A special guest will be joining us for Greenbag lecture at UNM for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day! Let's come together to enjoy the prestige that is Dr. Eric Magrane.
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Spiral Orb, Multi-Species Poetic Ecologies, and Community Environmental Writing
Dr. Eric Magrane
In the online journal Spiral Orb spiralorb.net, excerpts from all pieces published in an issue are composted into an entry poem that serves as table of contents. Readers then navigate through the issue by clicking on hyperlinks embedded in the entry poem. When I first began the journal in 2011, I gave it the byline “an experiment in permaculture poetics,” referencing in particular its systems focus. The fall 2019 issue features A Literary Inventory of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, including more than 50 contributors who wrote poetry and prose addressed to species who live in Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument (OMDP) in southern New Mexico. In my talk, I will reflect on Spiral Orb as well as the literary inventory of OMDP, focusing especially on women contributors. As a form of community environmental writing, the inventory engages with concepts of sense of place, human-environment relations, and representation of more-than-human species.
Eric Magrane is an assistant professor of geography at New Mexico State University. He is the editor, with Christopher Cokinos, of The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press, 2016), and with Linda Russo, Craig Santos Perez, and Sarah de Leeuw, of Geopoetics in Practice (Routledge, 2020). In his research and creative work, he is particularly interested in environmental narratives, sense of place, and contemporary artistic and literary responses to environmental change.