Letter from the Editors

Part One: Publication of Nature

Dear future v.1,

This summer v.1 woke up feeling skittish as an ant hill. We wanted to metamorphose. We ached for reinvention. But how? And why? No change can happen in haste, but we started to rethink our newspaper skin and the role nature plays in our creation. Nature has sung our praises for a while. She is the vessel of what we do as a publication, from the earliest clay tablets to the inky papers we use now. And yet, it has been a time of inglorious climate change leading to ecological imbalances, aquatic destruction, and suffering of both the human and non-human. This time, future v.1, we asked ourselves: how do we privilege nature in our publication?

Here’s what we did: we lent an antenna to the buzzes of nature—a hunch, a trap, a hope, a sting. What we heard back were ethical queries for spotted lanternflies, odes to a weeping beech, and living poem organisms morphing out of reeds. Nature has also inspired us to loosen up. Through spreads that err on the side of artistic objects, our newspaper this time is designed to fall out of the fold, stick on walls, or enter into new palms as gifts.

We’ve become as fluid and adaptable as the natural world with the introduction of our new Special Issues. It started serendipitously with Eleven Ways of Writing to a Leaf, a collection of eleven tercets wordsmithed by our v.1 staff. We’ve scattered them across RISD’s campus, finding them new places to fall and new eyes to take them in. Along the way, we gathered an artist statement collection and the At/Through book of poetry—small anthologies in which form evolved to fit the content. With all these gatherings and scatterings, it’s starting to feel like this is the “first volume” after all.

This has been our offering back to Gaia, a most worthy suitor for our devotion. There’s plenty we still haven’t figured out: What does it mean to publish? How do we keep launching our ideas into the world in an unpredictable living sprawl? And how do we continue to intervene with the nature of publication? We plan to keep that rolling. So, future v.1, how did we do?

Sincerely,
v.1 Fall 2025