When the world feels like too much, take your grief into the woods.
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues.
This issue’s featured writer, Gina Rae La Cerva, is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and award-winning writer. Her book Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food was recommended by the New York Times for their 2020 Summer Reading List. Gina’s search for “the last untamed food” began after she noticed an increase in the price of wild-caught foods. “Foods that had been associated with subsistence and poverty for most of human history” had suddenly become luxuries, and she set out on a quest to understand why. Wild Spring Immunity Tea was written after a recent forage near Gina’s home in Santa Fe, and the piece is accompanied by a photograph of her finds.
Esther Pearl Watson’s series “Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings” is a collection of 100 small paintings created in the tradition of ex-votos. Esther has been working in this style for several years; prior to the pandemic, many of her paintings include visits from spaceships and alien visitors. Esther chose the Carpenter’s quirky, creepy version of “The Rainbow Connection” to accompany her painting, The Stay at Home Order Starts at Midnight. She writes, “What was heading our way? We had no idea how to protect our families. Looking back, it is easy to see some of our early rushes to the store to stock up on toilet paper or disinfectant wipes were desperate acts of an anxious society.”
We’re thrilled to share new work from our current team of curated writers and artists. If you love what you’re seeing, please share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back next month.
Yours,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
“When the world feels like too much, take your grief into the woods. Bring a basket and a pair of sharp scissors.”
— from Wild Spring Immunity Tea by Featured Writer Gina Rae La Cerva
Issue 7 Highlights
Wild Spring Immunity Tea by Featured Writer Gina Rae La Cerva
“When the world feels like too much, take your grief into the woods. Bring a basket and a pair of sharp scissors.
Gather over-wintered rose hips from the bare stalks of wild roses. They will taste jammy and sweet, leathery on the tongue, like Nature’s candy. Sit on the ground and eat a few. Spit out the many seeds as a prayer for new flowers.
Gently pull off wrinkled juniper berries, leftovers from last fall. They will sound like hail as they drop into your basket…”
Read Wild Spring Immunity Tea.
Read Khôra
LEIGH HOPKINS 