Our introductory note is from Emilie Lygren. Emilie is a poet and outdoor educator who has been published in several literary journals and anthologies, and her first collection of poems, What We Were Born For, was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye as Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick in February 2022. Emilie has also developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling, outdoor science education, and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. In her writing and teaching, Emilie calls on awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into relationship with place, self, and community. She was first published in Wild Roof Journal in Issue 21.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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Greetings from Northern California. We’re well into the rainy season here. New grass is pushing through last year’s worn stalks. Creek beds dormant all summer and autumn mutter with current and sediment. Rain always helps me slow down, feel present to the moment, loosen my grip on my to-do lists. Maybe I feel a little more permission to revel in stillness because rain holds down the realm of constant motion. Whatever winter looks like where you are, I hope spaciousness is finding you, too, offering time for reflection, writing, creativity, rest, or anything else that feeds you. 

Poetry, essays, and art always sustain me, and there’s some incredible work in Issue 28 of Wild Roof Journal. The cover image by Brad Robert Benford brought me immediately into a state of awareness. An owl, rendered in block print, stared at me, and though I knew it wasn’t real, I felt myself meeting the owl’s unblinking eyes with reverence and curiosity. The pieces in this volume felt as though they each had a directional gaze of their own, inviting me to consider a salient perspective, a significant memory, a fresh way of relating to place. 

Katherine Hagopian Berry taps into shared moments of wonder with loved ones: “the woodfrog / . . . as it blends and reveals, / who you think you are / . . . on the car ride home you say / sit beside me Mom, the warm / of my eyelight finding you / no matter how dark it gets.” Julie Gard offers: “The garden, a mass of bloom and chlorophyll, posed a counterpoint to worry.”

The authors in this collection also examine how their presence impacts the places they move through. Sean Stiny reflects, “I killed a bird today. A beautiful violet-green swallow. Hardly a thump on the car’s front grill. Makes me the villain. I’m sorry.” Ann Keeling imagines speaking to whales swimming through oceans filled with plastic: “I whisper a prayer of sustenance / for their home / as they slip down / into an endless blue.”

The visual art offers compelling counterpoints to the written word. I was struck by the intimate use of scale and value in Benjamin Green’s “Fenceboard Landscape (II),” the haunting quality of light and shadow in Jaina Cipriano’s photograph “The Garden of Eden is Hot,” and the way the street draws the eye forward through the tired-seeming houses in Cristina Sanchez’s “Hudson Delights.”

Homages to people and practices emerge throughout the issue, too. “I like to think my hands knead / this ball of dough the same way / my ancestors did,” offers Isabel Hoin. Olivia Torres also invokes an ancestor in a meditation on grief and the passage of time: “I have not tasted in fifteen / years the tea / —the tea its black or green / or herbal leaves / plucked straight from stem / time’s boiling / mouth so plain and hungry / for tea for us.” 

In a striking reflection on the creative process, Barbara Drake-Vera whispers into a crevasse of the Qolqepunku glacier: “I will write about you.” Maybe that’s what we’re up to as creative beings—moving through the moments of our lives, opening to find glimmers of poems, essays, or art in what’s healing or troubling, what’s disappearing or what won’t budge despite all our efforts. Keeping a portal open toward what could be written about, what could transform in the presence of our attention.

Or, in Samuel Gilpin’s words, “we need / these diversions / occurring at the edge / of what we know, / of what we can see, / and never ending there.”

Emilie Lygren
San Rafael, CA
December 2024