The January Reset
Our tips and resources for this time of year.
January is a time to reset. The new year brings us a time to plan, to resolve, to imagine what comes next. Yet January also asks us to sit with what is already here, whether that means colder mornings and shorter days for some, or warmth and light for others in a world that is still very much in progress.
As we enter the new year, we’re turning toward literary magazines engaged with environmental rights and climate change — not to offer easy answers, but to help us think, feel, and read more carefully about the future we’re entering.
Here at Anodyne Magazine, we believe environmental writing isn’t just about landscapes; rather, it’s about bodies, labor, health, memory, and who is made vulnerable when systems fail. Climate change shapes our futures, but it also shapes our narratives now. Our own Vol.2 focused heavily on climate as a foundation for (and threat to) health thanks to our guest editor’s own advocacy work in the sphere. We always welcome such work, and encourage you to submit what you have during our current open call (closing 31 Jan).
Below are a few journals publishing especially thoughtful work at the intersection of ecology, justice, and creative outlets. Whether it be outside, near a window, or wherever the natural world feels closest, read them now, in this in-between moment of the year while new possibilities are still forming and the world restarts.
A long-standing publication devoted to nature, culture, and place, Orion is a perfect blend of literature and rigorous environmental reporting. Their work consistently asks how we live ethically on a damaged planet and how storytelling can restore attentiveness, humility, and care.
Dark Mountain is a literary and cultural project rooted in a 2009 manifesto that challenges dominant narratives of progress and human centrality. Its journal and wider community publish work that reckons with ecological collapse, uncertainty, and the need for new stories in unsettled times.
An online journal devoted to the built and natural environment, Terrain.org publishes work that moves fluidly between environmental justice, place-based writing, and visual art. Many pieces engage with land, labor, and environmental inequality.
Alocasia is a queer plant-based journal, publishing creative writing of all genres focused everything plants, gardens, gardening, parks, and indoor horticulture! Their work is centred on both traditional and experimental styles including the weird, erotic, explicit, and anti-colonial.
While not exclusively environmental, The Common regularly publishes fiction, essays, and poetry centred on place, climate, and displacement. Their environmental features foreground global perspectives, reminding readers that climate change is unevenly experienced.