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The Nomination
“An abiding reverence for nature and a commitment to the wild comes through in everything Julie Gabrielli writes. So, too, in her dreamy, often ethereal watercolors—landscapes and animals and brushstrokes that love light and invite you in. I picked this passage from so many wonderful choices because, when I think of Julie, I think of the great blue heron and her deep fierce affinity for this bird and because it’s from one of my favorite of her stories, and because, not only does she paint the human characters and the scenes in the story perfectly, she also embodies the bird. That she opens with this embodiment captures the wonderful experimental aspect of her work. I gasped, yes, when I first read the heron passages and then again when I listened to the recording. Don’t miss all Julie has to offer—the stories, the responses to Walden, the intricate explorations of the Prayer of St. Francis, the Nature Stack compilations, and more.”
an excerpt from “shapeshifting”
“Rowing training had begun with a video. “Your boat is your life raft. Never leave it. Worst case, haul up on the overturned hull and paddle to shore.” A guy rolled sideways in an indoor pool and turtled, popped to the surface, positioned the sculls, righted the boat, climbed in. “Free your feet first,” the voiceover said. Right then, Hank had vowed never to capsize.
Stronglegs stalk, stalk, stalk
Longneck turns waits watches
Wrigglemeals dart silver
Neckthrust beakplunge
Behind the island, he tries breathing in to a four-count and holding it before a slow exhale. But the aquatic reek nauseates him. He coughs out the breath. Too jacked from the exertion, his body greedy for oxygen.
In the pool for capsize training, the geometry of blue lane lines and clean grid of white tiles had done nothing to tame Hank’s dread. A girl in their group had executed the drill perfectly. Then an old guy. Then it was Hank’s turn.
There’s movement on the shore ten yards away. A great blue heron perches on a submerged branch, wriggling fish clamped in a razor beak. With a head-toss, the fish disappears down its long gullet.
The teardrop body floats above the log. Legs, spindly as an old woman’s finger, blend with shadows on the shore beyond. Front-on, the bird is barely there. A vertical sliver cut from water, shoreline, trees.
His mother had loved herons. Or was it pelicans?
The heron turns, shapeshifts into a pewter soup ladle. Steps into shallow water with the solitary coiled energy of an edge-dweller. Mesmerized, Hank’s pinned feet feel each step. His head swivels like the bird’s.
Its neck reaches snake-like from hunched shoulders, then retracts. Hank’s chin pushes forward and tucks. He swallows. The bird singles him out for a piercing stare. Its black eye rimmed with gold has him pinned.
Brotherbody boatbalances
Fearbreath heartskips
Eyepair watches
Heartmind thumps here
Hank can’t look away. He falls awestruck into the bird’s fierce strangeness, its pure wild belonging. His chest aches with a homesickness he doesn’t recognize.
He wrenches from its gaze to bend and stretch for his phone in the small drybag beyond his toes, one hand on the oars for balance. He manages a few shots and the start of a video when the heron croaks and leaps into the air.
Squawkhonk launch
Wingspread rows and rises
Six-foot wings deploy like the time-lapse of a blooming lily, tight bud to extravagance in an instant. The breeze-sound of flight disarrays Hank’s chest, pulls his gaze aloft, phone forgotten, until his mind floods with her trailing wing feathers, the delicate scribble of feet extending from her torpedo body, the neck tucked in a tight S, the beak slicing the air.
Necktuck legstretch
Bodybeing streaks and glides
An oar pokes Hank in the ribs. He recoils, off-balance, overcorrects and topples in slow, unsalvageable motion.”
— Julie Gabrielli, Shapeshifting
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