Volume 42, Issue 1 of the award-winning literary magazine Cardinal Sins includes two stories that both arose from the landscape a little north, a little west of my cabin, just a bit over the invisible boundary between Wyoming and Idaho. In "Dust", readers join an older black woman exploring the silences around her family history as part of the area's gold mining past, and the deeper silence surrounding the sacrifices of Chinese women whose enslavement to serve miners went unspoken in the early years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Follow mountain bluebirds to witness the power of choice in the most constrained of situations.

In the second story, "Horizontal", readers find themselves at a springtime wildlife refuge where wetland birds and a native moss help guide someone into one of life's migratory passages. Landscape literature has long resided largely in poetry and creative non-fiction, but a renaissance in the role of place for powering stories is under way, and being part of that shift is exciting.