By
Katie Davis
Around Washington people say Anacostia as a code word for poverty, crime, isolation. Many add in a low voice, “Don’t go there.” In fact, a city-wide website left it off the map entirely and pushe […]

By Laura Marello
I’d never owned a house before, and when I finally bought one in Lynchburg, I found that I enjoyed decorating it. The rooms would take on a life of their own, sometimes a history of their own a […]

By Michael Lachance
I have been thinking more and more about art in my life and the special appeal photography has for me, especially black and white images. We are assaulted daily with media and the volume can […]

by Patrice Calise

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be one of the boys. No shock there: I grew up in a house with four older brothers, our parents, and several male dogs. My brothers got to run […]

By Phyllis Leffler
American cities can and should be places of civic history and civic virtue. Most are not. My city of Charlottesville is not – despite its progressive government and mostly well-intentioned c […]

By Janis Jaquith

Is it pathetic that my gray roots are showing? What about wearing yoga pants to the grocery store – are people thinking I should know better?

Women have always been subject to physical s […]

By Stefanie Newman
I spent most of my life at a loss for words. On job interviews I could never describe my good points or my bad. As an art professor I would get student evaluations that said She was nice but I […]

It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to reach someone in a crowd and you keep glimpsing the back of their head before they’re swallowed up by the thick humanity. The crowd is impermeable— you try e […]

K. Douglass Hopkins, DMV, is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2016 essay/memoir contest.
I sighed as I loaded my duffle into the Trooper, reluctant to leave for a long weekend at the emergency veterinary […]

We Always Called Him Fletcher
 
Never by his first name Albert, or Mr. Fletcher.
He was tall as a sugar pine, skin the color

of freckled walnuts, walked our whole
neighborhood hauling

an extension […]

The Sheets Pulled Over
 
When one thinks in love about love,
he’s doing what he shouldn’t. He will get it wrong.

What if everything were revealed?
The apples and milk on your mind

when we lay down in W […]

The coffee shop was closed. I would not have made the detour into Leland if it hadn’t popped up on my smartphone map. And who would have expected that a coffee shop would be closed at 9 am? So there I was p […]

Sometimes we need to write about writing. Sometimes we need to list all the reasons we love to write, or why we hate to write or what we want to write about.

I write because I want to find out what I think, […]

Write It Right! Free Grammar Resources for Writers.

Sometimes even the most erudite writers use bad grammar or misspell words. Hey it happens. English is a living language after all and subject to change. […]

9 Pieces of Advice for Writing Fiction From Streetlight’s Fiction Editor

First off, crafting stories is a skill that can be learned. (Unlike, say, the ability to keep house.) So here a […]

Street of My Life
 
Street of my life, I have left you and I have returned,
   wandering nights in your renovated future,
The deed has passed into my keeping, and the dead,
   ever gracious, have agreed […]

Smoke
—translated from Theophile Gautier’s Emaux et Cemées, 1852-1872
 
Down there, under sheltering trees:
A hunchbacked hovel of the poor—
Walls crumbling; roof down on its knees.
Moss blots the thres […]

Many writers choose not to enter creative writing contests because they think the low odds of winning aren’t worth the effort. And yet, that’s exactly the kind of thinking that makes it easy for other people to […]