The newest issue of Camas, Winter 2017, was delivered to our doorstep yesterday. I'm in awe of how beautiful, inspiring, thought provoking, and interesting it is. Thank you to all who submitted, edited, and offered support along the way.
This issue is also the 25th anniversary of Camas. I've spent a lot of time looking through the archives, reading past work, and thinking about the future of this fantastic publication. We've published some big names: Rick Bass, Rebecca Solnit, Wendell Berry, David James Duncan, Sharman Apt Russell, and Bill Kittredge among others, including this issue's featured authors Robert Michael Pyle and Debra Marquart. Their words add a timelessness to this publication, and I'm honored to take the editor helm of a magazine with such a rich history.
This anniversary issue I made a concerted effort to spotlight more of the people, places, and yes, problems of the West within Camas' pages. Our tagline is the nature of the West, and most of the time, we've interpreted this as traditional nature writing, focusing on the wild places we escape to and the elements -- birds, trees, landscapes -- that live mostly there. But if those of us that live in the West stop to look around us, what we see is vastly different than what we've been publishing. Nature is very much a peopled place.
Ben Swimm's "Georgic II," a poem about our newest Secretary of the Interior, lies above Sally Henkel's photo of a buffalo on the plains with a mountain backdrop (p. 24), an iconic image of the West. And on the next page, tucked next to Tom Sentner's essay on using veneno (poison or chemicals) to restore native prairie, photographer Guido provides a snapshot of a road crew digging trenches (p. 27). Which have you seen more often in the West: the buffalo or the road crew?
I hope you enjoy. I know I am. Have a happy holidays, and we'll see you in January with news about the next issue of Camas.
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Purchase the Winter 2017 issue here.
