photo Simon Beckmann

“At Joya: AiR, I felt like I was between the worlds. It is a place where creative vision meets dry earth and wide sky, and I felt the past and the future cross there. The beautiful rebuilt home, the lost objects of the Gázquez family hidden throughout the pine forests, the eroded banks and dry barrancos. These acts of memory met the wind turbine and solar panels, the careful replanting of the land, the newly dug well: an environmental future I could believe in. And I was there to contemplate environmental futures, to lean into ecological grief and imminent threats and give them language. I did not expect quite so much joy. We ate, we laughed, we laughed more. Under that wide sky, one artist attempted to catch falling stardust on film. I’m fairly sure she succeeded. When it’s that quiet, you can hear the earth think. It sounds like an echo. It sounds like the sky turning indigo, and pink”. 

Alessandra Naccarato

Alessandra Naccarato is a writer based in Toronto, Ontario. She is the recipient of the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2015 Bronwen Wallace Award in poetry from the Writer’s Trust of Canada, runner-up for Event Magazine’s Creative Non-Fiction Prize, and two-time finalist the Edna Steabler Personal Essay Prize and Arc Magazine’s Poem of Year, as well as The Constance Rooke Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among other recognitions. Alessandra holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in literary magazines across Canada, including Room Magazine, EVENT, The New Quarterly, CV2, ARC Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the managing editor of Write Bloody North Publications, a newly released imprint of Write Bloody Publications (Los Angeles). Her debut poetry collection is Re-Origin of Species (Book*hug Press, 2019).