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COVER IMAGE:  “And Yet”  by Ann-Marie Brown

My family has planted a forest garden in coastal B.C. The trees grow hazelnuts, walnuts, cherries, apples, pears, figs, plums, apricots, and sea buckthorn.  There are blueberry, raspberry, gogi and gooseberry along with grapes, and wildflowers on a lawn of clover. Climate change has been a challenge with freak weather and unseasonal temperatures–the drought last summer and the floods this one. I’ve been painting the fruits that do grow.  Portraits of apples and plums, with as much attention paid to their individuality as I pay to my figure works.   

Painting in a garden in a time of shifting ecologies is a celebration of resilience shadowed by knowledge.  When Dutch painters in the 17th century painted fruit, they were in contemplation of the transience of human life, firm in the conviction that the eternal seasons would continue to unfold even as the eyes looking at the painting would turn to dust.   

To paint fruit now is to think about the ephemeral nature of all things, including the ecosystem. There is a qualitative difference in the sadnesses beneath the lustrous surfaces of historical and contemporary fruit paintings, with the later propelling one towards an immediate engagement with the luminous life force shimmering in the present moment.

 “Colt of the Ecocide” by María DeGuzmán

María DeGuzmán is a scholar, photographer, writer, and music composer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC). She has published photography in Typehouse Literary Magazine; creative nonfiction photo-text in Oyster River Pages; and short stories in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas and Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature. Her SoundCloud website may be found at: https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.

Image included with acknowledgement to The Banyan Review.

“Fire Ring II”  oil on canvas by Barbara Sarvis

In the winter of 2020, Covid19 re-introduced me to several unfinished paintings hanging in my studio. For many weeks I stared at the images on the canvas while listening to the daily news. Feelings of rage, sadness and powerlessness overpowered me regarding immigration, systemic racism, climate change, equal rights and a woman’s right to choose. The paintings could no longer exist as a portrait, landscape or floral, but instead became visual stories that I had to tell as a catharsis for change. 

“Fish Tail”  by Leslie Brown

Leslie Brown has a MFA in Creative Writing. Her digital work appeared on the cover of Zoetic Press, “NBR: World Tour,” and Variety Pact Art (Winter 2023/24). Future work will appear in Closed Eye Open and Burning Word Literary Journal. Other publications include  Phoebe Literary Journal.

Fish Tail” is my imaging of the Deepwater oil leak flame chasing a fish.