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**Pitches due:** May 1, 2025
**Complete works due:** May 15, 2025
In Volume 3, No. 2, we train our focus onto the legacy of catastrophe and catastrophic thinking itself. We invite writers, scientists, poets, and artists to submit pitches and work that resonates with the theme in accordance with the description below.
Appalachia is no stranger to the trauma left in the wake of catastrophe. Since the colonization and settlement of our region, these hills have witnessed unspeakable pain on a scale that is hard to understand, and impossible to quantify: genocide, removal, enslavement, extraction, poverty, development, addiction, pollution, incarceration, climate catastrophe, and the list goes on.
In recent days, months, and years, Appalachia has faced serial catastrophic events stemming from anthropogenic climate change and the abuse of our lands. In the months since Helene alone, we have experienced more and more flooding throughout Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. In Western North Carolina, debris left by Helene provided the kindling necessary to fuel high-intensity wildfires that consumed thousands of acres. We are living in the Age of Catastrophe.
In a world where the lashings never seem to halt—a world that relentlessly pushes us to return to the normalcy of work in the aftermath of worsening and more frequent catastrophes—finding the space to grieve becomes an exercise in futility. In a world where the invisible hand of the free market scrapes timeless soils from the earth like wax—a world where ancient woodlands are sold for a dice roll—there seems to be no place to hide, no place to nourish our wounds. This is Hell.
In his book entitled The Writing of Disaster, a potent work of fragmentary writing after the Holocaust, French theorist Maurice Blanchot opens thusly:
“The disaster ruins everything, all while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; ‘I’ am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me—an other than I who passively becomes other. There is no reaching the disaster. Out of reach is he whom it threatens, whether from afar or up close, it is impossible to say: the infiniteness of the threat has in some way broken every limit. We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which does not come—that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.
The disaster is separate; that which is most separate.”
The disaster, for Blanchot, is not a reference to the point of impact. Rather, it is the infinite aftermath, the persistent stickiness, the inescapable sense of threat associated with catastrophic undergoing—that which is most separate, trauma.
The nuance of Blanchot’s writing, reinforced by many others practicing in the field of trauma studies, brings clarity to the limitations of the belief that catastrophe ends at the point of impact—a core principle in capitalist society. When we neglect to slow down enough to acknowledge the traumatic remainder of catastrophe, to honor and tend to it, the conditions for catastrophe abide.
If Blanchot’s writing helps provide an affective and conceptual account of the persistent trauma associated with disaster, contemporary author Sophie Strand widens the range of possibility for this persistent trauma using metabolic imagery in her recently published book The Body is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Hope, Healing, and the Human. Like Blanchot, Strand does not envision trauma as an impurity we can eradicate—in contradiction to the obsessive pursuit in contemporary society. Rather, Strand envisions the persistent traumatic wound as a portal that, if we choose to pass through it, offers the metabolic compounds necessary to construct new mythologies, kinships, and geographies of care.
One of the core goals we have set as a publication is to confront the apocalyptic imaginary that saturates contemporary discourse. This is not a simple task, and has only become more challenging in a world where environmental decline, genocide, and the acceleration of repressive governance are the norm. As we have reflected on ecological grief throughout this project, it has become apparent that the persistent trauma associated with capitalism and empire is a primary factor clouding our capacity to maintain a stable vision of a future without apocalypse. As Blanchot says, “We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future.”
How can we begin to account for the trauma leveled upon our collective psyches and the lands that we share? What steps must be taken to protect our communities, children, and lands from further affliction? How do we ensure that the legacies of catastrophe—the distortions of catastrophic thinking, eroded lands, collapse of trust, poisoned waters—do not thwart our capacity for hope, recovery, and transformation?