Two young Virginia artists are worth watching.

Laura Bell, a 2012 graduate of the University of Virginia and a native of Pennington Gap, Virginia, has shown her work across the state and has a current show, […]

I have a shelf at home where, up until recently, I kept the books I hadn’t yet read. It was three shelves, actually, stacked with the volumes I hadn’t had the time or chance to peruse. Many of the books have been […]

I recently read a critique in New York magazine by Jerry Saltz about a current MoMA exhibit, “Photography and The American Civil War.” The piece mentioned Alexander Gardner, a Scottish-born war photographer famous […]

From what Fern can tell it looks like a fight. Fern’s watching through a back screen door which makes the scene look like a pointillist painting. Grace flies across the kitchen floor at Philip, something in her h […]

She adjusted the nasal cannula in his nostrils. She couldn’t hear the oxygen moving through the tubing.

“Is that better?”

He nodded, saving his breath for breathing.

“The flight of stairs was a lot.” S […]

The Universe May Expand Forever
 
The fan blades spin large in your pupils,
imperturbable peepers as a pilot’s.
I am reflected in the corner of your eye,
feeding you, and we are just mesmerized, aren’t […]

Rob Browning “always loved art,” and had parents who recognized his young talent, buying him books to encourage a budding interest in drawing and painting. Browning, a native of Nahor, a village in Fluvanna Cou […]

From her window as a child, Robin Braun could look beyond the grassy yard out to the Chesapeake Bay. The water, its tides and artifacts, would fascinate her from then on. Today an accomplished artist, […]

If You’re Here With Us, Give Us a Sign of Your Perversion
My wife is a ghost hunter. Actually, my wife considers herself more of a Paranormal Anthropologist. But, essentially, she’s a ghost hunter. And if tha […]

That’s the kind of remark that librarian Ruth Kneale encountered often in her research showing that all the old stereotypes of her profession – you know: they’re a mousy, prim, timid and bespectacled lot – persist […]

Something I’ve noticed about public discourse over the past decade or so is the habit or need to assume or force our real lives and events to fit into the arcs and tropes of fictional stories. This happens to […]

Some years ago in Key West’s Gallery on Greene, I saw a unicorn — sculpted from wire entwined with bits of china, crystal and beach glass — gliding like a giant mobile, catching the light, gently riding t […]

At one point in the graphic novel Maus, Art Spiegelman’ chronicle of his father’s life before WWII and in Auschwitz, and the author’s own difficulty dealing with that history, Spiegelman is speaking with his […]

But do we? Do you still get letters?  Sometimes I find myself wishing I did.

Of course I get mail. Everybody gets mail. But is the monthly statement from Belk’s to be considered a letter? I don’t think so. I kn […]

I calculated as my hair fanned across the scorched, crumbly asphalt: 5.5 pineapple vodkas since 12:13pm, four in the privacy of my kitchen, one and a half since I had been out in the sun, and a beer. I was a […]

For days after her mother’s death, while adults move around her making funeral and guardianship arrangements, Sarah stands by walls. Her six-year-old fingertips search the wallpaper in the day care where they h […]

I could argue that there is, in fact, an art to the garage sale – I’ve certainly claimed more than a few cheap treasures – but I wouldn’t imagine scouting for such in the hushed halls of the Museum of Modern […]

Charlottesville performance artist Avery Lawrence recently claimed the Grand Prize of Art Takes Miami 2012 competition. The “edgy,” contemporary SCOPE art fair was held in early December concurrently […]

Between Worlds
for Margie
 
Her arms flutter, as if
 
                  to flee her body, the milk
 
glass hands skimming sheets
 
                  like autumn wings:
 
thumb and fingers open and c […]

Fence
for Margie
 
She built that fence
in the snow. All
we saw of her
was her red anorak
and the upward
flash of her tool, a
hammer. Later,
after her husband died
and we tried to visit
she wouldn’t co […]