Water's Edge: Writing on Water

A wide-ranging consideration of water’s plenitude and paucity—and of our relationship to its many forms

Water is quotidian, ubiquitous, precious, and precarious. With their roots in this element, the authors of Water’s Edge reflect on our natural environment: its forms, textures, and stewardship. Born from a colloquium organized by the editors at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the anthology features a diverse group of writers and artists from half a dozen countries, from different fields of scholarship and practice: artists, biologists, geologists, poets, ecocritics, actors, and anthropologists. The contributors explore and celebrate water while reflecting on its disturbances and pollution, and their texts and art play with the boundaries by which we differentiate literary forms.

In the creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art collected here, water moves from backdrop to subject. Ashley Dawson examines the effects of industrial farming on the health of local ecosystems and economies. Painter Kulvinder Kaur Dhew captures water’s brilliance and multifaceted reflections through a series of charcoal pieces that interlace the collection. Poet Arthur Sze describes the responsibility involved in the careful management of irrigation ditches in New Mexico. Rather than concentrating their thoughts into a singular, overwhelming argument, the authors circulate moments of apprehension, intimation, and felt experience. They are like tributaries, each carrying, in a distinctive style, exigent and often intimate reports concerning a substance upon which all living organisms depend.

LENORE MANDERSON is a distinguished professor of public health and medical anthropology in the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. From 2014 to 2019 she was also a distinguished visiting professor at Brown University in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. The Society for Applied Anthropology recognized Manderson’s career achievements with the 2023 Bronislaw Malinowski Award. She is the author of Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self, among other books; her most recent coedited work is Viral Loads: Anthropologies of Urgency in the Time of Covid-19. Born in Australia, she now divides her time between Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

FORREST GANDER, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in Northern California. Gander’s book Be With was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Among his other recent titles are the novel The Trace and two translations: Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda and It Must Be a Misunderstanding: Poems by Coral Bracho.