Sift Portal

Here you will find invitations to engage with Alissa Hattman’s Sift from different and intersecting vantages. The contributors are writers, artists, teachers, scholars, community leaders, and activists. Let their reflections, prompts, reading lists, recordings and questions spur your critical imagination. We are grateful for their generous offerings.

The Shape & View of Shared Agency

When Sift started to take shape, it was a shape that felt unfamiliar to me. Was it a letter? A poem? An elegy? A meditation? A dream? A type of taxonomy? I wasn’t sure. At the time, I was attempting to create a story-space where I could pause, witness, experiment and expand some of my narrow notions of self and time with regard to our changing climate. Sift became a type of journey narrative, written in spare, nonlinear passages which endeavored to match the rhythms of relation. Move, adapt, connect. Rest, remember, attend, sip. This is how I/she/they/we keep living.

Though I began reading Min Hyoung Song’s Climate Lyricism (Duke University Press, 2022) after writing Sift, his thoughts on the value of literature as a practice relevant to an understanding of ecological crisis—and its legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction—resonate with my intentions for the book. While Song explores craft concepts, such as how point of view and time operate in fiction, climate lyricism is not simply a genre or craft, but connected to an active attending to the everyday moments of climate change and its disproportionate effects. Song says, “to sustain attention to the forms of organized injustice that contribute to the present’s environmental emergency is to realize how many other forms of organized injustice exist alongside, and are interwoven with, them.” In this way, he shows how reading and writing might help us metabolize the gravity of the current environmental crisis while also being a catalyst for new ways of acting and being together within the struggle—what he calls “a model for shared agency.” 

I began drafting Sift in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. As I wrote, I was thinking about interconnectivity and isolation and identity—who am I, who are you, and who are we now, in this moment of crisis? I can see, looking back over my notes, that these questions were entangled with point of view. Is there a point of view outside of our first, second, and third person formulations?Is there a point of view that can connect all three?  I’d asked myself.

I experimented with a perspective outside of these formulations in the short non-human passages where pronouns and other identifiers were eliminated, and in other shifty ways as well; for example, in the narrator’s second-person address to her dead mother–

Sometimes I think about how far I am from my abandoned home, how this becoming has made me less animal and more vegetal, and when I think about this, I think of you, Mother, an wonder whether you would have lived this way too, had you know it was possible, and if you had known, whether we, as women, might have thrived like moss, parts and parcels. Now, as we’ve traveled through day and night and through dayless, nightless dark, I’ve grown hints of you up my back and have not always known if it is a comfort or a burden. Perhaps it is both.

The address to the mother, at first a coping strategy, becomes an address to self—a type of coaching on how to survive—but as the story progresses, the gap between the “I” of the narrator and the “you” of the dead mother starts to blur or morph, so the “you” addressed is not just the mother, or the narrator trying to coach herself through the chaos, but also the larger “you” of the land and its inhabitants. In this way, the “you” (maintaining the closeness, a loving personal address, which is traditional to the lyric form) can also be read as “I” and “we.” 

The purposeful transforming of the “you” in the piece was one of my attempts at what Song calls “shared agency,” a tenant of the revived lyric which his book works to define. Song says, “The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ seek to discover what they have in common, what forms this commonality can take, what aspirations they want to work toward and even fight for together, and what kinds of shared agency are possible.”

In this way, the shifty “you” in Sift is both homage to the lyric form and also a type of practice, a wrestling with self and other, in an attempt to build tolerance for our fractured, yet interdependent world.

Any novel which includes the climate crisis—which I argue all contemporary writing, if it is true to the time, does—must grapple with the risk of overwhelming the reader or proselytizing. Part of the task for the writer and reader is to stay true to each other and honest about our current condition, even if it means preparing, in a very real way, for the present dangers that are unfolding before us. As a writer, you cannot shelter people from that danger, but you can create the space of a book where together we might practice imagining, preparing, and wrestling with the unknown. The struggle, whether it’s with the text or with each other, is, I believe, a necessary struggle, essential to our survival – it helps us learn more about ourselves, the world, our shared lives.

And this is why we need to protect literature, why we need to protect the humanities: we need to be able to imagine alternatives together.

Song again:

To pay attention and to experiment with the forms such attention can take, as a rejection of capitalist realism, is to insist on the right to exist, and to continue existing, even in the midst of harrowing conditions, no matter how bad they get. To sustain attention is to insist that the lives of the most vulnerable in particular are worth living, even when surrounded by the message that only some lives are valuable. It is to make a way when there seems to be no way. It is to refuse to give up.

Now, in 2025, I hear that urgent refusal everywhere. I hear it in the voices and textures of the artists, activists, and educators who have added some of their beauty and insights to this Sift archive in an effort to dig deeper and reach out further than I could have ever possibly dreamed. I’m grateful that The 3^rd Thing has given me this opportunity, several years after publishing Sift, to reflect on some of what the book has taught me about shared agency–both inside and outside the libratory space of those pages. It has been an honor to collaborate with them, and now with others for this resource, to see the story anew through the rhizomes of their words, attention, thoughts, influences, calls-to-action, prompts, colors, music, and voices, which have created an altogether new shape. In so doing, they have made for us more apertures, more surprising encounters, models for shared agency, spacious enough for fresh communities to thrive. Welcome in.

Emmi Greer

INSTRUCTION FOR RITUALS, AS A FUNGAL LIFE CYCLE (pdf)

Emmi Greer (all pronouns) is a writer, educator, editor, and snack artist based in Portland, Oregon. Emmi edits the regional anthology publication Buckman Journal and is forever devoted to exploring the polyamorous relationships between language, art, and consciousness. She grew up in a really small town in a landlocked state, so now she always wants to live in a city near an ocean.

Jennifer Calkins

SOME SIGNPOSTS, OR ONE SORT OF MAP FOR SIFT (pdf)

Jennifer Calkins uses hybrid techniques to explore intersections, gaps, coincidences, and emergence relationships within and among humans, nonhuman beings, and the more than human world. She is informed by her work as a professor of evolutionary biology and as a public interest environmental attorney, and the multitude of alternative ways of knowing the world that survive and emerge outside the dominant white-anthropocentric European worldview. Jen’s books include the uncanny poetic fairytale A Story of Witchery, (Les Figues Press, 2006), reissued by Punctum Books in 2023, and the lyric noir Fugitive Assemblage (3rd Thing Press, 2020). She currently curates and creates for the communal creative emergent project, Delisted 2023, and continues to use genre-fiction to destabilize the history of her family and her own experience of trauma. She lives on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish, AKA Seattle, with a variety of creatures including at times her adult human children.

Jennifer Calkins photographed by Sage Swanson

TJ Acena

FIGHT LIKE HELL FOR THE LIVING: A Recommended Reading List from a Labor Perspective (pdf)

TJ Acena is a writer and labor activist living in Portland, Oregon. You can find out more about him at his website www.tjacena.com.

TJ Acena photographed by Celeste Noche

Siloh Radovsky

DYSTOPIA & POSSIBILITY (pdf)

Siloh Radovsky is a writer, artist, and educator. She is currently working on a collection of linked essays exploring illness, subculture, and the paradox of making a livable life alongside chronic catastrophe. Siloh’s work has been published in Entropy (RIP!), Identity Theory, [PANK], and elsewhere. She also hosts the podcast Experimental Practice and the Substack Essence of Toast. You can learn more at silohradovsky.net.

Brandi Katherine Herrera

SIFT, IN COLOR (pdf)

Brandi Katherine Herrera is an artist. Her work in text, image, and sound explores the poetics of color and space.

Brandi Katherine Herrera photographed by Zachary Schomburg

Miranda Mellis

Miranda Mellis is the author of Crocosmia (forthcoming, Nightboat Books); Demystifications (2021); The Instead (2016); The Spokes (2012); None of This Is Real (2012); and The Revisionist (2007). Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, Conjunctions, the New York Times, and many other literary publications. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Millay Colony. She received the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, the Michael S. Harper Praxis Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Olympia, Washington where she teaches at The Evergreen State College.

Matthew Holmes

TORTULA

WESTERN BANDED GECKO

WILD MUSTARD

WOOD FROG

PEPTO

STONES

TADPOLE