Wild Apples - A Journal of Nature, Art, and Inquiry

In our complex fast-paced world, Wild Apples offers stories, art, and inspiration, inviting reactions and interactions with voices that speak to our potential to live a thinking life. Within its pages, you'll find a creative community offering wisdom, reflection, and connections to enduring landscapes, both real and imagined. Wild Apples' essays and art encourage us to repossess and celebrate how ideas, art, and nature nourish our spirit and feed our souls.

-Maud Ayson, Board of Directors, Freedom's Way

Dear Readers,

We are sad to announce that Root, Trunk, Bough, is our final issue.

Thank you for your support!

The Editors

INTRODUCTION

Wild Apples: a journal of nature, art, and inquiry is a new twice-yearly arts and literary publication. Taking its name and inspiration from Henry David Thoreau's essay, "Wild Apples," the journal brings together the work of artists and writers who are connected by the common threads of care for the environment, engagement in social concerns, and commitment to the arts and the way they shape our world.

"Artists are not like the ordered rows of trees in a commercial orchard," writes founding editor, Linda Hoffman, in her introduction to the first issue. "They have more in common with the wild apples growing on the borders of woodlands." Our journal seeks to find these gems in the landscape, let the different arts and visions intermingle, and produce new varieties and voices to sustain us.

Let Wild Apples be a haven from cell phones and computers; a piece of reading that takes you into the woods and wilds. As the journal's guiding spirit writes:

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish
the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!

I want to say how much I enjoyed Wild Apples #4, just a great and memorable collection of work. It's one of the most beautiful, absorbing, and valuable issues of a literary journal I've ever read.

-Barry Sternlieb, Poet

ISSUE EIGHT | ROOT, TRUNK, BOUGH

For this last issue of Wild Apples, we chose Root, Trunk, Bough for our theme. All of us who have worked on the journal over the last five years have memories of our excitement as we discovered new artists, met new writers, and grew creatively together. We fell in love with the cover photomontage by Tom Chambers: the young boy, with outstretched arms, being a tree, aground in his boat, open and innocent. Chambers' work also accompanies our first fiction piece, Hide and Seek, by Kathryn Liebowitz. We were grateful to find the ageless photographs of Janet Pritchard to accompany The Calling, an essay by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, who describes her encounter with an old pear tree on the evening that she realized she was ready to become a Zen monk. Donald Saaf's magical paintings accompany Karen Terrey's poetry. We asked Greg Lowenberg to take on the subject of "apples." Little did we know that his first child was born in a ramshackle, one room, Iowa farmhouse with a mature wild apple tree growing nearby. Lowenberg writes, "I, a twentysomething botanist-to-be, discovered 'wild' apples. My first bite of the old tree's fruit launched me on a journey through botanical time and space from which I have never quite returned."

We invite you to journey through the trees of this last issue of Wild Apples. Please enjoy a sampler of essays, poetry, and artwork by clicking here. Or better, order a copy of the issue by clicking here.