Aunt Maggie laughs with a Marlboro Red clamped between her lips. A metallic party hat sits atop her matted, white hair, fastened with a cheap elastic band under her turkey-wattle chin. Today s […]

This summer, I have performed two activities that strangely seem similar: shredding dozens of family documents and serving as a screener for a poetry manuscript contest.

Many of our older readers […]

I stared at the thick frosting of the cake, dotted with rainbow sprinkles, wondering if this would be what made him sick. I’d messed up the recipe, not realizing that “pasteurized egg whites” were diffe […]

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Void where […]

This is a true story.

After my husband Billy died in June of 2020, his ‘step daughter’ Zoe, a beautiful and vivacious woman of fifty offered her home in Santa Barbara to hold his memorial. We waited until the […]

She was a day past presence, riding
the jagged breath below the surface
of consciousness, and I was running
to make the next plane to Arkansas.
My footsteps parted the ear-splitting
everyday […]

One of the most surprising things I’ve discovered about writing is that while putting words on the page can be a solitary act, “being a writer” can’t be.

Mind The Gap
There is a gap between what peo […]

“I’m going to tweet about this, and I need every single English-speaking celebrity on the planet to retweet my tweet. This is monstrous.”

We are stopped at a red light. Devon, my husband of ten ye […]

Michael Snyder has traveled the world, camera in hand, documenting the stories of those concerned with environmental change and sustainability and the spaces they inhabit.

“I want to be very inte […]

I am in the middle of writing an essay that spans a full twenty-nine of my thirty-two years of life. It hinges on an event that happened three Thanksgivings ago, but reaches as far back as my third birthday […]

Carole Duff has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest

“I love a piano, I love a piano, I love to hear somebody play . . .”
From Irving Berlin’s Stop! Look! Listen […]

Once again we have had the good fortune to be invited into other worlds, each unfurled in just 500 words. The skill involved in presenting backstory and insight—with minimal description—is great.

And, as […]

In the quarantined Covid year of 2020, I returned to exploring the figure in my mixed media paintings. Even though it’s been years since I’ve used the human figure as a subject, I’ve always consi […]

I mix up the names of common furniture pieces
like cupboards and cabinets, closets and shelves

And bureaus. And Ursas, both major and minor

Armoires. To know only of […]

My summer reading list (and Spring) centers around the writings of Thomas Merton. After sifting through his prose and poetry I think the most amazing thing about him is how many people lay claim to him and find a […]

There’s this Tree. It’s a Cottonwood. It’s been there longer than forever, a gentle, generous tower on the long green lawn in front of the dorms. Three decades ago, when I was still teaching at the colle […]

Naomi Raquel Enright has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest
I am the brown-skinned, biological mother of a son presumed to be white. My mother is Ecuadorian and my father was […]