echoverse

In poetry, echo verse is a form of repetition, where a line provides an echo, or an answer, to the one that comes before it.

Contributors to echoverse volume one: day to day responded to a prompt asking them to consider the daily lived experience of climate change. For volume two: time capsule, contributors submitted work to a digital time capsule that will offer the world to come a record of the place and time we live in now.

As a title for this project, the word echoverse gives a nod to the call and response nature of writing to a theme. It is also a gesture of optimism–an insistence that an accumulation of voices need not be an echo chamber or a feedback loop. Rather, by collecting, I suspect we can create positive, productive echoes that, like the universe (or like a Yayoi Kusama infinity box), are ever-expanding.

volume two: time capsule

For its second volume, echoverse invited writers and artists to submit work to a digital time capsule that will offer the world to come a record of the place and time we live in now.

The past year+ has shown us that imagining the future is a gesture of hope. To take time to make art, even if it expresses what is terrible, is an act infused with a kind of optimism: our thoughts, concerns, and experiences are worth noticing and sharing.

Every time we write or make art, we create a marker of time. We say, “here is the view from where I stand today” and create a vantage point to gaze back upon, an offering to ourselves and those who will come after us. And so with this time capsule, we create a marker of our environment, our lives, and our world as they are right now.

Some time capsules have a set date for when they’re meant to be opened, often hundreds of years in the future. They’re intended for future generations—for others—but we think a record of this time could also be a gift to ourselves. We define the future as any moment yet to happen and, with that in mind, this time capsule is not hidden underground. It is available for any future reader who comes across it, whether that be eight months or eighty years from now.

—Christina Wood
    founder and editor

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