Sea Stories, Estival 2008

Be silent for a few moments before you plunge into the Estival 2008 issue of Sea Stories. Now, run your fingers along your bare arm. Is your skin warm to the touch?

This brief exercise gives you an indication of the most fundamental aspect of your existence: You are a warm-blooded mammal.

In these pages, we invite you to meet your kin of the oceans, your fellow mammals.

Award-winning essayist Kathleen Dean Moore takes us close to a herd of harbor seals—“sighing and grumbling and growling” - in her “Stalking Seals.” They sound almost human, don’t they? In fact, Moore confesses she and her family visit a seal-draped island each summer “to leave behind the routines and pride and presuppositions that separate us from the natural world” and thereby gain an intimacy with the seals. Read on. You’ll rediscover your mammal self as you go with Moore to an island “piled high with sleeping seals.”

You’ll meet another seal in Jeffrey Thomson’s poem “Mermaids”—one that sings to you with a “gargantuan” voice “like Nina Simone’s.” Irresistible!

Travel with Holly Hughes as she paddles on a meditative kayak expedition in the Alaskan wilderness, meditating on the “Buddhist concept of inter-being, or interconnection.” You don’t have to have a Buddhist cell in your body to feel the thrilling connection with a “70-ton-mammal” when she describes “the whoosh of exhalation” of a humpback whale.

He is your brother, Megaptera novaeangliae. And his “whale song, echoing / against the ocean floor” is much like our breathing as we drift into dreamland, to quote M.J. Iuppa’s poem “Below Sleep’s Surface.” Indeed.

As always, there’s much more in Sea Stories. As a mammal unique among your fellows, you have the fluent ability to prowl the other poems and essays here and let your highly-evolved brain take you on many adventures. You can journey from the comfort of home to San Juan, Puerto Rico, with returning poet Donna Marbach to enjoy her “feathered ferns / brushing shadows across / canvases of sand.” Or visit the English Channel with Martin Willetts, Jr., seeing it as Picasso might have. Or explore Belize with John Hutchinson. Or….

Dive in! The water’s warm; a whale of a time awaits you.

KLM

Please Sign Our Guestbook

Estival 2008
	Welcome	Current Issue Contents
	Be silent for a few moments before you plunge into the Estival 2008 issue of Sea Stories. Now, run your fingers along your bare arm. Is your skin warm to the touch? This brief exercise gives you an indication of the most fundamental aspect of your existence: You are a warm-blooded mammal. In these pages, we invite you to meet your kin of the oceans, your fellow mammals. Award-winning essayist Kathleen Dean Moore takes us close to a herd of harbor seals—“sighing and grumbling and growling” - in her “Stalking Seals.” They sound almost human, don’t they? In fact, Moore confesses she and her family visit a seal-draped island each summer “to leave behind the routines and pride and presuppositions that separate us from the natural world” and thereby gain an intimacy with the seals. Read on. You’ll rediscover your mammal self as you go with Moore to an island “piled high with sleeping seals.” You’ll meet another seal in Jeffrey Thomson’s poem “Mermaids”—one that sings to you with a “gargantuan” voice “like Nina Simone’s.” Irresistible! Travel with Holly Hughes as she paddles on a meditative kayak expedition in the Alaskan wilderness, meditating on the “Buddhist concept of inter-being, or interconnection.” You don’t have to have a Buddhist cell in your body to feel the thrilling connection with a “70-ton-mammal” when she describes “the whoosh of exhalation” of a humpback whale. He is your brother, Megaptera novaeangliae. And his “whale song, echoing / against the ocean floor” is much like our breathing as we drift into dreamland, to quote M.J. Iuppa’s poem “Below Sleep’s Surface.” Indeed. As always, there’s much more in Sea Stories. As a mammal unique among your fellows, you have the fluent ability to prowl the other poems and essays here and let your highly-evolved brain take you on many adventures. You can journey from the comfort of home to San Juan, Puerto Rico, with returning poet Donna Marbach to enjoy her “feathered ferns / brushing shadows across / canvases of sand.” Or visit the English Channel with Martin Willetts, Jr., seeing it as Picasso might have. Or explore Belize with John Hutchinson. Or…. Dive in! The water’s warm; a whale of a time awaits you. KLM Please Sign Our Guestbook

	This issue of Sea Stories comes to you through the work of: Steven Pavlos Holmes, Editor/Coordinator/Creative Consultant Karla Linn Merrifield, Poetry Editor Hannah Hindley, Editorial Intern The staff of Blue Ocean Institute