Our regular contributor Rui Carvalho invites readers and contributors to submit poetry to the next annual Nature Writing Contest.
Our contest, Nature 2025-2026, is a new opportunity that we, as organizers, create to reach the rest of the world. Every Contest is a challenge for authors participating and to people that make it happen. This year we invite all authors to write poetry about:
(i) Flowers;
(ii) Trees and wind;
(iii) Water;
(iv) Nature Conservation;
(v) Turtles;
(vi) Love for people and nature;
(vii) Hope and Happiness.
Rules and submission information here.
Also, one of our regular contributors, Jaylan Salah, whom I’ve known for nearly 20 years, is an Egyptian national and a feminist film critic in the Arab world. She’s spoken virtually on panels at professional conferences and has a few books of poetry published.
Her father, who has been a consistent and encouraging presence in her life, has heart disease and needs a lifesaving bypass surgery. In Egypt people can get this done for $3,500 USD even without insurance, so she’s put together a GoFundMe to raise this. She’d appreciate any contributions or people resharing the fundraiser.
Fundraiser by Shadan Larki : Help My Father Receive Life-Saving Open-Heart Surgery
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The Wildness of Being: Voices Against the Beige World
Across these pages runs a stubborn, beautiful refusal to become beige. The writers and artists gathered here confront conformity, grief, displacement, history, education, love, work, politics, memory, and the natural world, yet again and again they discover that the deepest form of resistance is simply to remain fully alive. The Wildness of Being is their shared territory: a place where imagination challenges obedience, memory challenges erasure, and tenderness survives even when the world seems determined to make tenderness impossible.
Olive Springman opens this territory with a determination to remain rooted while staying militantly imaginative in a world demanding conformity, beige normalcy, and patriotic duplication. Her stance establishes the collection’s essential tension: belonging need not mean surrendering individuality. That tension extends into Suleiman Mansir Gado’s essay, which applies Jean Piaget’s theory of childhood development to practical observations of children, reminding us that human beings begin life as curious interpreters of their surroundings and that education must respect that developing intelligence.
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand carries the educational question further. In his reflections on improving education, he asks how schools can encourage original thought rather than manufacture students like products on a factory line. Sobirova Husniyabonu Axrorjon qizi similarly outlines effective pedagogical techniques for foreign-language learning, while Iroda Sobirova considers human capital and its relationship to broader economic growth. Together, these contributions suggest that education is not merely an economic instrument or a mechanism for producing conformity; at its best, it is an investment in human possibility.
That possibility also appears in the work of young professionals defining themselves through their own emerging identities. Alamgir Hossain Raj presents a self-portrait as an emerging Bangladeshi journalist, musician, and digital content creator, while Shinha Sarder offers a profile of himself as an aspiring Bangladeshi musician and entrepreneur. Kamolabonu Inomova presents her research as an emerging medical scientist on the use of artificial intelligence in the diagnosis of stroke. Their portraits capture lives still being assembled—careers, ambitions, identities, and futures that resist the idea that a person must fit neatly into one predetermined role.
Dr. Jernail Singh’s career journey, discussed in his interview with writer Rupa Rao, reinforces this spirit. He argues that there is no secret formula for success, only honest work, dedication, and creativity. Alan Catlin offers a grittier version of the same struggle: his poetic speaker is worn down by grunt work but cannot quit, partly because he needs the money and partly because continuing to work is proof that he still exists. Between Anand’s faith in purposeful labor and Catlin’s exhausted persistence lies a fundamental question: how do we preserve a sense of self inside systems that can make people feel interchangeable?
For some contributors, authenticity is inseparable from resistance. Bill Tope’s short story imagines love and the courage to be one’s true self transcending age, gender, and even conventional definitions of what it means to be human. Young-eun Kang’s pieces explore the complexity of personhood and the many facets we contain and radiate to our worlds. Christopher Bernard’s latest installment of Otherwise explores choice under impossible conditions and the struggle to keep the idea of alternatives to oppressive regimes alive. Stephen Betts’ ekphrastic poems continue Marcel Duchamp’s wit and playful satire through another medium. Ismatullayeva Maxliyo discusses a study looking into a protocol weaning toddlers off of excessive screen use and helping them learn to think for themselves and engage with others. Yaqubjonova Madinabonu To’lqinbek qizi urges us to moderate our screen time and maintain our attention by reading paper books. Bobomurodova Gulzina Fazliddin qizi discusses how, while social media and artificial intelligence may be useful tools, we should not let them replace our humanity. These pieces insist that freedom begins in imagination—the ability to conceive that another way of living might exist.
Duane Vorhees discovers a similar freedom in the ordinary, suggesting that the fantastical may be present directly inside mundane life if we learn to look at familiar things with a slant. Mark Young takes that principle onto the page, playing with maps and opening new possibilities through text, line, and color. Adam Fieled’s prose poems turn toward the complicated lives and roles of creative artists, examining what it means to make art while inhabiting the many identities, expectations, and pressures attached to being an artist. Together, these works turn perception itself into an act of rebellion.
Jerome Berglund takes a darker route. His dense, free-associative poems weave images of conspiracy and corruption into a critique of society’s normalization of evil. Adjekpagbon Blessed Mudiaga, meanwhile, speaks truth and vision from within the specific realities, struggles, and beauty of his own time and place. J.J. Campbell writes from a specific posture: middle-aged, weathered, romantic under a crust of cynicism, aware of death’s proximity. Ahmed Miqdad mourns the ongoing violence in Gaza. These works demonstrate that resistance need not have a single voice or aesthetic. It may emerge as surrealism, social criticism, local testimony, fragmented association, or uncompromising witness.
History becomes another battleground against erasure. Charos Ismoilova honors the strength and perseverance of her Uzbek homeland across 35 years of modern-day independence. Shokhida Nazirova’s essay declares that Uzbekistan’s reforms have succeeded in creating a generation that is educated, globally confident, and deeply patriotic, while Sabrina Ravshanova encourages modern Uzbek youth not to become obsessed with the vapid aspects of global consumer culture but instead to live up to the dreams of their ancestors. Zarnigor Salayeva Bekmamad qizi stresses the importance of preserving the ancient Uzbek fortress and city of Katkala. Eshniyozova Sevinch Jumanazar qizi discusses how to understand various cultures’ contributions to syncretic literature, teasing out the long and varied cultural history that has inspired many works. These contributions place modern identity in conversation with history, asking how a culture can enter the future without abandoning the memory that made the future possible.
Shokhida Nazirova’s gratitude for her mother’s consistent care and Berdinazarova Jasmina Mirshod qizi’s celebration of her mother’s steady, devoted love bring history down to the intimate scale of family. Their tributes are echoed by To‘raqulova Dilso‘z Anvar qizi, who resolves to mourn the loss of love while continuing to live, and by Yongbo Ma, whose poems ask how one lives after love ends: by memorializing, ritualizing, and honoring what has been lost.
Love throughout these pages is rarely simple. John Dorsey’s poetry traces the tender outlines of romantic longing and unrequited love. Perwaiz Shaharyar mourns a dead love while remaining suspended in grief and still wondering whether a future might be possible. Mykyta Ryzhykh presents love as a slow, beautiful, ultimately fatal suffocation. Faleeha Hassan’s essay and poem, translated into English by Hussein Nasser Jabr, embrace love in all its contradictions: whatever human beings make of it, whether exalted or ridiculous, sacred or sweaty. These writers refuse the polished mythology of romance and instead explore its tenderness, absurdity, danger, persistence, and aftermath.
Randi Rohde approaches love through an especially painful maternal memory. She reflects on the baby teeth of her child that she saved but never shared, realizing that what was intended as a treasured relic of childhood innocence would have been cruelly overshadowed by the adult teeth violently taken by cancer treatment. The keepsake becomes a meditation on how memory can preserve both love and unbearable pain.
Other contributors examine suffering without allowing it to have the final word. Steven Croft’s literary review of William Walsh’s Haircuts for the Dead describes a protagonist who confronts trauma but refuses to let trauma define her. Jacques Fleury’s “Hills and Valleys” follows a painful yet transformative inner journey through life’s external hardships and internal contradictions toward the discovery and embrace of an authentic self. Claire Photini Karamouzis Chalkias meditates on living with depression as a continual balancing act between despair and defiance, frozen numbness and the dangerous courage of confronting what lies beneath. Philip Butera’s poem is a sustained meditation on existential acedia: the specific kind of sadness that doesn’t come from any single loss but from the gap between what life promises and what living delivers. Isaac Dominion Aju speaks to the responsibility and ability of writers and artists to empathize with, hold, and transmute pain. Nedaa Al-Durubi’s two poems trace an equally painful arc, from a young soul wishing for death rather than endurance to one who has fought countless battles and still wonders whether anything has truly changed.
Yet survival repeatedly becomes a form of creation. Eva Petropoulou Lianou’s poetic cycle moves from disillusionment toward faith in the resilience of the human spirit. Abigail George transforms continual unfulfilled cravings into a guide and a path for helping others. Kushi Nanayakkara insists that peace is not merely the exhaustion of angry words or the emptying of bullets but an active choice that must be planned, written, and released into the world. Thi Lan Anh Tran and Musharraf Hussain make that commitment collective, offering a unified call for the world to choose and learn peace. Stephen Jarrell Williams’ poetry shows the Earth itself healing after a human-caused apocalypse, coming back not exactly as before but something new and different. Mahbub Alam’s piece laments a homeland remembered as beautiful but irrecoverably lost.
Bahtiyar Hidayet’s dark humor provides a devastating counterpoint, showing how, for many displaced and impoverished refugees, happiness can seem possible only in death. His poem exposes the terrible distance between abstract ideals of happiness and the realities of people denied security, home, and dignity. Joshua W. J. Brown similarly turns memory into a form of mourning in his elegy for the burning of Zanzibar Tavern, the historic Toronto strip club at 359 Yonge Street. For him, the fire destroyed more than a building: it erased a working-class, unpolished piece of the city’s memory, a place that had housed decades of lives, labor, loneliness, and desire atop an old morgue. Both works ask what happens when places and people deemed marginal are allowed to disappear without witnesses.
Ri Hossain’s satire attacks another form of social disappearance: the male intellectual who imagines himself exceptionally important while objectifying women and his poetic subjects and fearing humility and genuine intimacy. Anna Zanidaki’s poem explores the ethics of seeing, and the refusal to be seen on any terms but one’s own. Saeed Koushan confronts the inculcation of shame in children for natural joy and exploration. In different registers, both writers challenge systems that teach people to distrust their own humanity.
The natural world offers an alternative vocabulary. Dr. Muhammad Ishaq Abbasi, in a piece translated from Urdu by Neelum Waqar, paints a quiet summer evening in which the speaker climbs a hill, eats wild jambolan fruits, watches monkeys and a peacock, hears a cuckoo, and feels a light rain. Brian Barbeito finds joy in ordinary days in his garden among deer, cardinals, raccoons, basil, and raspberries. Christina Chin’s haibun celebrates a moment of pure, adorable happiness with a soft puppy. Jerrice Baptiste’s art blossoms into another colorful, joyful flower.
Ravshanova Shakhina Rustamovna celebrates Uzbekistan’s seasons and changing weather. Egor Cherkasov reflects on how meteorologist Luke Howard’s naming and categorizing ethereal clouds opens the door for a quieter kind of reverence — the little god of an afternoon, a birdhouse, a piece of bread, a truth that fits in your palm. In poet Alan Patrick Traynor’s new release The Silence of the Desert, the quiet of the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains becomes not an absence but a place for listening, the space between notes where love and truth become audible. Ali Hasnain echoes this theme with his short story where a speaker rediscovers the value of seemingly “unproductive” moments. Ike Boat celebrates the work and seeks partners for a youth outdoor soccer program in Ghana. These works remind us that wonder need not be spectacular. Sometimes resistance to despair begins with noticing what is alive.
Yeon Myung-Ji gives that natural resilience a more precarious form: cows and sheep huddle together, creatures confronting indifference and uncertainty with something resembling grace. Sayani Mukherjee likewise turns toward the earth, finding solace not as an escape from ruin but as an active contrast to it—something that lives and sings despite destruction.
Sheila Murphy’s poetic response to David Chorlton’s painting occupies a quieter border between nature and consciousness. The painting offers a serene, painterly landscape populated by birds, a mountain, a palm, a hawk, a pear, and a pitcher, while gently wondering whether this stillness possesses its own interior life at night. Against that imagined wholeness stands the speaker’s fractured, restless inner world. The landscape becomes a mirror: apparently still outside, tumultuous within.
Patrick Sweeney’s monostich poems create another kind of landscape. Taken together, they seem to form a lyric sequence or poem in fragments, circling transience, inheritance, and the collision between the natural world and human-made structures of meaning. Mark Young’s maps, meanwhile, transform geography into possibility. Both poets show that landscape is never merely scenery. It is memory, structure, history, inheritance, and imagination.
Susie Gharib expands the sense of loss into an encompassing elegy. Her poetry collection reads as one multilayered lament for a world losing its substance to surveillance, noise, and decay. Against this erosion, the collection repeatedly proposes acts of attention: remembering, observing, imagining, preserving, creating, loving, and refusing to accept the given world as the only possible world.
Even humor becomes part of that resistance. Noah Berlatsky lightens the atmosphere with a brief, amusing observation about perennial skin problems, while Duane Vorhees finds the fantastic lurking in everyday existence. Humor does not cancel suffering; rather, it gives the imagination room to breathe inside it.
The same mixture of gravity and play appears in Mesfakus Salahin’s portrait of the human mind, whose stubbornness can be simultaneously heroic and tragic. We cling to beliefs because persistence can help us survive, yet that same persistence can prevent transformation. This paradox runs throughout the collection. To remain rooted can be courageous, but roots can also become chains. To preserve memory can honor the past, but memory can also imprison us. To mourn can be necessary, but mourning must sometimes become the road back into life.
That is why To‘raqulova Dilso‘z Anvar qizi’s resolve to mourn and continue living matters so deeply beside Yongbo Ma’s rituals of remembrance. Grief does not require forgetting. It requires learning how to carry what cannot be changed. Faleeha Hassan’s expansive vision of love, John Dorsey’s longing, Perwaiz Shaharyar’s suspended grief, and Mykyta Ryzhykh’s suffocating romance all become variations on the same question: what do we do with what has transformed us?
The collection’s answer is not uniform, but it is persistent: we make something from it.
We teach. We write. We paint. We remember. We preserve old cities. We profile ourselves into existence. We question oppressive systems. We challenge shame. We garden. We listen to birds. We laugh about our skin. We honor mothers. We mourn lost children and lost lovers. We imagine alternatives. We choose peace. We keep creating.
Olive Springman’s determination to stay imaginatively rooted therefore becomes an apt emblem for the entire gathering. These contributors do not deny the pressures of conformity, grief, violence, economic hardship, displacement, decay, or historical erasure. Instead, they answer those pressures with multiplicity.
Their worlds contain Piaget and Katkala, mothers and refugees, maps and mountains, musicians and journalists, factory-like classrooms and stubborn brains, baby teeth and adult wounds, puppies and sheep, gardens and strip clubs, dead lovers and living possibilities. They contain ethereal melodies and guttural growls, as Alex S. Johnson’s interview with musician Leila Abdul-Rauf makes especially vivid: her music enacts an internal conflict between ethereal melody and guttural growl, between psychoanalytic self-examination and geopolitical rage. That contradiction is not a flaw. It is the sound of a complex human being refusing to simplify herself for anyone.
In the end, The Wildness of Being is not about escaping the world. It is about looking at the world more intensely and refusing to accept its first definition of us. The fantastical may hide inside the mundane. Peace may begin as a sentence. A map may become an opening. A garden may become a sanctuary. A ruined building may become a memory. A mother’s care may become an inheritance. A dead love may become a ritual. A painful past may become a source of compassion. A classroom may become a place where original minds are liberated rather than standardized.
And a world determined to make us beige may discover, despite itself, that we remain gloriously, stubbornly, irreducibly alive.
