Detail of a mixed-media haiku created by Benjamin at the Metamorffosis Festival, Bangor, UK.
Teaching and Practice

Creative Connections with Rivers: A Toolkit for Learning and Collaboration

We are three people who draw on research and practice to create arts-based learning, engagement materials, and interventions with and for diverse audiences. We purposefully integrate and apply different artistic methods in non-artistic disciplines, such as ecology and environmental conservation, physics, climate science, and human health. We came to know each other and work together through a four-year project that was awarded to the lead author and focused on rivers in a fragmented world. Our project had local and global foci on rivers, and many of the activities, including those shared in this article, were designed with and for people in the United Kingdom but with a view that the ideas could be adapted and applied in other contexts.

Reeds and shoreline. Photo by Renzo D'souza on Unsplash.
Introduction

Introduction to Issue 24 | Layers

The cover image for this issue is a meditation on layers. In its two-dimensional form, it reveals dark but reflective water, distinct aquatic vegetation, an autumnal shoreline, and powerlines stretching across the deepening blue in the sky. The image reveals the layers of the visible place (the water, plants, and sky), but also evokes the layers that are invisible…

Pa’ashi in April 2023. Image courtesy of the author.
Feature (Peer Review)

The Return of Pa’ashi: Colonial Unknowing and California’s Tulare Lake

The early morning sun shone off the water. I parked at the “Flooding Ahead” sign and walked past deep gouges in the ground. The teeth marks of a bulldozer’s blade were still visible where it had dug in to strengthen the walls of an earthen berm along the edge of what was once a ditch and is now simply a slough meandering along a larger expanse of lake…

Sunrise over the pines and the bay. Image courtesy of the author.
Geographies

Morning on Chesapeake

I slide my kayak into the tranquil waters of the Chesapeake Bay as the first glow of sunrise is appearing behind me in the eastern sky. The bay is quiet today, waters smooth as glass as only happens a few times during the summer. There are many mornings when the winds and the tidal currents conspire to make it impossible for a small craft like a kayak…

Detail of the cover of Harry Saddler's book 'A Clear Flowing Yarra.'
In Review

Seals, Swimmers, Bat Carers

Author Harry Saddler’s book on Melbourne’s Yarra River is an engaging account of his years exploring its native species and human communities. He acknowledges the river’s First Nations name of Birrarung, writing with a boyish enthusiasm. At times I felt his emotion jumping out of the pages, almost channelling David Attenborough’s passion for species and the environment…

An aerial view of Northrop Mall, part of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ East Bank area. Image courtesy of Ben Franske.
Teaching and Practice

The River at our Doorstep: Student Projects Tell Stories of the Mississippi River

The Mississippi River, by all accounts one of the great rivers of the world, flows through the middle of the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. During fall semester, 2022, the University Honors Program continued a long-standing commitment to introducing students to the river at their doorstep by offering an Honors Seminar…