begins to consider his options.

The Monongahela Valley, whose hill-and-dale structure was ideal for an industrial revolution of its own, recalls middle England, which cradled the revolution’s Big Bang. At first, the revolution drew its lifeblood from the farm, which provided it with labor – no matter that this labor had a job already. After a time, the smoky towns that grew up around a factory yard could give it all the flesh it needed. The tallest structure was a smoke-stack that stayed hot and could be seen for miles. Yet the towns that were built alongside of it began, after a time, to sag. A smothering haze drifted along their rooflines, which would not shake it until the factories closed down. The Monongahela Valley’s charm – if it be that – is, in part, dependent upon its history. It is a history that embraces the Industrial Revolution’s headwaters (Stoke and Coalbrookedale) as well as its great climactic flood (Lowell, Pittsburgh et al.) The Monongahela Valley evokes the old Midlands as no other American landscape can. Small towns clinging to hillsides. Bars/pubs (and churches) aplenty. A pall of vapor settling down onto houses of undifferentiated red and yellow brick. Hardly any young people at all.

My father came from Monaca – a place not far away culturally or geographically. Its chief industry was glass, though it was never the sprawling behemoth Braddock came to be. I would imagine some people left Braddock as my father did – well before the writing was on the wall and steel went overseas. I am two generations removed from working-class people. Yet what distinguishes my world from my father’s – or from Braddock’s – is the reality of choice. The people of Braddock had two: work in the mills or get out. Choices in this day and time run amuck. There are so many appeals to one’s appetite for challenge and adventure that it must be paralyzing for someone who doesn’t have a direction and can’t, for the moment, decide. Places like Braddock had a cradle-to-grave sense of destiny that held them together when times were good, but bad times have ruined them. You can’t make it in a one-horse town – or, rather, the one-horse town will eventually keel over because it only has only one horse.

The houses in Braddock were vaguely reminiscent of the little place my father had grown up in: cramped, mean, desolate – and not nearly as well-scrubbed. Their front yards lacked gardens. Gates were askew. Plastic bags and other debris were caught in the tines of wrought-iron fences. The best houses were, of course, above the town, which seemed to have faded less. You could get a cup of coffee here. Fill up your tank. Pick up the groceries you failed to get at the mall. I would not call it lively, but it was not dead or dying. If this little enclave was all there was to Braddock, it might be a tolerable place. But you’d have to wall yourself in it, as I would imagine the people who live here actually do. How else to endure the stark and somber images below? How else to keep the good memories alive? How else to keep on going?

As I drove away, things started to perk up. An all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant along the road to the main highway tempted me, so I went in and ate mounds of rice topped with steamed broccoli. I washed it all down with a pot of tea I didn’t bother to sweeten. It was a large and raucous place, full of husbands, wives, and children who sprawled out on the family-style tables that made me look smaller and more alienated than I actually felt. The dining room had plenty of space for everybody and it sounded like a great many people having a good time. It seemed “normal”, which gave me a surge of hope such as I’d not had all day.

I’m glad I left the town from where I did. Had I driven away along the riverbank, Braddock would have struck me as unredeemable, as it possibly is. At its best, it is not a hopeful place, but it might gradually attract future citizens who will see the same swung-open door I did and walk right through it.