The Learned Pig is changing. Since launching in November 2013, The Learned Pig has taken an instinctive approach to editorial. We have published what feels right to us and we have published as often as we can. We are very proud of the work we have done so far and the brilliant people we have been able to collaborate with. Many of our contributors are hugely respected in their fields (and indeed beyond); many had never been published before.
In addition to a rolling publication schedule, we have run five distinctly themed editorial seasons: Radical Landscapes (2019), Garden Voices (2018), Carnevale (2018), Wolf Crossing (2017), and Clean Unclean (2015).
Building on the success of these thematic approaches, we have decided to change the way we publish. Over the coming weeks we will be doing away with the previous headings (Art, Thinking, Nature, Writing) and instead launching four carefully conceived editorial sections. Each of these new sections will be launching soon with a full programme of editorial. In the mean time we’re holding open calls for each one so please do take a look and get in touch. More detailed information about each section and what we’re looking for can be found at the following links: FIELDS, RHYTHM, ROOT MAPPING, ROT.
But first, we’re delighted to announce the appointment of four new editors to oversee these four new editorial sections.
Marloe Mens
Marloe Mens, who became our first ever guest editor in 2018 with ‘Tuin Stemmen’ (Garden Voices), is overseeing FIELDS, an examination of agriculture, systems of food production, and lines of division/connection through the landscape. Marloe graduated in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently learning how to grow (organic) vegetables, and is researching the relationship between the arts, nature and food.
Julia Cavicchi
Julia Cavicchi is overseeing ROT, getting knee-deep in the messy tangle of interspecies collaborations and contaminations. Julia works in the feminist environmental humanities, by way of a B.A. in environmental studies at Skidmore College, New York, and an MRes in human geography at the University of Glasgow. She is currently serving a year as an AmeriCorps member at the Rich Earth Institute. Her current interests include feral sewers, glass eels, biosensors, and urine composting.
Rachel Goldblatt
Rachel Goldblatt is in charge of the RHYTHM section, exploring rhythm as individual and collective, as poetic and biological. It thinks through the ways that rhythm dictates life. Rachel read French and English literature at the University of Edinburgh and then completed an MPhil in modern and contemporary literature at the University of Cambridge, where she focussed her research on Thomas Hardy’s lyric verse. Rachel’s editorial work is balanced with freelance writing and theatre producing.
Melanie Viets
Melanie Viets is going ROOT MAPPING. Melanie is a shepherd, writer, and small-scale farmer born and raised in northern Vermont. She is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program whose own writing is grounded in her family’s hill farm. Her section explores journeys of way-finding, where power and domination make way for cartography as art, as resistance, as guide to the present. This section asks: what might mapping look like when it engages with love, fear, wonder, threat, and curiosity?
Editorial advisory board
We are also very pleased to announce the appointment of a new editorial advisory board. This consists of four people who have been hugely supportive of The Learned Pig since the very beginning and for whose vision, guidance, encouragement and advice we are extremely grateful. The appointment of an editorial advisory board aims to formalise these existing relationships in order to ensure that The Learned Pig goes from strength to strength, especially during this exciting (and slightly nerve-wracking) period of editorial development.
The editorial board consists of poet and publisher Camilla Nelson, artist and writer Crystal Bennes, artist Hestia Peppe, and writer Justin Hopper.
