The national literary journal, About Place, has just released its special online “On Freedom” issue, guest edited by two Washington State University English department faculty members.
Guest editor Regents Professor Debbie Lee, who teaches literature and creative writing, said the issue brings together about 80 writers and artists whose work “questions, reimagines, and embodies what freedom and unfreedom mean in our current world, inviting artists to explore liberation through formal innovation, boundary-crossing, and aesthetic risk-taking.”
Lee collaborated on the issue for over a year with assistant editor Rachel Sanchez, the English department’s director of composition, who also earned her BA and MA in English at WSU.
About Place is a biannual literary magazine published by the Black Earth Institute, based in Black Earth, Wisconsin. The institute, in its own words, “is dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society.” Michael McDermott, a retired emergency room doctor who directed emergency care at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, founded the institute as a non-profit 21 years ago.
The “On Freedom” focus of this issue of About Place emerged from the collaboration among Lee, Sanchez, and McDermott, who also helped edit About Place while running Black Earth Institute. The writer Jacob Noah Klaung of Rockford, Illinois, also served as assistant editor.
The issue’s introduction — co-written by the four collaborators — explains: “The word ‘freedom’ streams across our feeds with astounding speed, from debates over freedom of movement and immigration, to battles over freedom of speech, freedom of faith, and many personal and collective liberties. While ‘freedom’ is often a rallying cry, it is also stubbornly resistant to simple definitions. Still, freedom is a basic human need, something so dear that people fight and die for it.”
WSU English Professor Peter Chilson contributed an essay, called “Why Are They Here?” about the efforts of a small eastern Oregon farming town to organize a welcome center for refugees from Africa and the Middle East.
