This year, at Chatham’s Summer Community of Writers, guest faculty member and Rachel Carson Visiting Scholar, Kerri Arsenault, began her masterclass by asking students the question, “What place are you from and what do people get wrong about that place?” The goal of the exercise was to upend stereotypes and students understood the assignment right from the jump. One Floridian among us bemoaned the “Florida man” memes and reminded the room that her state was more than alligators and Disney World. Several students talked about how the project of their writing was to illuminate the marvelous complexity of the real people and communities that comprise Appalachia, from South Carolina to southern New York. As the author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, an environmental memoir about growing up in a small town in Maine where life revolved around a paper mill, Arsenault understands the problems inherent in essentializing a place and its citizenry. We both are and are not reflections of the landscape of our origins. Some of us can put a pin on a map that points to their place. Others, like yours truly, have a harder time identifying a latitude and longitude to call home. I was born in Yonkers, NY, but it was never my home. On the other hand, I lived for only a few years in New Haven, CT, and when I return to that city on occasion, I feel filled with familiarity and a profound sense of welcome and belonging even now, twenty-odd years after I moved away. It is most certainly one of my places.

The Fourth River bills itself as a journal of nature and place-based writing, and having edited it for the last ten years, I can tell you that the majority of the work we see come through the queue is more obviously connected to the nature part of that mission statement. Of course, they are not truly separate ideas—this poem about birds goes in this bucket, this essay about coastal erosion goes in this one—but I wondered what, if anything, might look different if we put out a call that doubled down on the place part. The result is so many pins in so many map locations like Kane, PA., Bumpass, VA., Osh, Kyrgyzstan, St. Edmunds, England, a dump in Ester, Alaska, the terminus of a glacier, a grave, Café Duck Butt, and Pittsburgh, PA. What happens in/out/because of those places I will leave for you to learn by traveling into these precise and elegant pieces we are so proud to include in the journal. Have a great trip!

My thanks to all the writers featured herein, and to the readers who help locate us in our mission (Can a mission be a place?) to publish the best writing that explores the intersection of nature, place and identity.

Bravo to the student editorial staff and to the genre editors for their collaboration and collective keen eye. Special thanks to Art Editor, Rachael Yahn, Head Copyeditor, Bailey Sims and Managing Editor, Lauren Hunter for providing the journal with beauty, structure and leadership this semester. Thank you to Chatham’s School of Arts, Science and Business for their continued support of the journal and to the walls, hallways and rooms of Lindsay House, the place where I am writing this letter, The Fourth River’s birthplace. A warm and welcoming place to read and write and be.

Sheila Squillante

Executive Editor