Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s DAWN issue. This bright, awakening, and challenging composition comprises a multitude of world views, places, and experiences. We explore new beginnings, transitions, dawnings, and realisations. New landscapes are explored. New places ventured. New experiences, in familiar environs, are retold. New is often seen as positive, yet change is often more complex, and we look at this too. With our return comes an expanded scope. Whilst retaining a core travel emphasis, we have added ‘place’ and ‘nature.’ Essays in Panorama have always been place-based but this increased focus on the natural world opens up new avenues to explore. With this in mind, we have added a new Ecology & Conservation Editor, Julia Knights, who uses this first issue to speak with world-leading botanist Ghillean Prance. The result is an enlightening and frightening conversation about the Amazon rainforest.
...I am sat on an endless beach on the southern tip of Barbados watching the sun get lost in the waves. I’m with Carly, my girlfriend of the time, and now wife. Our bellies are full of the most incredible fish, cheese, egg and lettuce burger from a seafood shack on the beach called the Cuzz Café. The queue for hot fried fish had told us this was a place to eat. On our chins there are runny egg yolk stains from trying to eat too quickly, evidence of our delight at what we are tasting. All around us was silent and if I listened hard enough I could almost hear the wind whisper through the palm trees, “you’re here, you’re safe, be happy.”
...Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s SPACE issue. From the very small to the enormity of our imaginations, essays grow from the furtive earth-bed of mushroom forests to the stars. Granville Carroll’s afro-futuristic cover artwork “Becoming” places us in space. John Angerson provides the obligatory rocket-propelled photos. Matilde Gattoni reminds us that one’s freedom to explore space can suddenly be taken away. The connection with space doesn’t stop there. Melissa Tuckman’s aptly titled poem “Space Junk” connects space debris to modern living. A new section on New Nature Writing probes the world beyond our urban confines. In the second outing for Decolonising Travel, there are excruciating, painful stories, sexual imaginings in the steam room, and personal reflections on historical ties to oppression; all whilst giving writers who have come through VONA/Faith Adiele’s writing programme space to share their work. We finish the issue with a stroll through London — the most ethnically diverse world capital — through the lens of Books Editor Nicolas D. Sampson.
...The wait is hard when you count time in memories.
But linger long enough, and the Mushroom King
will emerge. Ears in the branches, hands made of
moss and tree bark. His Sunday...