The Best Sex I Never Had


 

When I was an adolescent, I read novels voraciously, and the genre of sword-and-sorcery fantasy appealed to me most. It combined supernatural magic, an element seeded into countless cultures and religions, with heroic warriors and monsters, and it allowed me to escape the doldrums of my unremarkable suburban environment. As I grew out of my teens into adulthood, a different type of fantasy fiction began to appeal to me: the horror genre. Writers like Stephen King and Clive Barker wrote engrossing novels that, on the surface, seemed like realism, but they typically possessed a paranormal … Continue reading The Best Sex I Never Had

Historical Inspiration For Novelist


 

  When I learned that one of the two main characters in Sue Monk Kidd’s latest novel, The Invention of Wings, is Sarah Grimke, of course I had to read it. I was not disappointed. In an “author’s note” Kidd describes her intention as being not to render a thinly fictionalized account of Sarah Grimke’s life but rather to offer a thickly imagined story inspired by Sarah Grimke. Thickly imagined though she may be, the Sarah Grimke I meet in Kidd’s book is resonant with the image of her I have been carrying with me … Continue reading Historical Inspiration For Novelist

Here-To-For


 

The miracle is that we have integrity at all. O, not fidelity to a moral code. That’s a pale shadow of the integrity I mean. Stable identity. Some semblance of unity. Or, to put it in the word that has haunted me for some months – coherence.   What is the thread that draws us through time and change? When faced with the diminishments of cognition that seem to loom with age, and especially when we confront the specter of Alzheimer’s and the like, how do we hold it together? How did we ever?   … Continue reading Here-To-For

The Art of Illustration


 

        What is the difference between illustration and fine art?    Streetlight’s featured artist Kate Samworth, and Nick Clark, former Chief Curator and Founding Director of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, consider the question.   Illustration as fine art — and the relationship of children’s book illustration to “art” or “fine” art — are complex questions. In short, they are, or were, the same. Illustration, or “narrative” painting, dominated Western painting for centuries until the mid-1800s. The longer answer requires that we decide what is the difference between “fine” and other art? … Continue reading The Art of Illustration

Keeping the Meadow Green by Rose Elliott


 

Growing up on a dairy farm in Northern New York, in Southern Jefferson County during the 1960’s meant, for my family, doing most of the work with our physical bodies. With a maximum of 25 dairy cows, one tractor, a pick-up truck and a few older pieces of machinery that came with the farm when we purchased it, my parents and we older children eked out a living. Our cows were rotated from field to field during warmer months after the hay had been harvested, and during the winter they were kept in the barn, … Continue reading Keeping the Meadow Green by Rose Elliott

Interview with Poet Laureate Charles Wright

Charles Wright
 

In His Own Right A conversation with U.S. Poet Laureate and Charlottesville resident Charles Wright What the city of Charlottesville, Virginia lacks in size it makes up for in culture. You won’t go ten minutes without passing a building bearing a whimsical mural, a metal sculpture gracing the bypass, or banners advertising book and film festivals and Live Arts performances. So we’re particularly proud to call poet Charles Wright one of our own, and not just because he’s the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Wright served as a professor of English at the University of Virginia … Continue reading Interview with Poet Laureate Charles Wright

Aviary Wonders by Kate Samworth

Lithium
 

    Imagine a world without bird song. A world without bird beaks, long, sharp and charmingly curved. A world without feathered wings red, gold and green. Artist Kate Samworth did, in fact, imagine such a future world and came up with her own creative solution. In Aviary Wonders Inc., Samworth offers environmentalists and bird lovers of all ages, a mail order “catalog” from which to choose a colorful array of anatomy parts to assemble into unique and beautiful birds. Readers also can teach their fledglings to fly and choose the perfect chirps, whistles and … Continue reading Aviary Wonders by Kate Samworth

Phone Sex in Three Acts by William Knudsen

Poetry
 

Phone Sex in Three Acts   Act I. There is nothing noble about having phone sex with your ex-girlfriend in the bathroom of a friend’s apartment. The shower curtain looks offended. Tile ashamed to touch bare feet, toes curling. Mildew in the bathtub corner is judging me. This is no bad porno. No fictional pleasure. I am only flesh, muscle, and blood. A collection of parts that ache and spill over. She loves him now. But we still search the static of each other’s lonely, trying to pull and honest fuck out of the phone … Continue reading Phone Sex in Three Acts by William Knudsen

A Wild Thing And A Tended One by Maari Carter

Poetry
 

A Wild Thing And A Tended One   We can talk about these corduroy pillows and how I want to shoot marbles with the ball joint of your right shoulder. Last time I tried to tell you about the guy who came in the Deli, duct tape holding his shoes together, carrying this tarnished bird cage, a finch inside and how his loose laces left a winged trail across my just mopped floor as he went to sit next to regulars, who shifted their metal chairs, and how the ice machine dumped cubes into the … Continue reading A Wild Thing And A Tended One by Maari Carter

Granny by Sharon Harrigan


 

We had just learned how to answer the phone. We liked to grab it first, before it woke our parents. That made us feel like spies and more grown-up than five. We flitted from flimsy top and bottom bunk, almost as soundless as we were sleepless. We lit like two squirrels on a telephone wire, our blonde or auburn hair banded into bushy tails. Red-checked, flame-resistant nightgowns scratched our scabbed-up, tomboy legs. Who would call us so early, the sky still dark through yellowed curtains? We knew who. Both tottering on a single metal chair … Continue reading Granny by Sharon Harrigan