About Ecotone
Much of our best writing grows out of the land. More specifically, it grows from rich, overlapping areas, those unstable, uncategorizable places that aren’t one thing or another. Biological ecotones are areas of great species diversity and biological density, of intense life and death; literary ecotones are the places where words come most alive. These edges—between genres, between science and literature, between land and sea, between urban and rural, between the personal and biological, between the animal and spiritual—are not only more alive, but more interesting and worthy of exploration.
The journal Ecotone emphasizes the deep importance of place in contemporary writing. We hope to break across genres, and across disciplines, to discover writing that is new, dangerous, and refuses to stay safely in a single place. Our goal is an ambitious one: to reclaim landscapes, to remap and reimagine place in writing that is vital, thorny, and alive. Ecotone is published by the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. We publish high-quality works of creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, as well as interviews with new and established authors about the idea of place in literature.
We are looking for great fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Our goal is to emphasize place but not to restrict ourselves in the manner of some nature magazines. We believe that this emphasis gives us an edge in a crowded lit market, creating a niche and giving us an immediate identity.