Двойной выпуск журнала Oxford American посвящен теме дома и смерти

A new double issue of the Oxford American, the acclaimed quarterly literary magazine of the South based in Conway, hit newsstands a couple of weeks ago, and it’s full of stories focused on the idea of home. It’s available for purchase and perusal here. Here’s a bit from an introduction by Managing Editor Christian Leus that teases some of the issue’s preoccupations: When we started talking to writers about home, the theme of this issue, we were surprised how often death came up. Em Palughi writes about the death of her father, and how his life was impacted by patient dumping in Alabama hospitals. Eric McMillan’s flash fiction explodes out from within the epidemic of war veteran suicides. Saeed Jones opens the issue with his encounter with Mister Anthony, a New Orleans rideshare driver with a terminal diagnosis. “A blues rivered its way through the two of us during that drive. It tried calling us both home, cunning as a riptide,” Jones writes. “But home is as much about where you are as it is about where you ain’t.” Maybe home, its specificities, its meaning, is most legible when it’s ruptured, and death is the most profound rupture we can experience. A highlight of the issues comes from Northwest Arkansas journalist and Arkansas Times contributor Jordan P. Hickey, who writes in “The Dream in the Valley” of the Meadowcreek Project, a sustainable living venture located on 1,500 acres in Fox (Stone County) that emerged in the late 1970s as the brainchild of brothers David and Wil Orr. During its prime throughout the ’80s, Meadowcreek flourished, inviting thousands of students and faculty from a “network of 110 colleges and universities, including the likes of Yale, MIT, and Princeton,” to take part in hands-on environmental education: What they intended to do, David would often say, was akin to what Thoreau had proposed with Walden—to force the problem of sustainable living into a corner where it could be studied. This place they had found in the rural Ozarks would be a laboratory of sorts, with lessons drawing upon the “appropriate technology” movement and intensive agricultural techniques that could be applied to urban settings. In doing so, the Orrs had joined a much larger movement of efforts across the country—notably, those of John and Nancy Todd at the New Alchemy Institute near Falmouth, Massachusetts; Wes and Dana Jackson at the Land Institute near Salina, Kansas; and Marty Strange at the Center for Rural Affairs—all dedicated to rethinking models of food production, renewable energy, and waste recycling, among other problems of the day. (All of these leaders, it’s worth noting, would eventually make stops at Meadowcreek.) Rather than approaching sustainability as the back-to-the-landers had, with individual homesteads and farms, Meadowcreek would be a means of addressing big-picture, systemic issues. It would be “an experiment in sustainability,” David said in a recent interview, “big enough to be important, small enough to be manageable.” That version of Meadowcreek fell apart by the ’90s for a confluence of interesting and difficult-to-summarize reasons, only to be replaced by a steady stream of other visions for the settlement, which you can read more about here.