Chicago is in my blood, even though today I consider myself a Californian. My parents immigrated to the Windy City in the late 1950s; my younger brother, my three older sisters and I were all born on the […]

That Sketchy Area Known as Writer's Block by Erika Raskin Sometimes trying to write is like playing Scrabble (old school—not virtual) and reaching into the bag for more letters o […]

Because
For Yannis Ritsos
Because the watcher wrote red on the shop’s wall,
because the half-candle was stolen & sold
for fuel,
because the innocent got hit with a cold,
wet branch,
because the town is d […]

I wrote an entirely new Chapter 1 for the new edition of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt 2006; rev. 2016). The idea to open the biography at a low point in the her life, instead of during childhood […]

My father seemed well enough when I saw him, though he did remind me of someone who’d been woken up too quickly from a deep sleep and was trying really hard not to bump into any walls. I’m not sure how rel […]

The New World Order Blues is inspired by the late conspiracy researcher and radio personality Mae Brussell, updated for today’s concerns and presented in one of the greatest music styles ever created by A […]

Pecking
 
A pigeon
pecking its tail clean
on a shady tenement fire escape

gives me
pause to feel, in its
twisting instinct, the fact of life

after death—
not an afterlife of mine, but of
its sp […]

Maybe Joan Söderlund’s mother was on to something.

“My mother wanted to keep me off my bicycle because I had broken a few bones. I think she thought, ‘If we get her into art and painting, it will ke […]

The Remains of Quanah Parker & Eagle Park

Follow Wayne Gipson down through the gate behind the trading post, past the concrete pad of the old amphitheater where Reba McIntire once appeared, and just behind the […]

In addition to being the second Monday in October—a month with, yikes, five Mondays in 2017—October 9 this year (and every so often) commemorates Columbus Day. Are you planning to celebrate? Or use the time off […]

I’m seven years old, and streams of people lean on the walls of the viewing room, standing in line for their turn to see my father in his coffin. I’m so close that the slippery gloss of the lacquered wood sli […]

I met Sharon one Saturday morning in late September at Writer House in Charlottesville, Virginia after dropping a writer off at the train station who had been at Porches writing retreat. We talked about Playing […]

Podcast: Marital and family duties constrict the life of a matriarch who contemplates change in her latter years.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: Away by Juditha Dowd

Where I First Was Happy
 
The twilight was never silver, but the trees were Russian olives.
I was the only thing that bloomed there.
Grandma’s petunias back by the house were really white,
And the pair of […]

An essay on creative process by Rachel E. Diken

The Open Road had long been a solace to me, until a highway crash many years ago where faulty brakes caused a high-speed tumbling wreck. I was moving from the […]

I am floating in near total silence in the women’s bathhouse at the Jefferson Pools, a natural mineral springs in Bath County, Virginia. Surrounded by six other women, some nude, others in bathing suits, t […]