What Body Are You Part Of? Ecotone Contributors Respond

For this issue of writing from and about the body, we asked our contributors a question: What body are you part of? What’s one group, entity, larger being, place, or organism to which you belong? We got some stellar answers in reply. If you are among the body of readers who can’t abide it when a sentence ends with a preposition, we welcome you to read it as: Of what body are you part? And we welcome you to answer the question too. It’s one we’ll keep thinking about for a while.

—anna lena phillips bell

yesterday i was wearing a big skirt and my three children decided to crawl under it, declaring me a “mommy tent.” I am someone who has never felt like I belonged in any group, and yet somehow I’ve become the head of a lumpy, giggly body—a body composed of three little bodies I made with my own body. My loneliness is overrun. There are bodies everywhere.

—teresa wong

lately i find myself taking up for this region I live in, this region sometimes called the South. I use its syntax—“taking up for.” I’m learning the names of its plants and trees, including the largest in my yard, a loblolly pine. These are the markers, for me, of working to make a place home, of working toward that state we call belonging.

—toni jensen [End Page 154]

i belong to the body of the unbroken bodies / still here past government cheese and chalk outlines, / midnight roadstops and wars I didn’t begin

—patricia smith

i belong to the American West, which Elizabeth Gilbert describes most succinctly in her book The Last American Man: “There was a frontier, and then there was no longer a frontier. It all happened rather quickly. There were Indians, then explorers, then settlers, then towns, then cities. Nobody was really paying attention until the moment the wilderness was officially tamed, at which point everybody wanted it back.” I belong to a history of desecration, atrocity, and appropriation masquerading as epic romantic myth. I belong to these trees, plains, mountains, and rivers—which I love desperately—and to every bone buried beneath them.

—keetje kuipers

a friend last night told me there is a big difference between being a resider in a place and being a dweller—in the land and nature and community. What a hopeful distinction. I’m part of the body of dwellers.

—susan o’dell underwood

i am, among other sundry and various bodies, increasingly a part of the disabled body, of the paradisabled body, identity wrapped up in a smaller person I am beside.

—matthew cooperman

some may think it a solitary practice, but weaving is actually a highly collaborative process, dependent on the complex organism of which I am a small part—a social-ecological body made up of dirt, water, air, plants, worms, bugs, and many other humans: the scientists who compile the data I work with; the movement leaders who have shared knowledge with me over the years; my teachers and students; the activists protecting our water, land, air, and all who depend on those elements for life; and the many laborers who cultivate the materials with which I make my work.

—tali weinberg

i am part of the family of writers, readers, and resisters that believes attention to language is important and necessary work. A family that pays close, almost reverent attention to words and believes the stories we tell, and the ways in which we tell them, matter.

—kat hayes

i am an indigenous body, Onondaga always. I am a Cubana body, abuelo birthed on Havana’s fourth floor. I am a Nippon body, where kin fled across the Pacific. I am a Scots-Irish body, off-spring of True Temper factory, wheel-barrow workers. I am bodied leftovers from America’s melted pot.

—benjamín naka-hasebe kingsley

an essential body for me is my sister-hood of girlfriends. We are each other’s muscles, stretching and...