A Soup Recipe: Questions and Interpretive Instructions for a Present Process and Future Meal

By Emily Hilliard and Rebecca Wright

In several springtimes past, we taught together and ran the communal kitchen at a literature program in the woods of New England. Every night, with a group of college students, we cooked for sixty students and teachers. This interpretive recipe is based on that experience: teaching students cooking skills that they could apply not just to that night’s meal, but to all future meals. The hope was that cooking might become for them what it is for us: a mindful and sensory process for the cook that engenders a future offering for a collective; the power to make something that was not there before, and to share it.

Read on via Ecotone

Honey from the Lion: A Companion Soundscape

“As the holidays approach, so does the time to curl up with beautiful and necessary books like Honey from the Lion, Matthew Neil Null’s debut novel from Lookout Books. The book, about a rebellion at a logging company in the West Virginia Alleghenies, is both lyrical and suspenseful, an elegy to the ecological devastation and human tragedy behind the Gilded Age.

Our solstice gift to you is an annotated soundscape for the book, expertly produced by folklorist, writer, media producer, and Ecotone contributor Emily Hilliard. Listen to the sounds of crows, trains, and fiddles and imagine yourself right into the world of Honey from the Lion.”

Read on and listen via Ecotone

Heavenly Work: The Fleeting Legacy of the Shakers →

Ten years have passed since my first visit to Canterbury Shaker Village, but walking again past the apple trees and old wooden buildings, I’m struck by the same feeling. In this small settlement nestled among New Hampshire’s green, rolling hills, a serenity seeps into my bones and muscles, compelling me to walk slowly, deliberately, with reverence. The Shakers believed they were creating and living in a heaven on earth, and that belief feels tangible here, a surviving legacy. But the sentiment also implies a tension—between permanence and transience, between mortal and eternal existence—that is itself ephemeral, difficult to grasp.

Read on in Ecotone