COLLISION
EDITOR’S LETTER
Trevor Dolan and Karam Sheban
Thanks to extensive human meddling, the planet is coming apart at the seams. It often feels like people have a pestilential touch; wherever we meet the natural world, we manage to kill something
important. But in obsessing over our capacity for destruction, we often ignore healthy, productive, respectful contact between people and the planet. To explore these qualities of human interactions
with their global biome, SAGE Magazine has devoted this issue to stories of collision. Collisions usually cause some harm, but they can also open space for growth and resilience. This edition
will dig into that tension.
We put out the call for writers to share their work on environmental collisions of any form, and our submissions ran the gamut from the very literal—Pat Wiedorn’s boat crashes into wall—to the heavily figurative—Manisha Rattu writes of dueling activist groups fighting for justice. We hope each story, poem, and haiku will spark a new idea of how people collide with, over, in and around the environment. We’ve also tried some new things with this edition’s physical form. Rather than working with a professional designer, we’ve hired two students from the Yale School of Art: Luiza Dale and Tuan Quoc Pham. They had some fresh ideas for how we could improve your experience reading the magazine, which ranged from a sewn spine that lets the pages lay flat to artfully applied metallic typeface. SAGE has printed fewer copies this year; we invested the savings in these design elements that we hope will more fully immerse you in our authors’ work.
Many thanks to our designers, Arts Editor Sam Corden, our authors, and the devoted team of editors who made this work possible. Their tireless work got this magazine to kick ass as hard as it does. Just bask in it. Take it all in. Enjoy.
MANAGING EDITOR Karam Sheban
ARTS EDITOR Samuel Cordon
STAFF EDITORS Abigail Chan, Megan Edwards, Pat Wiedorn, Emma Johnson, Elizabeth Himschoot, & Maximillian Schreck
SUPPORTING EDITORS Becca George & Britta Dosch
JACKET Melissa Halstead
DESIGNERS Luiza Dale & Tuan Quoc Pham
Typeset in William’s Caslon Text.
Custom glyphs by Mianwei Wang.
Printed by Prolific Group in Canada.
Edition of 500.