The first American best seller was Susan Warner’s Wide Wide World, a saga of tears and redemption that appeared in 1850. It was eventually outsold by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but only just. It’s not surprising that this […]

I first met Kristen-Paige Madonia two years ago. Her writing is forthright and honest. It is this earnestness that stands out the most, employed to great effect as a penetrating light to plumb the depths of her […]

Up until a few days ago, when it was returned in a glorious shower of shooting stars and singing angels, the internet connection at my house had been out for about a month. I suppose its absence could have been an […]

On a wintry late afternoon in the early 1960s, I was driving from Providence, Rhode Island, where I studied at Brown University, to my apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts. I did this three days a week – a ride o […]

Jessie had worked at Meyers Auditorium for six years, by then. When she had started during her fourth year in college (it took five to finish her social sciences degree), she hadn’t planned to stay that long. It h […]

“The ceramic vase is 5 years young, a complete improvisation, based on the seed crystal of a female model saying that this session was her last, that she would be flying away. Thus I drew the flying […]

“These drawings were done during an experimental period when I was drawing from reality and from my projected photographs (slides). I loved the idea that I could juxtapose images…like a l […]

Artists Chica Tenney and Robert Bricker
Streetlight’s second issue features the work of Virginia artists Chica Tenney and Robert Bricker. Tenney, a painter and multi-medium artist, and Bricker, a sculptor, […]

Self Check-out
 
Of course I have my doubts,
but when no one’s looking
I pretend I’m someone else:
the tightrope walker, The Great Farini,
crossing Niagara Falls with a man on my back.
Or the veiled beek […]

Teresa Lewis
 
They are raising amnesty
signs along the courthouse road
portraits with her missing
lateral incisor filled in
perhaps to make her look
more like themselves
perhaps taking back
the […]

Sunday School
 
Here’s what I’m thinking:
Why does a duck need an ark?
What’s a flood to a duck?

The teacher says I ask
too many questions.
I raise my hand again, thinking

if we didn’t have teachers […]

Rehearsal
 
The best thing about the house
I grew up in was that it sat at the edge
of a small weedy lake
where my mother and I would row
to a raft through a thick tangle
of water lilies, their white cups […]

“Mommy, do trees grow up out of the ground,” Waffles says, “or do they grow from the top up?”

“I don’t know,” Isabelle says to her daughter. Then Isabelle takes a stab in the dark and says, “From the top […]

Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was a serious student of Platonic idealism, in addition to being a highly successful novelist. Her exploits as scholar and philosopher – she was fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford – […]

In contrast to my subject matter, I will try to be brief: I don’t have any long range studies to back this up, but I think communication is getting, in general, faster and briefer. I have anecdotal evidence […]

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the original “Twilight Zone” series was available on Netflix Instant. Needless to say I have (happily) surrendered hours of my life re-watching this classic series, which I […]

In my twenties I thought of language as a bridge, not from one place to another, but above an abyss. The damnation waiting below was ordinary chaos, the dissonant march of hours, the rush of unsorted, simultaneous […]

[frame align=”right”][/frame]In 2006, Farrar Straus and Giroux published Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, a medley of previously uncollected work by Elizabeth Bishop (edited by Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The […]

Maybe it’s the Blue Ridge Mountains. Maybe it’s the red clay, rolling pastures, horse farms, holsteins and herefords. Of course, it could be Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village.

Whatever the lure, Charl […]

Taken at face value, writing is a bit of an odd enterprise: Writers work alone, spending inordinate amounts of time and energy on something with absolutely no guarantee of success. In fact, the whole endeavor s […]