The Hopper, Issue 4

When used for cider making, a hopper is a wooden or metal box that collects fruits before they are funneled down through a chute to the crusher. In old Vermont towns, it was common for the community of growers to share one cider press instead of each farmer purchasing and maintaining his or her own. Come fall, people would cart their apples or pears to the farm that kept the mill, and into the hopper their fruits would go—often mixing with the products of a neighboring grower.

The Hopper believes that in order to refashion our lives to accommodate the knowledge we have of our environmental crisis, we have a lot of cultural heavy lifting to do. To reacquaint ourselves meaningfully with the natural world we have to turn our interpretive, inquisitive, and inspired faculties upon it. Through what we publish and the communities we encourage, The Hopper seeks to be a leader in this cultural re-centering.

Jenna Gersie

Jenna Gersie is a writer, editor, and educator currently based in rural northwest New Jersey. Jenna has participated in the Wildbranch Writing Workshop and the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers' Conference, and she recently completed a fiction writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Her writing has appeared in Orion, Zoomorphic, and Kudzu House Quarterly. Her website is jennagersie.com.

Anna Mullen

Anna is a poet and naturalist from the suburban foothills of the North Carolina Appalachians. She studied environmental literature at Middlebury College and as a poetry fellow at Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. Anna has special love for writings about the sea, speculative fiction, animal consciousness, psychologies of climate change, and queer ecology.