Rascal is an ecology, literature and arts journal operating out of several parts of the world as a movement of the Earth. We publish poetry, essays, photography and art, along with a smattering of genre-blending and genre-defying work. We publish in multiple formats, including online, e-book and an audio version for the visually impaired.

Conceived in 2015, launched in 2017, we started the journal not for doling out publication credits and advancing careers, but for enhancing and sustaining lives. If we also help writers and artists proceed along the road of creative embetterment, we’re happy to take the assist.

Briefly stated, the purpose of the journal is to:

wake the inattentive mind out of its doldrums
and compel the shrinking heart to care.

Our aesthetic is health, from microfloric to ecospheric. What about the health of the galaxy and the well-being of the universe, you might ask? Well, we’re not sure the notion of health applies at that scale, and the universe is its own caretaker, but as participants in creation, we hope that attending to the health of our immediate realm contributes to the health of the whole.

On the face of it, that may seem a nebulous endeavor. It may even, in the guts of it, include nebulous features. But it’s clearly felt and will become clearer in the work ahead.

You know that feeling you get when you read a poem or look at an artwork and everything melts away but admiration, affection and an urgent desire to be an improving force in the world?

That, friends, is Rascal—we’re happy to be here, and here to be of service.

Rascal was a dog, a Shepsky, cute-speak for a mixbreed German Shepherd and Siberian Husky, a dog who was also a brother and guide and guardian and friend. He died around the time when the desire for this journal was born. It took 14 years for that desire to mature, coincidentally the length of time Rascal spent watering the grass in Florida. Rascal was also, in a boy’s infatuation with literature, the name of a raccoon immortalized in a novel by Sterling North. 

We don’t think it much matters who we are, but for the curious and the unsatisfied, we’ve been educated on the streets and in the Ivy League, in Iowa cornfields and Florida swamps, Texas plains and Persian countryside, German forests and Ecuadorian mountains.

We’ve sat under Japanese cherry blossoms and Californian redwoods, oaks larger than houses and ethereal banyans. We’ve collected oldskool jungle, gypsy jazz, folk, hip-hop, bluegrass, reggae and classical quartets. We’ve moved in circles of Zen, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, beer-snob barrooms, research labs, survivalists, drug dens and churches of the Lord.

We love literature and art, we love philosophy and science. We’ve studied business, engineering, administration and nature. We’ve studied our hearts and made a practice of listening to what we’re a part of, what composes us and what we compose. We’ve dug ditches for wages and run record labels. We’ve taken blankets to bums and poems to a billionaire who asked for more. We’ve rehabbed birds and set them off into the yonder, buried others we arrived too late to help.

We straddle the academy and the street, the rural and the urban, the physical and the spiritual, logic and devotion and all of the glorious ways in which they intertwine.

We want your passion infused with attention and affection for the wild blue orb known as Earth, our source, our being, our home.