Dispatches: encounters at the margins, written by Kyra Morris, is a series of vignettes drawn from experiences at ecological and cultural boundaries. It will take readers to a shifting pebble coastline in England, an urban salt marsh in New Jersey, a myth-drenched island off the coast of Ireland, and a barrier beach in South Carolina that records the history of slavery in the United States. Inspired by encounters that occurred at the margins of more deliberate research projects, these vignettes are experiments in writing the unexpected, the un-planned, the unclassifiable. They are not extensive site histories but “dispatches”—messages from topographical and intellectual margins meant to invite further inquiry.