Issue 2

Just as Seneca and I were embarking on developing this project a few years ago, I left my career job in book publishing. I was still shuddering with burnout, unconvinced that art mattered very much, or, if it did, that it could really matter ethically. As we stepped into creating the first issue, I obsessed over how to build a good art thing. I asked my former colleagues, people I admired, and my loved ones, what to do, how to pay people for art, and how to make something like this a force of good, both economically and socially. I was scared all the way through the publication of our first issue.

And then you showed up. Our readers, our community, our people, our people’s people. The sweetness of it swarmed me like bees. We paid our contributors. We paid our logo designer. We paid our printer. It wasn’t a perfect art thing.

But it worked. Enough.

I have lately been thinking hard about uncertainty. Part of the success of Issue One, for me, was in letting go of the idea of building something static or certain, and aiming our project instead at navigation. In opening ourselves up to the likelihood of directional change and the unknown.

With that, welcome to Issue Two of The Thalweg. A thalweg is the deepest part of a canyon, the primary navigable channel of a waterway. This publication hopes to honor the idea that the creative metabolism of community is part thalweg—the idea that art can move us toward navigating the unnavigable by aiming us at the deepest channel.

David Whyte’s poem “Not Taken” considers walking on one side of a river or another. It’s one of my favorites and ends like this:

You were in the end,

never just looking on,

but always the river moving between

and the song of the water,

holding the flowing of ways together.

Relatedly, at least to me, Ursula Le Guin writes the following in her book on writing, Steering the Craft:

“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict . . . Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.”

Here, as in Issue One, you’ll again find the work of folks who, in some fashion, make their living outside: farmers, educators, artists, guides, writers, biologists, and activists. Some of the work included in this issue deals with concealment and the unseen. Some of it reckons with close-ups and illusions. Some deals with precariousness. Some with metamorphosis and evolution.

There is so much uncertainty in our lives, lately and always. I’ve grown tired of keeping it at bay. I’m starting to invite it into my mind and my heart and my work. All of the things Le Guin has listed seem, to me, to be partly made of uncertainty, or at least made of the act of letting it in. What if lucidity was not the aim of our lives and work? What if we made room for other kinds of development? For the unintegrated narratives of our brains? For art as metabolism instead of resolution? What if we honored these other, less certain modalities of creation? Honored evolution by way of dis-integration, erosion, or decay? Honored being the river itself, rather than being on either bank?

And here is the thing I am interested in that I hope The Thalweg does: collect work that does not aim itself at conclusions or certainty but that holds the flowing of ways together. The Thalweg is interested in stories about pianos in little Alaskan towns. In paintings of foxes with beaded houses inside them, in undrowning, in bird zines, in quilts as landscape, in firefly nights and cicada gravy, in being tucked into one star.

Last summer, I wrote this poem for my friend who had helped me navigate a profoundly unnavigable season of my life. I have lately found it to apply to this undertaking, too. It puts words to my gratitude for this project, for everyone who contributes, who reads, who patiently listens to me as I tear up reading “Camellias, Instead” aloud on the last day of every river trip. I offer it to this issue, and to you reading it:

WHAT IT MEANS TO FIND YOUR HANDS

I woke up and couldn’t find my hands

And so you took them in yours and showed me,

Finger by finger, what it means to

Rest my palms on a river swelling in the rain

Unfurl the high water numbness of my too-firm grip

Reach for the bottom, for the rocks that live

In perpetual submersion.

You told me a fact you know about hands:

They are both equally water.

—Dory Athey, Co-Founder + Managing Editor, 2022