Our introductory note is from Emily Wilkinson. Emily is a researcher, writer, coach, artist, and movement practitioner based in North Wales, UK. Her current PhD research with Aberystwyth and Exeter universities explores therapeutic landscapes and creative practice. Emily is also the host of the Desire Lines Podcast, which explores wide-ranging themes including environment, creativity, embodiment, holistic thinking, sensory experience, equality, health, and neurodivergence.

I’ll pass it to Emily to say a few words about Issue 29.

Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief

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Noswaith dda (or good evening) from a tiny cabin nestled in the Welsh hills, just inland from the Dyfi Biosphere in Wales, UK. Here, on a writer’s retreat, the landscape reminds me how this small country reveals wildly diverse geographies. Y Gwanwyn (spring) whispers around the corner, and my resting place this weekend shows me a blooming biodiversity far richer than I observe in my home habitat just an hour’s drive away. This same diversity emerges within small, independent publications like Wild Roof Journal, where writers from varied landscapes weave words and inspiration into new ecologies of language. Daffodils burst into melyn (yellow) patches while barcutiaid (red kites) command the skies above. Crocuses stand suddenly agored (open), heralding the Spring Equinox—Alban Eilir (the light of spring) in Celtic Druidry. Life thrives beneath the darkest night skies, and as daylight retreats still too early, I write with clear views of Jupiter, Mars, and Venus gleaming overhead.

We wait for Spring’s true arrival, echoing Kelsey Britton’s poem “Glacial”: “Like a hand / outstretched, the earth said / be with me here / a little longer.” In Wales, spring announces itself through fields flecked with newborn lambs. The seasonal shift is equally fertile ground for birthing our writing—a complex parallel where I (a woman who isn’t a mother) find resonance in Elizabeth Joy Levinson’s words: “And I’ve carried eggs, unfertilized specks I shed and shed, to make room for other people’s children or to make room for new poems and poems, in a world where everyone is shouting, listen to me.” On the theme of motherhood, Bethany Reid’s spider-webbed words remind us how with each passing year the making and unmaking of seasons becomes more visceral. Kristi Joy Rimbach’s “Woman Recommencing” confronts the cyclical darkness many mothers experience, while Rich Spang’s textural artwork pulls us through new layers with the evocative handwritten words “Bird Nest.” 

New spaces offer themselves within these pages. Matt Pasca’s “Orange Zero” evokes for me the Japanese concept of Ma—the harmony found in negative space: “maybe everyone is / a hangman’s hood falling to the sound / of automated bells or yak fat / mantras chanted over quivering / bowls & snowy cutouts of quantum / bones we sometimes were, like a zero / is both circular & infinite.” The transition from winter to spring embodies Ma’s dynamic presence, where we wait impatiently to “cross land with a hunger” as Logan Anthony writes in “albatross aubade.”

Spring teases us with fragments, found in Laura Tafe’s collage, tempting us toward summer boldness. We often taste that aliveness and tumble into brightness despite lingering cold, heeding Willa Yonkman’s warning that “death is the sea drying up, / death is staying inside.” Myfanwy Williams infuses us with the hope of growing things, while Stephen Campiglio reminds us that life always persists between the cracks, in places and forms we would rather not see. Awakening sexuality is starkly present in Dale Going’s sensuous glide into spring, while Daniel Brennan speaks eloquently of grief and death. In this threshold between seasons, Emily R. Antrilli’s words capture our collective transition: “that is when the trees would say goodbye to the mouths they / used to have to sing to be nourished by the gold of summer.”

Emily Wilkinson