Terrain.org's columns include the issue's Guest Editorial as well as regular columns from the editors:
 

Guest Editorial: Virtually Unconscious: Dreams of Escape
by Renee Lertzman, Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities and Sustainability, Portland State University

"For now, then, let’s imagine the proliferation of virtual worlds, as a sort of 'royal road.' What I believe Freud meant in this statement is the ways in which we express and manifest difficult, often contradictory, ambivalent and painful desires and impulses through the language of the dream."

The Literal Landscape: Songbird
Simmons B. Buntin, Terrain.org Editor/Publisher

I hadn’t meant to kill the bird. He was a robin, as best I could tell at 50 miles per hour — the road loping through the Vermont countryside, green on green except for the occasional field of dandelions, a congregation of black-and-white cows beside the baptistery of a watering trough. The bird arced out of the roadside brush and into the passenger side of the windshield, thinking perhaps the glint was a sudden stream, dragonflies and water striders ready for the taking.

Plein Air: Sharing the Edge of the Sixth Shore: Artists and Scientists Converge at Lake Clifton
by Deborah Fries, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

As an undergrad, I first majored in art, then English, and gravitated only toward the sciences that required the least math. That’s how I came to spend one hot Milwaukee summer illustrating a large and definitive collection of microfossils for my paleontology professor. Tucked away in the cool basement of the Thomas A. Greene Geological Museum, surrounded by Greene’s 19th century collection of Silurian specimens, I plugged away at my quiet task.

Bull Hill: The BluRay Squirrel and the HighDef Squid
by David Rothenberg, Terra Nova Editor

One of the highlights of the New York City holiday season is the opening of the temporary Wired Store, last year just around the corner from the permanent Apple Store in the trendy meatpacking district of lower Chelsea, downtown Manhattan. With more than a bit of cajoling, I managed to convince my wife to check it out with me, pulling her out of her more favored haunts right up the street, the toniest art galleries where she is often trying to flog her wares.

A Stone's Throw: Winter Leaves
by Lauret Savoy, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

A withered leaf is not death alone nor emptiness nor an end. It is one point in a cycle of survival in which living and dying are two sides of a bright edge. Henry David Thoreau noted, in an essay published months after his own death, that fallen leaves teach us how to die. He wondered, too, if a time would come when we could “lie down as gracefully and as ripe.”