Issue I

Silence and stillness
Vacuoles plumped to fill
Glucose readied

When The Hopper was germinating this October, we imagined a literary magazine of and about New England. Inspired by the hardscrabble but warmhearted history of so many Vermont villages and the new cultures heralded as coming out of these hills, we pictured the magazine as a pure product of one region—something as vertically deep as Dillard and as socially networked as Mosher or Berry.

Our name and icon were derived from a Leland Kinsey poem. The name The Hopper led us to compare cider making to the literary arts—farming is never far off from other creative processes. Experiences, objects, and tastes are harvested from here and there, brought together, milled in a frenzy, and processed down to bare. Work around harvests, especially fruit harvests during banner years, is time sensitive, and the workers are often transitory. The labor around this magazine has been the same: people have entered and exited, sharing different parts of the load at different times.

This first annual print issue brought with it a litany of surprises. First off, by no particular effort (or lack of) on our part, the authors and artists we chose to publish are mostly non-native to New England, and only four of the twenty-six are resident Vermonters. What we imagined as a hyper-focused (geo-fenced, you could say) magazine about place has become multi-focused. We would have been happy with just New England, but tasting so many different vernaculars of space has been incredible. Clearly, good writing disrupts the ideas one has about one’s magazine, and about oneself.

That said, we hope this issue solidifies for the concerned reader that nature writing is alive and well and only getting more nuanced and applicable in our Internet age. And, if none of the writing herein demonstrates that, we’ll let slip a secret that should do it. What you thought were apples on this cover are actually green oranges, seen and photographed outside a mosque in Seville, Spain.

Harvesting

We walked the rows of the orchard, picking Honeycrisps, Cortlands, and Ida Reds.
Twisting MacIntosh and Macouns from their stems, we piled the fruits in the white half-peck bag, sturdy despite its paper straps.
We collected apple vocabulary like we collected the apples: “robust with a zesty, pineapple citrus,” or “crisp, juicy, and sweet with a distinct strawberry flavor.”
We collected apples like we collect words, like we collect poems, like we collect stories.

Milling

We tumbled our apples—stems, seeds, and all—into the wooden hopper, where they were snagged by iron tines, pulled through blades, and shredded into a sweet pomace.
Collected overripe (best for cider), the apples were now coming into their cider lives.
We milled them and recalled our first encounters with nature, memories sweetly emboldened by youth and muddled in newness.

Pressing

The pomace was ripe and tangy and rested in the barrel like applesauce, chunks of fruit buried in globs of white pulp.
We set the press plate on the mash and began to crank, wringing juice from the fruit like water from a towel. Amber liquid poured from the spout.
We thought about the earth’s gifts, about offerings as small and sweet as scarlet apples, and hoped to know our place in this world of wasp and apple and carbon climate.

Blending

We mixed the musts of our sweet and bitter apples. You brought the blend to your mouth and then to mine.
In it, I could name the colors of familial love, the taste of nostalgia, the warmth of pleasure.
I asked what you tasted, and you said, home.