Dear Reader,
Since publishing our debut issue in June, the dust has settled and we’ve enjoyed the opportunity to assess the direction of Contra Viento and further establish our project. Some updates: we hired the incredible Claire Meuschke as poetry editor, whose three poems you can find in Issue One; we hunted for grants and welcomed several generous donations (if you’d like to add your name to that list, our Donate page is here); and we introduced Open Range, our home for more frequent postings from rangelands and across the American West.
As always, we are committed to exploring the complex substance of rangelands — those massive yet marginal spaces — and showcasing the work which emerges therein. We remain fascinated by how people fashion livelihoods in concert with these landscapes. And we continue to be delighted by the wide range of art and writing that surprises, dissects, reframes, and undermines.
Our second issue has an unintended focus on the desert: or, more specifically, the lens through which we understand the desert as such. You’ll find a terrific analysis of sand qua glass in Samuel Rafael Barber’s breathless short story. You’ll feel the selfsame sand shift beneath your feet while watching Ben Bigelow’s speculative virtual-reality film, The Desert; or while following the mirage-spawned whale in Kim Parko’s prose; or while attempting to reconfigure Paul Henderson’s subtractive collages; or while gasping through Brandon Shimoda’s poems, four of which are titled, again, THE DESERT.
Elsewhere, we have poetry from the US-Mexico border and El Salvador; intimate essays on silence in Wyoming and dairies in South Dakota; fiction about sage grouse, oil, and jailbreak; sculptures of decay, vivid photographs of California’s Cuyama Valley, and a revealing interview about image-making in the rural West.
Thanks for journeying with us. We hope you enjoy!
Sean McCoy
Executive Editor