Deadlines are as follows
March 1 – Spring
June 1 – Summer
September 1 – Autumn
December 1 – Winter
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Poetry may be submitted in any length. Please don't submit 100 poems and ask us to pick 3.
Fiction may be submitted in three formats:
very short stories less than 500 words in length
short stories less than 1000 words in length
Short stories that don’t fit the above should be less than 3000 words.
We also accept longer forms of fiction occasionally.
Non-Fiction is just that so lets see some
interesting footnotes. Non-fiction should be short, (a lot) less than 5000
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it must be something that can be published in 2 dimensions. It’s hard to
publish sculpture but illustrations together with some intelligent prose
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Published works are welcome with proper attribution.
Welcome to the 63nd issue (Volume 16, no 3) of the Wilderness
House Literary Review. WHLR is a result of the collaboration between a
group of poets and writers who call themselves the Bagel Bards.
Lets get this out of the way. We use cookies, everyone uses cookies. Our cookies just tell us how many people take a look at Wilderness House Literary Review. Over the life of an issue we get about 1500 unique visitors. The cookies tell us who’s unique. If that's a problem We're sorry. Enough of that.
The stories, articles, poems and examples of art have
been presented as PDF files. This is a format that
allows for a much cleaner presentation than would otherwise be available on
the web. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader (used to read a PDF file) on your
computer you can download one from the Adobe website. These files are large and we hope you will be patient when downloading
then, however we think the beauty of the words deserves a beautiful presentation.
Finally, the
copyrights are owned by their respective authors whose opinions are theirs
alone and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or partners.
We live in strange times. Here in central Massachusetts on the east coast of the United States of America we have just experienced the hottest and wettest summer in recorded history. That’s not as impressive as it sounds because “recorded meteorological history” only goes back to the late 1800’s in these parts. The media wants to instill a sense of panic on all of us because of “climate change,” which used to be called “global warming.” Climate change is real but here’s the thing: It changes constantly. There is an old adage here in New England that says if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.
Of course, the climate change the media are talking about most often occur over many years. Sometimes over millennia, sometimes over just decades but it’s always changing. The current panic is based on the theory that the excessive burning of carbon based minerals, coal and oil, are heating up the atmosphere at an extraordinary rate. It’s likely true and the joke here in Bumblebee Park (at 403 feet above yesterdays sea level) is that we’ll soon have ocean front property.
As we said the climate is always changing and we have very good reason to be concerned but few of us stop to consider the bigger picture. We don’t mean just the “bigger picture” we mean the “BIGGER PICTURE.” Lets look at the last 20,000 years. That encompasses all of human memory and a bit more. We’ll begin at the end of the Pleistocene era (ending about 10,000 years ago). The ice was retreating all over the world. Here in New England we have many scars leftover from glaciers thousands of feet deep.
We live at what scientists call the end of the Holocene era. The glaciers had retreated and somewhere around 9400 years ago the temperature suddenly rose and the tundra that covered Europe and North America gave rise to the boreal forests here today. Between 9000 and 5000 years ago we experienced what scientists call the “Holocene climatic optimum.” The earth was as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 C) warmer at the poles. The Sahara and Arabian deserts were lush and green as was the Indus valley. Global sea levels were 2.5 to 4 meters (8 to 13 feet) higher than the twentieth-century average. Nature did this not Man.
By 5000 years ago the climatic optimum was over. The earth grew colder and the sub-tropic belts were driven south. The Sahara became the desert it is today. Arnold Toynbee in his epic “A Study of History” says that it was this dramatic cooling that energized the creation of Civilization as we know it.
The earth as recorded in ice cores in Greenland generally grew colder with warm periods lasting several hundred years. There was the Roman Warm Period (250 BC – 400 AD) followed by a cold that lasted until the Medieval Warm Period (900 – 1300). The Viking era occurred during this period and ended as it ended. Then we had the Little Ice Age that lasted until the middle of the 19th century. We’ve been warming ever since.
The end of the Little Ice Age coincided with the beginning of the Industrial Age where the burning of coal and later petroleum coincided with a dramatic rise in the worlds temperature. Current theory suggests that the enormous rise in carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning acts as a greenhouse in the atmosphere and is responsible for the temperature rise.
Is Mankind destroying the planet or is it pure ego to think he can? Discuss.
