Philip Newman Lawton has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest My sister Margaret is dead. Her body has gone to cinders, her pain, blown away like smoke. I want to remember her as a child, go back far enough to trace the whole arc of her existence, make sense of it, figure out why she lived and died the way she did, but we grew up in a dysfunctional family, an alcoholic father, a hand-wringing mother, and I was prone to lose myself in books and daydreams. My memories are in … Continue reading Deus Absconditus by Philip Newman Lawton→
I LOVE shoes. I have loved shoes for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I became an adult that I had the disposable income to explore what that really meant. Growing up as the daughter of a pastor at a small midwestern church, there wasn’t a lot of money for anything that wasn’t a necessity. Expensive, sparkly shoes did not fit the criteria. I’ll be honest, my favorite shoes these days are my Converse . . . solid, comfortable, and easy to wear. My six-year-old daughter shares my love for them, … Continue reading Shoe Story by J. Tara Scott→
Karen Dolan has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest I had seen the penis on the ultrasound, I knew I was having a boy. What I didn’t know was that I was wrong. “Stop it with all the questions!” the midwife barks in response to my questions about a possible epidural. “This isn’t a think tank.” This is a dig at me and my employment at–indeed–a Washington, DC think tank. I feel like I’m in a medieval torture chamber and my captor is commanding me to shut up, lay back, and … Continue reading The Earth is Round by Karen Dolan→
Katherine Slaughter has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest Oppenheimer: Back to the Future In the movie theater, I clenched my shoulders and hunched in anticipation of the blast; I could feel the tightness in my jaw. The time between the image and the subsequent sound of the explosion was akin to the space between a lightning strike and a thunderous storm: the interminable wait until the explosion erupted with all its furious sound. Viscerally, I had a sense of generational deja vu. I had grown up in the 1940s and … Continue reading The Oppenheimer Retrospective by Katherine Slaughter→
By the time I reached my teens, I was taken with the idea of writing a fictionalized autobiography, but as my college roommate, Barry, observed, no one will want to read my autobiography if I have led a dull life. He was right, of course, but I had already considered that problem and thought I had solved it with the novel—if overly precious—notion of setting my autobiographical account in the nineteenth century even though I lived in the twentieth. This would have required historical research to figure out what would be the same and what … Continue reading The Thinly Disguised Autobiography by Miles Fowler→
Sandra Hopkins is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest How did my grandpa, Papa Hop, know that it would be impossible for me not to put my tongue in the space where my first baby tooth had come out? How could he predict that all on its own my untamed tongue would find my soft, raw gum and seek to massage it? I wanted a gold tooth just like his. His teeth gleamed as he spoke. A piece of Timothy hay he was chewing on moved up and down as he … Continue reading Tongues of Fire by Sandra Hopkins→
Jeanne Malmgren is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest This should be a quick in-and-out, I’m thinking. As we walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles, I’m cheered to see the line isn’t too long. We’re here for a simple errand, to change our driver’s licenses from Florida to South Carolina. It’s as mundane as any of the other chores related to moving to a new state. This DMV office is home turf for me. It’s just down the road from the country hospital where I was born. This is the … Continue reading Blindsided by Jeanne Malmgren→
Avery Roche is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest Pain. This is a word I am intimately familiar with. In fact, it is at the heart of my whole testimony. Everyone has their own unique relationship with pain. Their own horror stories. Their own way of surviving it. Some have been tossed deep into its depth. Some have been cut brushing along its sharp edges. Some have only gotten close by peering through a window into someone else’s suffering. Before, I might have claimed to understand pain. I might have said … Continue reading Stop Shivering by Avery Roche→
Today we drive north for an hour to find the snow geese migration. The geese are in the area for six months, so it shouldn’t be hard. Migration, as in come to roost. The barista in our favorite French coffee shop says, when we tell her where we are headed, “Hmm, I don’t think I’ve heard of that,” even though we know she grew up in the area and we just recently arrived and still know about it. Steaming our milk, she adds, “I once saw a field of swans, maybe that was them.” The … Continue reading The Shooter by Martha Clarkson→
So, here’s the thing about the Meemaw cookbooks. I have no desire to make any of this stuff. But it gives me metaphysical peace to know that someone in Arkansas is eating the 800-calorie sandwich. The Meemaw cookbooks are the dozen Taste of Home Annual Recipes volumes I’ve acquired. With systematic, inexplicable pleasure, I began collecting them the week V. moved out. The 2nd Avenue Thrift Store asked $2.99 per candy-colored hardcover, so I merrily cleaned them out. I intentionally left behind the Cooking Light Annual Recipes. I can and can’t explain any of this. … Continue reading God Bless the 800-Calorie Sandwich by Angela Townsend→
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