Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries ofPlace, Identity, and Feminism

by May-lee Chai (Foreword by), Belle Boggs (Contribution by), Camille T. Dungy (Contribution by), Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Contribution by), Lauret E. Savoy (Contribution by)

Overview

“Perhaps a future of environmental writing begins in trying to meet all people where they are, wherever they are,” writes Lauret E. Savoy. “It’s acknowledging and honoring difference as enriching.” In Trespass , twenty women essayists challenge the traditional boundaries of place-based writing to make room for greater complexity: explorations of body, sexuality, gender, and race. Traveling across time and place—from a Minnesota summer camp to the peacock-lined streets of Kerala, India—these essays reveal their authors as artful and singular observers of their homes, lives, and histories. Emerging writers along with celebrated voices in the field, including Belle Boggs, Camille T. Dungy, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Terry Tempest Williams, reclaim spaces that have always been theirs.

Observing the policing of Detroit, Aisha Sabatini Sloan bears witness to environmental racism, and finds community with family and neighbors. Toni Jensen traces the erasure of Native culture on college campuses and challenges notions of safety in light of sexual and gun violence. Laurie Clements Lambeth paints the strength and fragility of the human body through the lens of a progressive neurological disease. And Shuchi Saraswat’s trip to the Bay Area to document a ceremony honoring Ganesha leads her on her own journey home.

Originally published in the pages of Ecotone, the award-winning literary magazine that reimagines place, these essays recount how women uniquely shape and are shaped by their environments. Together, they spark new conversations, showing the ways we forge identity through larger cultural considerations—in our bodies, our neighborhoods, and the natural world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940596297
Publisher:	Lookout Books
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including the memoir Hapa Girl and the recent story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants, which won the Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, and the Asian / Pacific American Award for Literature; named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book; and given honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award.

Belle Boggs is the author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, a finalist for the PEN / Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Mattaponi Queen, which won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, including, most recently, Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. A Colorado State Universityprofessor, her honors include an American Book Award, NEA fellowships, and NAACP Image Award nominations.

Preoccupied with earth science since childhood, Aimee Nezhukumatathil crafts her research-based poetry using curious phenomena of the natural world. Her award-winning books of poems include Miracle Fruit, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Oceanic. Other honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the National Endowment for the Arts. She serves as the poetry editor of Orion and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where she lives with her husband and sons. Her essay in this anthology also appears in her collection World of Wonder, from Milkweed Editions.

Tracing memory threads Lauret Edith Savoy’s life and work: unearthing what is buried, re-membering what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she writes about the stories we tell of the American land’s origins and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her books include Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape; The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World; Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology; and Living with the Changing California Coast. Trace won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the 2017 ASLE Creative Book Award, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Orion Book Award. Lauret is the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies and Geology at Mount Holyoke College, a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, a photo­grapher, and a pilot.

Arisa White is the author of Black Pearl, Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, A Penny Saved, and the Lambda Literary Award–nominated You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened. Her chapbook “Fishing Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, she curates cultural events and artistic collaborations that center narratives of queer and trans people of color. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she is an assistant professor at Colby College.

Terry Tempest Williams is author of seventeen books, including the environmental literature classic Refuge, and most recently The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. She is currently writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School.

Table of Contents

Foreword, May-lee Chai Imaginary Children, Belle Boggs Differentiation, Camille T. Dungy To See the Whole: A Future of Environmental Writing, Lauret E. Savoy Carry, Toni Jensen What Looks Like Mad Disorder: The Sarah Winchester House, Joni Tevis Fake IDs, Arisa White Hypää Järveen!, Carrie Messenger Memorandum to the Animals, Amy Leach The Journey Home, Shuchi Saraswat A Disturbance of Birds , Terry Tempest Williams Summer, 1959, Carolyn Ferrell Sign Here If You Exist, Jill Sisson Quinn A House in Karachi, Rafia Zakaria The Pony, the Pig, and the Horse, Alison Hawthorne Deming D Is for the Dance of the Hours: A Portrait of Prebankruptcy Detroit, Aisha Sabatini Sloan Entry Cove, Lia Purpura Monsoon and Peacock, Aimee Nezhukumatathil Going Downhill from Here, Laurie Clements Lambeth Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, Jane Wong Becoming Earth, Eva Saulitis

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In a nation still wholly obsessed with diversity, the writers in Trespass manage tobrilliantly situate themselves in the sinew of liberation, loss, and love. By foregrounding the prose, possibilities,and politics ofplace, race,and gender, each writer in this iconic collectiongoes beyond the space of reckoning. The book conjures atomorrow anchored in, but not predictablydictated by,yesterday. This is a once-in-a-generation book.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

“Since its founding in 2005,Ecotonehas been publishing work that enriches our understanding of nature, identity, and place. As evidence, here are twenty revelatory essays, all by women, on subjects ranging from birth to death, including race and religion, family roots, enduring beauty, and the healing of self and world. Eloquent, insightful, diverse in background and voice, these writers bring us news that matters.” —Scott Russell Sanders, author ofEarth Works: New & Selected Essays

“In this exquisitely written collection of essays, women explore the ways we make our lives out of and inside places, and how we are connected across distances by empathy, narrative, and imagination. In the course of unpacking their stories—of migration, of family, of home—they tell greater stories: about history and identity, loss and transformation, writing and making one’s self.”
—Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Daughter

“Trespass is an atlas that luminously maps the landscapes of the interior. Memory, migration, identity, and desire are among the terrains of its powerhouse cartographers. Follow these tracks to reclaim, restore, replenish.”
—Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author of All the Agents and Saints