LinYee Yuan is a design journalist, publisher, editor, and gardener. When she was on the show in 2021, she mentioned that she was launching a new community-focused non-profit. That non-profit is Field Meridians, an artist colective focused on food ecologies in Crown Heights Brooklyn. I’d been following the development of the project through their newsletter and wanted to catch up with LinYee to talk about her goals for the organization, the role of publishing in her work, and what she’s learned from gardening.

When you were on the show, you mentioned you were in the early stages of setting up a new non-profit. That non-profit, Field Meridians, has since launched. What is Field Meridians and what are its goals?

Field Meridians is an artist collective committed to strengthening local food ecologies in Central Brooklyn. Our three anchors are site-specific programming, publishing, and radio broadcast. Our first project was the Solstice Kitchen (June 2022)—we installed a solar oven and mobile kitchen in our local park and invited our community of cooks, musicians, designers, and artists to host free and open workshops throughout the week-long duration of the event.

How does the work of Field Meridians build upon — and perhaps diverge from — the work you’ve done with MOLD Magazine?

MOLD is an editorial platform – in essence, a small group of us make the work and we’ve been fortunate enough to have a global audience that engages with it online and in print. Doing this work for over a decade, I have felt that the “community” piece of it has been missing. I am confident that if we were to get MOLD readers together in a room, a certain kind of magic could happen, but our readership is fragmented across geographies.

Field Meridians is rooted in a place—my neighborhood of Crown Heights in Brooklyn. It is born from this yearning to get people together in a room, to build something, in person, together. I hope FM can be more fluid, and nodal in shape. It will be messy! It will be chaotic! Those are not bad things—it’s part and parcel with living a full, robust life.