A Letter from the Editors

By Chantelle Flores & Harrison Goldspiel

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Welcome to Spire鈥檚 tenth anniversary issue! Since our inaugural issue in 2017, we have been fortunate to publish a wide variety of environmental stories, including over 150 works of fine art, photography, poetry, essays, research articles, and even animation. We are grateful to the many talented contributors who have shared their pieces with us and the larger community in Maine, advancing awareness, dialogue, and action around conservation and sustainability. As our social-ecological systems face ever-growing challenges, we believe interdisciplinary forums such as Spire are vital for reflection, engagement, and (hopefully) inspiration. Thank you for being here and joining the conversation.

We are delighted to announce Jordan Ramos as the winner of this year鈥檚 cover art contest. Ramos鈥� Spiritual Retreat is from her watercolor series, Athletes of the Rake, and sheds light on Maine鈥檚 sustainable wild blueberry hand-raking communities. She vibrantly paints hand-rakers in action and shares their experiences through documented interviews, emphasizing the beauty found in community-engaged agricultural practice.

Our tenth issue contains work from over 20 contributors, spanning a variety of environmental themes and genres. We see stories about glaciers, climate change, and our relationships to landscapes over the passage of time in Eleanore Allan-Rahill鈥檚 poetry collection Glacial Humanity and Nestor Walter鈥檚 essay 鈥淐onsider the Glacier.鈥� We hear how the rivers and mountains in our backyards move and reorient us to the natural world, in personal essays such as 鈥淥ur River鈥� by Andrea Lani and 鈥淟istening Differently鈥� by Mara Scallon. Writings in this issue meditate on our lasting and complex legacies in nature, whether in the form of artificial refuse, as seen in the poem 鈥淥de on a Plastic Starbucks Cup鈥� by Benjamin Thorne, or as artificial life, as explored in the fictional piece 鈥淎n Anatomy of a Steller鈥檚 Sea Cow鈥� by Matthew Jablonski. 

The artists in this issue reflect on the fragility and beauty of local species and environments in their watercolor paintings, prints, digital illustrations, and even sculpture. Human-nature interactions are on display for feathered friends, such as in the watercolor paintings of Piper Galipeau鈥檚 Tapping and Brenda McGuiness鈥檚 Summer Residents, as well as those with fins, such as in Sarina Martin鈥檚 monoprint Replenished and Maeve Littlefield鈥檚 linoprint Blubber and Baleen. Several pieces explore impacts of climate change and human excess on ecosystems from the sea, as seen in the sculpture Entangled Rights by Sophie Shannon and the print Debris Pile #01 by Erin Coughlin, to the sky, as conveyed in the digital illustration Survival of the Tallest by Haley Metzger.

Of course, we must thank our dedicated editorial team who have made our tenth issue possible. A special thanks to our editors鈥擫aurel Dorr, Mo Drammeh, Elise Dunne, Joelle Kilchenmann, Nicole McAdam, Monica Miles, Kathryn Novak, Autumn Pozniak, Alex Scearce, Micah Shelenberger, Clinton Spaulding, Kathleen Spear, Stella Tay, Aaron Thibodeau, Jordan Thompson, Ana Trueba, Erin Victor, and Nestor Walters鈥攚ho provided their insight and time. This year we also thank our design team members, Kathryn Novak and Erin Victor, who made our inaugural print issue a success and our social media coordinator, Nicole McAdam, who helped spread the word about Spire online. Additional thanks is given to our faculty director, Daniel Dixon, whose support for Spire over the last decade has made this journal possible.

We enjoyed the chance to read and edit the powerful voices, narratives, and works within this issue. We hope you enjoy the tenth edition of Spire!

Cheers,

Chantelle Flores & Harrison Goldspiel
Editors-in-Chief