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 […]

Winter white. Snow White. Bone white. Wedding gown white. Pearl white. Lilly white. White knight. White lies. White lightning. White hot.

Whether cold or steamy, saintly or seductive, ghostly or s […]

Prompts are everywhere all around you, all the time. If you have recently been startled awake from a dream, taken a bite out of an apple, crossed a busy intersection or lived another day, you have new material to […]

I’ve always known that what I love can disappear.

When I was three, I fell asleep on the subway, head on my father’s lap, my stuffed green bunny clutched in my arms. One instant I slept; the next, Daddy rou […]

It’s a highly discriminatory practice, but on this small tump of an island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, dark-haired boys are the ones rewarded as harbingers of good luck for the coming year. If such a c […]

The Ones Who Stay by Jenna-Marie Warnecke August 2012 Paris is empty. There’s no one left except the tourists who planned poorly, or cheaply. All the Parisians a […]

Last week it rained for three days. Outside my window the light pearled gray and rain drumming on the roof inspired me to ignore my to-do-list and wander among my bookshelves. My books have a way of wandering […]

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

Not fast enough, you don’t reply.

You have somewhere to be, and you can’t get there quickly enough. It’s not your own bed (that’s where you just came from) and it’s no […]

On the day I found out that I was pregnant I went to a bar and drank heavily with my boyfriend. It was early afternoon and I had a spicy bloody Mary and followed it up with a few craft beers. He drank the same. We […]

I’m a writer which means I am constantly taking in interesting things. Even when I shouldn’t be. I can be having a very serious conversation with a doctor, for instance, while simultaneously po […]

There is a dog on my runs who doesn’t like me. He lives on an Amish farm one and a quarter miles from my house. I take Bake Oven Hill Road to Middlecreek Road and can get in a moderately challenging run out and b […]

On a drizzling November day our poetry group gathers around the workshop leader’s kitchen table. Before we begin the critique of our poems that we wrote during the week, our workshop leader, Sharron Singleton g […]

I had a fantasy when I began volunteering for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Charlottesville. I would help newly arrived refugees document their identities, tell their stories and illustrate […]

HELP, I’m roiled in moil, chaos on every side of me. My life flashes before my eyes, although the only thing I’m drowning in is the sorting of minute particulars. It’s a cautionary tale.

Some time ago (has it […]

“Just meet me at my internist’s office,” my mother texted.

“Oh, ok. You have an appointment?”

“Yes, I’ve had some internal bleeding.”

“Oh, ok. I can be there by 4:30.”

I was going to visit my mom for […]

For photographer Andrew Shurtleff, the goal in covering sports and political events is “to report the story — whether winning or losing — through photographs. I l […]

2nd place winner of the Streetlight 2015 Poetry Contest.

Rubble
 
The water found a home in our wreckage.
                 Our city, once a bastion of high times—
      colored lights on strings, avenue […]