Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine. In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring

the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Camille T. Dungie is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, Smith Blue, Suck on the Morrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to

Leave for Poison. Her debut collection of personal essays is guidebook to relative strangers,

and her honors include an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and a

Guggenheim Fellowship. In her essay, Losing Language, Camille looks at loneliness, erasure,

and loss, and rejects the common refrain, there are no words.

As she revisits the passing of her friend's mother and the dying out of species whose loss is emblematic of a larger extinction crisis,

Camille reaches for a language that encompasses the expansive reality of eradication.

What we need are tier leaders, not cheerleaders.

We need tier leaders to teach us how to mourn.

Alison Adele Hedge Coke.

I think of my friend's mother, dying 40 years before she imagined she was due to die.

We stayed in a spacious house in the Oregon countryside, rented by my friend, so there would be

room for her mother's small herd of visiting stepchildren, relations, friends.

In those days, my friend was hardly ever alone with her disappearing mother.

A group of us deliberated around the dining table.

These were the days of the Occupy movement when activists renamed Frank H. O'Gawa Plaza in Oakland.

Who remembers what that was about? Calling it Oscar Grant Plaza instead.

It was necessary, some of us believed, to highlight everyday, modern day, catastrophe, the unjust death of yet another young black man.

Others believed that erasing a survivor of U.S. internment camps from our collective memory might, in the end, do more harm than good.

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