The Essay is Systems Thinking
An Essay and Conversation with Simmons Buntin
Like you, I imagine, I was very pleased to get a little early rain out of the monsoon this last week, and as the desert comes alive in the break from the heat, I’m also pleased to get to share with you a reprint of an essay by club member Simmons Buntin from his recent book Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far (Trinity University Press, 2025). I also asked him a few questions about his work and life. You may read that interview after the essay.
And as a reminder, Simmons (and three others) will be giving a Work Talk on 7/7 at Tucson Small Business Center at 7pm. Come and join us at 600 S. Meyer for these fun flash presentations! —
Songbird
by Simmons Buntin
from Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far (Trinity University Press, 2025). Buy the book here.
I hadn’t meant to kill the bird. He was a robin, as best I could tell at fifty miles per hour—the road loping through the Vermont countryside, green on green except for the occasional field of dandelions, a congregation of black-and-white cows beside the baptistery of a watering trough. The bird arced out of the roadside brush and into the passenger side of the windshield, thinking perhaps the glint was a sudden stream, dragonflies and water striders ready for the taking. On impact, the beak dropped and neck must have snapped before he bounced and landed light but lifeless on the pavement behind me. I could hear the initial impact even with the buds of the iPod planted in my ears, the chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Bitch” rolling with the small hills. I may have invoked the song’s refrain—Love, it’s a bitch, alright—as I watched the pear-sized life pass. It’s not so much that love is a bitch, I thought, as that sudden collisions are a bitch. I’d been warned to watch for moose, and have certainly pinged birds before, but something about this encounter resounded, as if the robin instead pierced the curved glass, a dart nested in the pane of my deeper self.
I paused the iPod and removed the earbuds—this was 2008, after all, before the proliferation of iPhones and AirPods and Apple CarPlay. The sound of the engine filled the cavity of the rental car. Still, as I slowed to forty I could just make out the calls of other birds in the birches and maples, the whirr of a riding mower on a lawn, the whine of the car’s small tires. At the time, Billie had owned an iPod for about a month, raving about it daily, telling me at every opportunity how much I’d like one, her own foreshadowing of just how ubiquitous listening to music and podcasts on small handheld devices or smartwatches would become. I’m not interested, I insisted. But with a trip from Tucson to New England coming up, I began to see the value. No more searching through radio stations as I drove the rental car. The chance to have our full music library digitized and at my fingertips. And an easy ability to watch films on the sleek, black device as well. I gave in, and it was only a matter of days before my new iPod held more than 1,900 songs and a handful of movies; not exactly today’s seemingly unlimited cloud-based libraries, but a worthy media catalog nonetheless.
I accepted the digital music player with a mixture of anticipation and regret. As with my adoption of any new technology, I knew it would change my habits and relationship with the wider world. Though I designed websites and worked on computers all day, I was wary of new gadgets. It’s not that I was old-fashioned; instead, there was something about losing a connection to the visceral world, an unwillingness to substitute the virtual for the actual.
*
I didn’t blame the bird’s death on the iPod. But over the few days I had the player on that June trip, I felt its ability to lure me away from the natural—and perhaps just as essential, the unnatural—sounds around me. I wasn’t shocked, then, to learn that the iPod was often called the isolation-Pod. Today, isolation and loneliness associated with what the iPod has evolved into—the smartphone—have only increased, resulting in significant psychological and societal changes that we are only now beginning to comprehend.
According to research by Kristi Baerg MacDonald and Julie Aitken Schermer, “Communication and relationships have been dramatically altered among emerging adults thanks to the rapid adoption of the smartphone in just over a decade.” Young adults, in particular, are at greater risk of loneliness and report being more stressed out about their loneliness. “Correlations indicated loneliness was positively associated with screen time, social media app use, neuroticism, social recognition, communication anxiety, and nomophobia,” MacDonald and Schermer write. (Nomophobia, according to the National Institutes of Health, is a psychological condition when people have a fear of being detached from their mobile phone connectivity; literally “no mobile phone phobia.”) The researchers’ conclusion: “More time spent on one’s smartphone and on social media apps is related to increased loneliness.”
For Billie, after a day of teaching second graders, isolation was a reward: her escape into synthesized rhythms and soothing vocals, if only for the brief periods before dinner or after our daughters were in bed. My escape was also from monotony—the drone of engines on the airliner, in the car. But back at home or moving around town, I preferred the honeyed song of the lesser goldfinch, the raucous cry of a cactus wren, even the regular echo of a fighter jet arcing above the local air base. Fifteen years later, I still do—all evidence to the contrary, considering my Spotify catalog is now three times the size of my original iPod library. Clearly, though, sound is every bit as much a part of place as image.
So, passing through New Hampshire’s White Mountains on my way to Vermont, I was surprised, in those early days of portable digital music players, to encounter a teenage boy with iPod earbuds nestled in his ears, volume up, music tinny but nonetheless audible. In a hooded red sweatshirt and baggy jeans, he walked along the trail that edges the Flume Brook at Franconia Notch State Park. The Flume is a thin gorge nearly three football fields long, lined with dark walls of granite and basalt, overgrown in ferns, moss, and the dangling branches of alder. At the ravine’s head is Avalanche Falls, four stories high and thirty feet wide. The wild rush of the brook is as visceral in sound as in sight, yet without both the experience must have been diminished for the boy.
Or perhaps that’s only my antiquated view, for isn’t it possible the teenager’s experience was actually heightened by his music? The melody didn’t sound like Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” or even the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” which would have been appropriate given the waterfall’s overspray, but his on-demand soundtrack played on, and he appeared as engaged as any of us. Yet at what point does synthetic sound replace natural sound and thus authentic experience? At what point do we lose our intrinsic connection to the physical places around us because we’ve become absorbed in the virtual places that technology makes so easy to access?
*
After I arrived in Vermont, friend and jazz clarinetist David Rothenberg, author of best-selling books on bird, insect, and whale song, said, “Why not try walking through a wild forest listening to a recording made in Times Square?” My immediate reaction was to do the opposite: load up the iPod with forest recordings for trips to the city. The last place I had seen David was New York, and I well remember the cacophony of sirens and subway trains, vehicles and voices.
Without an accessible urban recording, however, my options were limited to the songs already on my player: I skipped “Gimme Shelter” for another topical Stones song, “Street Fighting Man.” Placing the smooth, wired buds into my ears, I reached the edge of a tattered trail near Craftsbury, Vermont, where I was staying. Guitar riffs announced the song, but right away I realized that I had to slide up the volume to hide the swishing of my feet through the high grass and pine needles that covered the cross-country ski lane. The trail dropped into a forest of hawthorn, birch, and pine. Ferns and intricate wildflowers of blue and white drifted into the path or edged the filtered shadows of the trees. I raised the volume once again to cover the cries of crows so that I could no longer hear even the internal cadence of my own breathing.
Almost immediately—as Mick Jagger crooned and a sitar bent in the background—I felt disconnected from the trail and broader landscape. My eyes cropped the shapes of the verdant maple leaves against speckled limbs and the gray granite against darker trail. But I saw few birds. A humid breeze washed my face and hands, mosquitoes took residence on the back of my neck, and the scent of the pines was light yet persistent. But I saw no wildlife. And soon my head swayed back and forth in a rhythmic, almost unconscious scan far from normal. By the time the song ended and “Sympathy for the Devil” began, my walk felt more cinematic than anything else—not so much surreal as half-real, a vital sense not so much cut off as held captive. I could neither deny that the experience was compelling nor endorse its isolation.
The path reached a wide clearing and then a road, but I kept going, music blaring, northern Vermont’s pastures and soft, forested hills on every horizon. The nature of the acoustic environment of the landscape—the soundscape—made little difference in my walk, except when I passed the swift but narrow Black River, where the trill of red-winged blackbirds forced me to wind the volume to its maximum, to the same level the iPod needed to overpower the jet engines just outside my seat on the commercial flight from Tucson. I hadn’t realized the sheer amplitude of the natural world, always assuming the mechanizations of humans were louder by default. I was tempted to pause the player to listen to the fen but instead stepped off the road onto a faint trail beside the marsh’s edge and headed for a hill a half-mile distant. Along the way I saw dozens of birds—warblers and blackbirds, finches and mallards—plus the outline of a turtle just below the water’s dark surface. The breeze picked up and I found myself slapping the back of my neck less, the forest’s tiny fiends left behind. Knee-deep in wildflowers and grass, I trudged to the base of the hill, choosing my steps through the water-logged pasture carefully, my shoes and pants already soaked. And I was delighted, for even though I wasn’t exposed to natural sounds, there was a certain cadence to the digital songs that rolled into my ears, immersing me completely. Though I was still certain the boy at the Flume missed the full natural experience, I realized he hadn’t missed experience altogether. I conceded that his exposure was rich, even if not truly authentic.
Or wasn’t it? At the base of the hill, I stopped once I recognized there wasn’t a trail after all. I turned south and looked across the fen as the wind built behind me. Suddenly the grass undulated in vast uneven ripples—like the parabolic waves of sound itself—and I became unstable, disoriented. I knew this experience was an illusion both optical and aural, yet the entire sheet of green and yellow-green grasses rolled row after row into the dark braid of the Black River even as my feet dug hard into the hillside. The misty green horizon represented the forest I came through, but it didn’t move. Only the saturated meadow between us receded, shifting with the wind and dropping into the river like a wide, thatched conveyor belt. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” filled my head when I realized that I could no longer deny that the boy’s experience was any less authentic than my own.
“But if you try sometimes,” the song’s chorus continued as I recentered myself, “you get what you need.” What I needed to ask, then, wasn’t whether synthetic sounds in nature lead to a less authentic personal experience, for I now knew that individual experience can be authentic regardless of acoustic source. Instead, I wondered if the loss of natural sounds leads to a disconnection from place altogether. That is, do we become numb to landscapes when they lose their natural sounds?
The answer may lie in how human-caused noise is perceived. For example, National Park Service managers have concluded, based on scientific research and visitor surveys, that park quality is generally inseparable from “natural peace and the sounds of nature.” So, an effort has been under way for more than two decades to better manage their soundscapes, which are threatened by flyovers, automobile traffic, and snowmobiles. One of the first parks studied was Sequoia–Kings Canyon National Park in California, where researchers set up equipment to establish sonic benchmarks—what the Acoustic Ecology Institute calls a “voiceprint of habitat.” The researchers’ goal was to monitor the soundscape as an indicator of overall ecosystem health: the more natural the sounds, the healthier the park ecosystem and the more connected visitors feel.
*
The ecosystem of my family back in Tucson was our stout bungalow plus the city and Sonoran Desert beyond. Our soundscape was mostly a wonderful mix: not only local birds but also neighbors on front porches, vehicles on streets, and the wind among acacia and mesquite. Lizards scampered beneath sage and prickly pear while bees nuzzled vibrant flowers. Inside, it was not uncommon for the soundscape to be composed of music—Ann-Elise practicing viola, Juliet on piano, a song or composition on the stereo.
That year, however, technology silenced our house even as my wife and daughters heard more music. In January 2008 my daughters’ school was selected from among more than three thousand others by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres as the greenest grade school in America. Civano Community School was known not only for its progressive expeditionary-learning model but also for its focus on community and environment. Solar photovoltaic panels provided power, a school garden maintained by students supplemented lunches, and recycling was old hat. With the award, each child received a green iPod Shuffle and solar charger. It didn’t take long for Ann-Elise, then in fifth grade, and Juliet, in second, to load their matchbox-sized players with their favorite songs.
“Finally!” my older daughter said as she eased the iPod out of its case. She was one of the few remaining students in her class who didn’t already have one, just as she was one of the last students in her class to receive her own smartphone when she was in high school. Though we defined the amount of time they could listen to their iPods, the effect was immediate, and silencing. More often than not, I found the girls walking around the house, iPods on, oblivious to my call. They hadn’t become zombies, because they danced or skipped or hopped to the beat, but they certainly became isolated—and were happier for it, just like the millions if not billions of children and adults today who listen to music through wireless earbuds as they move from class to class or task to task in the wider world. But were they healthier, and was our family?
My wife was already a chronic headphone wearer, connected to a portable CD player, before I gave her the iPod for Mother’s Day in 2008. After school she often worked late into the evening grading student work and creating lesson plans. For these repetitive tasks, and for exercising and housework, she listened to music. Upgrading to the iPod was a logical evolution, both in technology and practice: it was smaller, used less power, and contained more music than the CD player. Yet once Billie programmed her iPod, listening increased and our home became quieter still. That wasn’t necessarily bad when I was working at my desk, but it could be downright eerie otherwise.
In addition to isolation, loneliness, and anxiety, there may be other dangers, too. Beyond the real possibility of hearing loss—listen no more than five minutes at full volume or four and a half hours at 70 percent volume per day, researchers have determined—the broader risk is disconnection from landscape and community altogether. Video game developers, computer manufacturers, and the corporations behind them may well want us to substitute virtual for actual reality (and with today’s threats to environment and people worldwide, who isn’t tempted every now and then?). After all, the less engaged we are the more complacent we become, and complacency breeds a willingness to purchase whatever product is placed before us, to acquiesce to whatever those in power tell us. But it seems to me that being a part of the community’s full landscape requires informed and active participation. And active participation is not possible with earplugs (Zoom town halls and civic activism webinars notwithstanding). Instead, face-to-face communication, sustained discourse, and keen listening must prevail.
*
Back on the edge of the Vermont marsh, without a trail to guide me further in my research, I removed the earbuds. The wider world rushed back, and with it the fen’s own sporadic music. Between the blackbirds, finches, and surprising bass notes of hundreds of frogs I hadn’t heard or seen earlier, it was a symphony indeed. I trudged back to the road, my shoes squelching in the lovely muck, and sat on a stone beside the bridge. The Black River’s current carried leaves and twigs beneath me, but the river also had its own lyric, not quite lapping at the edges but still resonating off the brambly shore and among the reeds.
I sat for a long time savoring the sounds—both natural and artificial, for trucks on a nearby highway held the frequency of waves on a beach—before walking up the road toward the trees. The wind shifted and a clique of birches gossiped, bright green leaves rattling, before I made my way into the forest where the higher pines had their own shushing talk. As the trail shifted from gravel to mud to hard-packed earth, the tempo of my footsteps changed accordingly, here a thud, there a scrape. Behind me a bird called, almost laughing in its nasal song, and I turned just in time to glimpse a nuthatch. Walking uphill through the forest, I saw that with the music playing, I lost not only my sense of hearing but also my sense of time and distance. Clearly, I wasn’t tuned into the landscape in many ways.
My full appreciation for hearing the sounds around me, however, wasn’t set by the blackbirds or frogs or trees, nor the bubbling of small brooks on either side of the trail. Rather, it came all at once, as I approached the edge of the forest, when a single crow’s sudden and rapid cawing made me jump. I couldn’t say who was more startled as the black sentinel circled high before flying off. But it left me silent, ears fine-tuned before I took another step.
A few minutes later I was deep in thought on sound and landscape when a distinct chipping rang from a pear tree in a pasture ahead. The call was from a robin, with flashy auburn breast and charcoal back. His yellow beak moved rapidly with the song, but his bright black eye focused on me—the kind of gaze I use on my daughters when they’re up to no good. His scrutiny had the same effect: we were both leery. I approached slowly, aware of my reputation with robins in these parts. I was sorry for killing the other robin but argued, in my head anyway, that there was little I could do to avoid the collision. At this he looked away and began singing loudly. He called more and more rapidly until I discerned two songs, though I could not see the other robin. Their intensity rose so that the calls could have been mistaken for an electronic synthesizer, keys dancing wildly, frequency and amplitude high. I half expected the ground to begin undulating once again. But the path held and I walked on, into the abounding ballad of the afternoon.
A conversation
with Simmons Buntin
Ander Monson: So much of this book is about communities and connections, or perhaps ecosystems, and systems thinking, a kind of thinking that appears to be on the wane, at least in America, as we continue to disrupt whatever systems we can without a thought for the consequences. I particularly appreciate how you’re able to overlay the ecological on things like the domestic, our family systems, and to think about the many roles you play in these systems: as a father and husband in the family system but also as a writer and a publisher and an editor and a human. How do you think of the essay as a connective technology?
Simmons Buntin: Much of my thinking—as a writer, editor, father, and community member—is informed by my studies in urban planning, which is all about systems thinking. I earned my master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Colorado Denver in the mid-1990s; Denver was such a fascinating urban canvas then. But as a kid I’d grown up in suburban settings. I had access to nature when I lived in Tucson and central Florida, thankfully, but otherwise I knew only very physically (and culturally) segregated environments—distinct residential subdivisions, indistinct strip malls, massive indoor malls, manufacturing districts, and the like. I didn’t think much about the city or the metropolis or the region, and definitely not about the relationship between the built and natural environments, at least beyond what I’d read in mainstream media or experienced exploring Pantano Wash or floating the Ocklawaha River.
But by studying urban planning, and reading the likes of Good City Form by Kevin Lynch and Cities of Tomorrow by Peter Hall (plus, early in my college days, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac), I began not only to think about but also analyze land use. (And as my wife Billie will attest, I became annoyingly critical of many built environments.) Built or natural, regulated or not, it was clear that we were talking about interconnected systems. I became interested not only in what the systems were and how they could be regulated, but also how to design them, literally, thanks to planning studio and then my master’s thesis on redeveloping suburban downtowns using principles of sustainability. And designing, living in, and waxing poetic on ethical, “sustainable” systems is really what I hope to be about.
That’s all a long introduction to say that the essay as a form and as a connective technology is also systems thinking. Essays are driven on the interconnectedness of systems: ideas, imagination, experiences, exploration (research, writing, the conscious, the unconscious, the soul…?). The essay is both process and outcome, like urban planning. Both reveal and create connections, feedback loops, intended and unintended consequences, and relationships across scale. “Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind,” writes Lewis Mumford in The Culture of Cities. “The world is not made of objects. It is made of relationships,” counters Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. Mind, form, relationships, essays—the process and products of systems thinking.
AM: As you told me recently, Trinity University Press, the publisher of Satellite, will be ceasing publication, it appears, in the next year. This is very sad, not just for the fate and availability of your excellent book but for a whole history of great books the press put out over the years. I’m glad to be able to feature an essay from the book here for Tucson Essay Club with a recommendation to our readers to get this book while you can before you won’t be able to anymore, but I’ll also stay hopeful for the possibility that these essays will find another home in the future. I feel like this book is also about precarity and risk and disappearing to some degree, whether it’s the migrating sandhill cranes or the disappearing days of the haunted garage or the fight to save El Tiradito from development and time. How do you think about what the essay does or what the essay is or what the essay is capable of when considering such overwhelming forces like capitalism and development and time?
SB: An undergraduate writing student recently asked how I avoided redundancy when writing new material. I replied: By choosing separate questions to ask—and essaying is all about asking questions, even if we don’t get to an answer. Probably especially if we don’t get to an answer. In a pretty broad sense, that’s how I feel about confronting, through writing creative nonfiction, the overwhelming forces of our time, which of course in one way or another are the overwhelming forces of any time. Or rather, to quote Bruce Springsteen and keep with the city theme, “There’s a darkness on the edge of town,” to which I’ll add: always.
Those forces are both external—capitalism, consumerism, sprawl, pollution, our fucked-up American “leadership”, biodiversity loss, etc.—and internal—health, desire, fear, pain, pleasure, anxiety, love. And how about family, heritage, genetics? It can be a lot. It can be too much. But always it is.
And that’s the essay—or rather, that’s essaying. There are so many questions, big and small, external and internal. It’s why we write nonfiction, I think—to work our way through the forces and, hopefully, keep the darkness at the edge of town, if not far beyond.
That said, what specifically helps me in these times, when it comes to essaying, is choosing two or more seemingly disparate objects or ideas and braiding them. Ever since I read David Quammen in his old Natural Acts columns for Outside magazine—where I recall first seeing the braided essay form—I’ve been a fan, and I find it a powerful way to address the overwhelming forces of the day because they are countered with something different, often smaller or more distinct. In Satellite, for instance, the first essay, “The Sum of All Species,” braids my daughter’s attempt to make a pet of a whiptail lizard she caught in our yard with a young neighbor’s near deadly bite by a rattlesnake. It’s an opportunity not only to narrate those experiences, but to think aloud about designing our communities to co-exist with the more-than-human world, even dangerous animals. In “After,” there are three strands: my daughter’s fall through a plate glass window, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, and the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire in central Oregon’s Mackenzie River valley—an essay of personal and landscape trauma and renewal. “Roundabout” braids traffic circles with the death of my mother, in the process considering what it means in both America and Europe (my mother is from Sweden) to care for an aging, declining parent. Pretty heavy stuff, but made accessible and interesting, I hope, by the braids that ultimately show our interconnectedness even among seemingly/surprisingly disparate things.
AM: All essays start with the self, I think, though I’m struck by how many other people appear in these essays. To see so much of your family and friends in here strikes me as a generous act and also a choral one, a little bit of an unusual approach to essays. It seems like part of what you’re up to is trying to pull other people and their voices into these essays too. I’m thinking about that as a response to the kind of isolation and loneliness that you talk about in “Songbird” and the advent of the iPod and the smartphone, its successor. We are of course in an age of increasing isolation and loneliness again, it feels like, but your essays invite us to think about the larger contexts and ecosystems we are part of. What essayists—either here in Tucson or in the west or the history of the essay—did you find important in the writing of these essays, or that you might want to shout out as being particularly important to you at the moment?
SB: I mentioned both Aldo Leopold and David Quammen earlier—hugely influential in my writing. To that list I’ll add Richard Selzer (his 1974 essay “The Knife,” which I read my first semester in the U of A MFA program, is stunning, foundational) and more historically Henry David Thoreau, plus Wendell Berry, Linda Hogan (who lead an environmental essay workshop I took when in grad school in Colorado), Terry Tempest Williams, Scott Russell Sanders, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Brian Doyle (Children and Other Wild Animals is frickin’ brilliant) Michael Branch (and particularly his delightful Shambhala books How to Cuss in Western, Rants from the Hill, and Raising Wild), and John T. Price. It’s Price’s All is Leaf, in fact, that helped me visualize Satellite as an essay collection that could include disparate pieces and yet still work as a whole.
At the moment—and it’s a moment that’s going to last in all the best ways—I am blown away by the books of two Tucson essayists: Wedding of the Foxes by Katherine Larson and The Exit is the Entrance, by Lydia Paar. I read Wedding of the Foxes just after it published last year, and am just finishing up The Exit is the Entrance. Damn!—these are searing, beautiful, pained, poignant, altogether amazing essay collections. I had been working slowly on a review of Katherine’s book for Terrain.org, but there’s such an interesting, rich, and unintended connection between the two, I’m going to write a single review to cover both, so keep an eye out for that over at the mothership.
AM: I also want to make sure we talk about the ongoing project of Terrain.org, the magazine that you run that’s more than 25 years old now, and that we both like to talk about how you started it only a couple months before I started DIAGRAM. It’s at least a little weird that two of the three oldest online literary magazines in the freaking world are both based in Tucson, and, as I’ve come to understand, the third, Brevity, will soon be helmed by Zoe Bossiere, also a Tucsonan, after Dinty W. Moore hands it off. 25+ years is a long time to be doing this! Fucking props, man. I know well how it’s a lot to balance editing and publishing with your own writing and the day jobs and the families and so forth, and I feel like you should feel very proud of the magazine and its long legacy, its importance in the literary world, and its longevity too. I feel like it provides a gathering place for writers, for one thing, to maybe feel a little less alone. Mainly I’m wondering how you think about that work versus what you want your own essays or poems to do?
SB: Thanks, brother, and right back at you. And we’re sitting at 29 years now, right? Crazy. Terrain.org is a labor of love, to be sure. I like to say that besides my babies, it’s my baby. My wife likes to say it’s my mistress. We’re both right, alas. And there’s no question that my time and energies working on the magazine—ten hours some weeks, 20 or 30 others, on top of a full-time gig as senior director of marketing and communications for the U of A’s College of Information Science—is at the expense of my writing. Indeed, one reason Satellite took nearly two decades to complete is because of the time I spent instead on Terrain.org. I had to step away from the journal for a couple weeks here and there to draft the final essays of the book. And that’s okay. It’s okay that it takes away from my own writing, because I believe that Terrain.org is how I’m making my biggest and most important difference in the world. I like to joke when introducing the journal to folks that we are saving the world one pixel at a time, given our focus on place, climate, and justice. That feels right, even if it’s just a small sliver of the world.
So of course the work we publish—a mix of literary and more technical contributions, including Unsprawl community case studies—matters. But what really sustains me is the community we’ve built—the all-volunteer family of editors and editorial board members, as well as our contributors. Conferences and bookfairs and such are all good and fine for introducing the journal to new readers and prospective contributors, but for me the real value—especially as an online journal and virtual organization—is connecting in person with fellow editors and contributors. If writing is a community sport—and I argue that it is, at least after the first draft—then editing is doubly so.
So I think the editing work is pretty closely aligned with my own writing—both in the content (place, culture, heritage, environment) and in context (community). It’s fair to say, because of how much I read for Terrain.org, that the editing also informs my own writing (it’s how I was introduced to the aforementioned influences of Mike Branch and John Price, for instance, as well as essayists like CMarie Fuhrman, David Rothenberg, Sean Enfield, Nick Neely, Pam Houston, and Joe Wilkins).
One day I may be able to retire from the paid work to continue editing Terrain.org and have more time for my own writing. Until then, I’ll need to take the occasional writing vacation from my constant editing “hobby”.
My question to you is—how in the hell do you do it all? I mean, DIAGRAM is epic and your writing both prolific and phenomenal. Not to mention all that teaching, New Michigan Press, Tucson Essay Club, karaoke, readings. A family. Sign me up for some of your endurance!
AM: Last question I like to ask in these is to invite you to recommend a place in Tucson that you love for whatever reason to our readers. What place has had a particular resonance for you this year or these past few years?
SB: From 2000 to 2018 we lived in the New Urbanist community of Civano in southeast Tucson. Satellite is largely the story of raising a family and building community there. In 2018, we moved closer to the university, first Sam Hughes, then the Miramonte neighborhood for five years. Partly that was because we wanted to live in a more urban setting, as we did our last couple years in Denver before moving down to Tucson. But last year, we moved back to Civano—to a different house on a bluff overlooking Pantano Wash and the Rincon Mountains. Our back porch, the backyard, and that awe-inspiring view, particularly as the Rincons drink in the last of the day’s light… that’s as much resonance as I could hope for. The stress evaporates, and it’s a great place to share a drink. So come on over, friends. Let’s admire the alpenglow and toast that beautiful satellite the moon rising over Mica Mountain.
Stay hydrated, all.
Ander
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