Emergence Magazine Vol. 6: Seasons launch event

Poet Jane Hirshfield, novelist David James Duncan, and Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee join Point Reyes Books’ owner Stephen Sparks for the North American launch of Emergence Magazine Volume 6: Seasons.

This special event at the Dance Palace celebrates the release of the sixth annual print edition and companion book of practices from acclaimed Inverness-based publication Emergence Magazine. Seasons explores the cycles of requiem, invitation, and celebration that unfold as we journey through spring, summer, autumn, and winter; and contemplates the paradoxical ways the seasons now beckon us into intimate relationship with the Earth.

Like light passing through a prism to reveal its many colors, the myriad expressions of the Earth unfold through the seasons. We’ve long moved with their simple and sacred rhythm; they are the primary gateway through which the human engages with cycles of creation, destruction, and renewal. But today we estrange ourselves from the seasons with technology and human-centric myths, while an unraveling climate causes them to grow increasingly unfamiliar. Reflecting a world where snow no longer arrives, annual migrations fall out of time, yet first blossoms still burst, Seasons, our sixth print edition, moves through three themes: requiem, invitation, and celebration—each a contemplation on the paradoxical ways the seasons now beckon us into intimate relationship. This collection of haiku, essays, short fiction, photography, conversations, and poetry, infused with a spectrum of color and light, listens for the turning song of the seasons—for what vanishes and what remains—attentive to these moments that call us into communion with the Earth.

Contributors include Melanie Challenger, David James Duncan, Camille T. Dungy, CMarie Fuhrman, Forrest Gander, Ben Goldfarb, Bear Guerra, David George Haskell, David Hinton, Jane Hirshfield, Brian Isett, Sandor Ellix Katz, Robin Wall Kimmerer, J. Drew Lanham, Sam Lee, Dara McAnulty, Lydia Millet, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Ron Moss, Susan Murphy Roshi, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Zoë Schlanger, Christina Seely, Jake Skeets, Terry Tempest Williams, and Kiliii Yüyan.

Emergence Magazine is an award-winning magazine and creative production studio located on the unceded lands of the Coast Miwork people in Inverness, California. Widening the frame of what a magazine can be, they share stories with the potential to shift ways of thinking and being in our relationship to the living world through traditional and emerging mediums.

Emergence publishes an annual print edition featuring a collection of essays, conversations, poems, artwork, and photo essays. Previous editions have explored Time, Shifting Landscapes, and Living with the Unknown. They also publish stories online each week: multimedia features; films; audio stories; and a weekly podcast, which includes conversations, talks, and author-narrated essays and poems.

Jane Hirshfield is a poet, essayist, and translator whose poetry collections include Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; After, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; The Beauty, Ledger, and most recently, The Asking. Recognitions include Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Hall-Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2004, Jane was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. And in 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

David James Duncan is author of the award-winning novels The River Why and The Brothers K, and most recently, Sun House; the nonfiction collection My Story as Told by Water, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the best-selling collection of “churchless sermons” God Laughs and Plays; and the story collection River Teeth. His recognitions include three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, a Lannan Fellowship, and the American Library Association’s 2004 Award for the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom (with co-author Wendell Berry).

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an author, Emmy- and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker, and a Sufi teacher. He has directed more than twenty documentary films, including Taste of the Land, The Last Ice Age, Aloha Āina, The Nightingale’s Song, Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, and Elemental, among others. His films have been screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum and London’s Barbican, and featured on PBS POV, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Op-Docs. His first book, Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, is forthcoming from Shambhala in summer 2026. He is the founder, podcast host, and executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Photo by Studio Airport

Host or Publisher Point Reyes Books