The premier poetry event of this year’s Festival of the Book in Charlottesville was “Shrines to Longing,” the March 20 reading by Charles Wright, America’s current (20th) poet laureate, and Mary Szybist, who was […]

The 21st annual Virginia Festival of the Book opens in Charlottesville this coming Wednesday, March 18. I do recommend it. An amazing assortment of programs will be offered. Find the whole wonderful schedule at […]

In 1995 Kay Redfield Jamison published her ground-breaking memoir, An Unquiet Mind, A Memoir of Moods and Madness.  For my husband who was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in 1987, and myself living through his m […]

“Nothing stays long enough to know.
How long since we’ve been inside
anything together the way

these birds are inside
this tree together, shifting, making it into
a shivering thing”
 

—Mary Szyb […]

Imagine for a moment an American family collected in a cozy living room and gathered close for the evening’s entertainment. But instead of gazing expectantly at some oversized TV screen while battling the c […]

Well, it’s over, the most important day of winter, Groundhog Day. And it’s still winter. How come? The groundhog, after being widely noticed, has gone back to sleep, which seems like a really good idea.

Here in […]

“I have an attraction to Berlin, especially the 1920s, when it was an art and science haven for the best and the brightest. I am also fascinated with German Expressionism, and many of the ar […]

January is upon us and with it the start of several weeks of bone-rattling cold and snow-cancelled classes erroneously dubbed “Spring Semester.” For me, it heralds the beginning of a poetry class I teach at the […]

I’m creatively constipated. That’s right, all input and no output. Binging on poetry, nothing to show at writing group. Forget the fifth round of revisions on that damn poem that won’t cooperate. Not in […]

Photographer Sam Abell is a seeker, camera in hand. A National Geographic staff photographer for 33 years, Abell has traveled from Japan to Newfoundland, from Australia to Russia discovering and shooting […]

I don’t know why I believe that I’ll find the truth about America in Mississippi. It’s a dreamscape, really. So overlaid with lies, oppressions, and Faulknerian legend that to expect anything authentic about the p […]

The other day I was remarking to somebody that I’d been doing my Christmas shopping and found the stores seemed not to be playing so much Christmas music lately. I’d been to the mall and I hadn’t really noticed […]

Chroma Projects enjoyed four exciting years of being able to introduce and exhibit art in our glorious space on the (Charlottesville) Downtown Mall. But all things being eventually subject to change, we […]

A good friend and fellow writer recently introduced me to Medium. NOT the dead-people-seeing-housewife tv show. Medium is a digital publishing platform/story-telling community for writers to eng […]

In second grade, I was assigned the role of a Pilgrim woman in the Thanksgiving play.  I wore a dull, gray dress with an itchy, starched white collar and I had only two sentences to say: “Look, look, the Gov […]

 
When I first moved to Qatar ten years ago, I was disappointed to find that the desert of the Qatar peninsula (on the northeastern coast of the Arabian peninsula) was not as lush as that of Arizona, where I […]

And you know I don’t mean Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. You do know that, right? I notice that the newspapers, the internet, the TV, are all full of stories about the seasons coming, by which they mean Thanksgiving […]

As I write, Halloween is upon us.  Not that I need to say anything.  Signs of its approach have been around for a while.  It is unlikely to slip by unnoticed.  Depending on how you measure such things (pu […]

Western photographer Katherine Minott moves in close in color and black and white.

Her closeups — abstracts as well as things recognizable — explore “the beauty hidden in every day objects, the sacred […]

Charlottesville’s Les Yeux du Monde Gallery is presently exhibiting a solo show by mixed media painter and landscapist Anne Slaughter, profiled earlier in Streetlight. Slaughter is known for her layered s […]