Abbey Cahill | Writer and Founder of The Q Review

Abbey talks about the modern human's fraught relationship to the land, how solving it can help climate advocacy efforts, and how she is launching a place-based literary journal to do so

Abbey Cahill is a Dartmouth 2018 graduate, writer, and passionate resident of the Boston area. She is also the founder of The Quinobequin Review (The Q) — a place-based, literary journal for the Charles Watershed area. This glossy compilation of art and writing coming out in the winter stands for so much more than a creative outlet. It is an incredibly unique approach to reconnecting people to where they live, a solution to the climate crisis, and an antidote for physical dislocation caused by years of remote work and extreme mobility. In this interview, Abbey voices concerns you might share in your own life around the impacts of remote work and a travel-heavy lifestyle on the relationship to community. Also in this interview, Abbey tells you what she has done about it.

Why did you decide to start The Q Review?

I studied creative writing at Dartmouth and when I graduated, I didn’t realize writing was something I could pursue. I moved to San Francisco where I worked tech jobs and ultimately ended up in the climate space. I was super passionate about addressing the climate crisis, but I also found the slow pace of change and band-aid solutions depressing and eventually felt that I needed a break. I went on an “adult gap year” where I did a bunch of writing and began to take myself seriously as a writer. I did some writing workshops and began submitting my work, which I’m still doing now. The process has been a lot slower and more isolating than I thought it would be. So I started The Q partially as a way to get to know other writers in the Boston area and partially to continue this desire to heal our broken relationship with the physical landscape.

The Q is a literary journal that focuses on the Charles Watershed area, where I live. When I was working in the climate space, there was a lot of conversation around technological and political solutions to climate change, but not as much around mindset shifts. There is definitely a philosophical aspect to shifting away from this culture of endless consumption and towards one of real caring and belonging. Part of that is familiarizing yourself with where you come from. I began thinking about how people, including myself, don’t know that much about the land they live on. And so I started reading local publications in California like The Inverness Almanac or the Desert Oracle in Joshua Tree. When I moved to Boston, I looked for publications like those (for the Boston Area), and I couldn’t find any. So that’s another reason why I started The Q.  

Can you talk a bit more about your “adult gap year”? What did you do and how did it influence your life today? 

I have mixed emotions about my adult gap year. I was actively choosing to work a restaurant and a retail job and so at times, I think I glorified that work in ways that were maybe voyeuristic because I could leave at any time. But what I loved about those jobs was getting to see really intimately the community that existed. Up the street from the art store where I worked was a bakery that would give us their leftover bread at the end of the day. We did workshops in the backyard of a clothing store next to us. We had regulars who we knew the names of. I felt like I was seeing a completely different side of the city I had lived in for three years.

During Covid, because I was working remotely and because I’d never had the experience of traveling a ton, my instinct was to explore many places. While working remotely, I lived in Joshua Tree for two months, Nantucket for two months, and multiple apartments in San Francisco. While the mobility was nice, and it was such a joy to be able to experience different areas, I definitely felt that I was losing a community I had pre-pandemic. People weren’t around on weekends. The city felt empty, and the fabric of it changed.

I started thinking about whether the nomadic lifestyle was a good thing. There was definitely a part of me that wanted to pick a place and settle down — to get to know the people in the community and the physical space. My gap year gave me a chance to try that. 

When I arrived in Boston, I knew I wanted to buy into the place. I spent the last year writing full-time from local libraries and coffee shops. I’d check out different trails, coffee shops, libraries, and museums. But now I have a baby and my world has shrunk so much that I can’t do that stuff with as much ease. It has been a blessing in disguise. I realize that even in trying to buy into Boston, my scope was so big that I never really knew where I lived. But now I feel intimately connected to the few 100 feet from my home. My baby and I go outside and sit under the same tree every day. And when we get coffee, we go to the same coffee shop and see the same people. This year, I’m learning to appreciate what’s right in front of me.  

What have you been writing?

There’s a piece I wrote that is being published in Boston College’s magazine Post Road this winter. It’s about a train ride across the country when I moved from San Francisco to Boston. I took the Amtrak the whole way back just because I was curious what it would be like, and I used that ride to share my thoughts on the current state of America – both how we perceive it and what it actually is as a physical landscape and a political one. 

At what point did you decide to split time between writing new things and putting this journal together?

I took off that year in San Francisco and then an additional year went by where I was writing full-time but felt like I had nothing to show for it. This is probably the part of me that craves tangible outputs from years of school and work, but I felt like I didn’t have anything concrete to tell people at parties or dinners or whatever. I just knew that in order for me to feel confident and good about writing and to keep doing it, I needed something more project-based that I could put out there.

What is your vision for The Q? 

There’s a lot of writing about our current disconnect from the landscape and how it might be solved using ancestral wisdom or reimagining the future, but so much of that writing tends to be academic and abstract. I just want The Q Review to be a tangible, fun, zany, weird, and accessible way to get to know where you live. I want people to be able to pick it up and read about some piece of folklore that’s attached to a place twenty minutes away or some leaf they can pick in the woods to make tea in the winter. I want it to feel joyful and weird and specific and hopeful.

Can you tell me about a phrase or idea — maybe from a book, a song, a life motto — that you repeat to yourself often?

I went to an environmental writing conference in Vermont as part of a writing course at Dartmouth. There, we learned about mycorrhizal networks and the fact that trees talk to each other. If a tree is dying in the forest, it knows to send its nutrients to other trees or if it’s being attacked by some sort of fungus or bug, it can send warning signals to others. And the takeaway was that we’ve internalized this idea of nature as competitive and as a survival of the fittest but actually, it is completely codependent and builds upon itself. It just made me realize that more of a good thing is better for everybody. You can benefit from each other’s success and lift each other up, and that’s the way the natural world works. I’ve been thinking about that fungus ever since.

So, where do you go from here?

Ideally, I can keep this journal going. I want it to be a seasonal thing. Eventually, I want to become a staff writer somewhere. I think the community and stability of having consistent assignments and co-workers would be good for me. And my ultimate goal is to keep writing essays and publish a book of them someday.

Submit to The Q Review HERE or follow its journey HERE.