Editor’s Note

Several weeks ago, in the midst of making my final selections for this folio, I was walking around my neighborhood in Tallahassee when I watched a blue jay plummet from the sky. It resembled a colorful paper airplane, wings outstretched and rigid, unflapping and still, falling to the concrete sidewalk like a violent projectile. It landed a few yards in front of me and I jogged to it, uncertain of what I could do. The blue jay writhed for a moment, rolled so its talons clutched at the vast expanse above, blinked a few times, the duration between each puny movement longer than the last. In another minute, the blue jay stopped moving entirely. I felt helpless and flooded with sadness.

What haunted me most was perhaps that the bird looked uninjured. I could see no obvious reason for its fatal descent. Was it the air quality? Had it eaten some unknown trash or detritus? Was it the fault of lawncare products or insecticides or the unseasonable heat? I regrettably see dead animals in our neighborhood all the time—furry roadkill and shriveled worms baked on driveways after brief and heavy Florida downpours and wrinkly, unmoving lizards victim to predatory birds or cats—but this felt different. I had borne witness to an inexplicable demise.

We do and don’t know exactly what climate crisis will look like in the coming years. Science regularly warn us of the worst, to prepare for more frequent natural disasters, water scarcity, hazardous air quality, destruction of crops, climate migration, pandemics, and the extinction of countless species. What we don’t know yet is how humans will act to destroy or preserve our future. In the United States, most of those in power are either willfully ignorant, maliciously genocidal, or in downright denial, complacent to accept environmental destruction, expansive inequality, violent white supremacy, and mass atrocities as long as they keep making money and maintain control. Systemic change is urgent and necessary. Still, I worry I am more complacent and despondent than I should be. We can all take immediate action in informed individual ways. I hope, even though a small part, that literary responses can play a valuable role in that action.

In reading hundreds of submissions for this folio, I was humbled and overjoyed by the breadth of writing I received: terrifying speculations, cheerful odes, thoroughly researched essays, and a gamut of hybrid forms. What’s clear to me is that many writers today are trying to find new ways to grieve, to react, to pay homage to our rapidly deteriorating world, to send pleas for help, to imagine new systems of documenting history, to leave something behind, and—always—to look ahead.

I should add that it wasn’t until putting together this folio that I considered that Earth Day and Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day are only two days apart. It will take me more time and space than I have here to fully consider the meaning of this coincidence, but I believe there’s something to be said about the connection between the horrific violation of land and people. Natural resources and the health of humanity are inexorably amalgamated. This folio’s cover art reveals the remnants of factories and machinery abandoned in the Armenian landscape. Roger Camp, the photographer of these images, notes that the Armenian countryside is littered with the ghosts of Soviet occupation.

I have been thinking a lot about the future and feeling defeated, but reading the wide range of work sent to me made me feel a little less alone. I felt a sense of communal grief, of hope, of commiseration. I felt like so many of us are baring witness together and searching for creative solutions and victories.

I’m so grateful to everyone who submitted work and the selected contributors for their commitment to fighting climate crisis. Thank you too for your support of the Armenia Tree Project.

In hopes of a more sustainable tomorrow,

Aram Mrjoian

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Aram Mrjoian earned his PhD in creative writing from Florida State University and is an editor-at-large at the Chicago Review of Books. He has also served as an editor at the Southeast Review and TriQuarterly. His writing has appeared in Cream City Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast online, The Rumpus, The Millions, Longreads, and many other publications. Find his work at arammrjoian.com