Five years ago, my wife fell in love. I’m not talking about me (we have been married thirty-nine years, so I hope the falling in love thing happened much earlier). Through her genealogy research, my wife, Vicki, discovered a ninety-three-year-old cousin living on her own in Montreal. Vicki’s research started with one item that she found among her late parents’ belongings: a postcard, sent from Poland and written in Yiddish, that had been addressed to her paternal great-grandfather. This was her first inkling that she might have family that had not emigrated to the United … Continue reading My Wife Is In Love by E. H. Jacobs→
I had heard when you get older you revert to a lot of your tastes and activities when young, but I disregarded it, until I started buying old Joni Mitchell and Buffalo Springfield albums, and listening to the Beach Boys and James Taylor in the car. Now I am riveted to a 230-acre ranch in the high coastal mountains of British Columbia, with wild horses and meadows bordered by beautiful woods full of aspens and birch, and even taller, snow-covered mountains in the distance. A few days ago, one of the spunkiest, fiercest of the … Continue reading The Little Colt by Laura Marello→
‘The silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from nowhere, as if I’d been hit by a plank. It dropped from the heavens above me like yard goods; ten acres of fallen, invisible sky choked the field. . . . But the silent fields were the real world’ —Annie Dillard, “A Field of Silence” I was born in a forest in the foothills of Virginia. My birth certificate notes a hospital as my place of birth, but we know how trivial that is. Birth for me was waiting in the trees. Through … Continue reading The Silence of No-One’s Land by Alex Joyner→
When I was thirteen, my mother left us. It was on a Sunday and she knew that Daddy, my brothers and I were away, visiting a family out on the old Nashville road. A moving van pulled up to the duplex and my mother emptied the rooms. Excited by the drama, neighbors watched from their front yards. My mother ‘stole’ the large Heriz oriental rug, the twisty verdigris wrought iron table, the African basket lamps in moss green linen shades—my friends had never seen such lamps. The hand-embroidered pillows, magenta and orange molas sewn by … Continue reading Red Sofa by Trudy Hale→
I once held my cousin in a Dixie cup. At least a part of him. The improvised committal on the banks of Nottoway Swamp was a fitting send-off for a man who wanted no ceremony. Prone to eccentricity and melancholia like many of my clan, Cousin Bill had requested only that we scatter him after the annual family reunion in tidewater Virginia. Over BBQ, collard greens, and caramel cake at the Ruritan building, we lit a candle for him and Alice Page, our other casualty that year, then offered the swamp excursion for those who … Continue reading Little Cups by Alex Joyner→
When my late husband set out to write his memoir he purchased Life As Story, by Tristine Rainer. He studied the book’s exercises and wrote in the margins. I want to read his annotations again. Feel the swoop of his pen; reacquaint myself with his responses to the memoir exercises. I have a distinct recollection of black ink on a cream page. Whole sentences, paragraphs filling the margins. I pull the book from my shelf and peer inside. There are none of the annotations I remembered. Instead, a few underlines and a small circle within … Continue reading Clutter by Trudy Hale→
There is a 1990s concept, or perhaps an older concept made new and currently gaining currency, called “re-wilding.” It is the prospect of making tamed and domesticated things wild again. Since 2008 or so, this concept has skyrocketed in book titles, and I imagine other places. It was originally used by Michael Soulé in the 1990s to capture the idea of restoring a landscape to its original wild state by introducing keynote species, native plants, and thereby allowing the natural environment to slowly return, restore itself. The major example was returning wolves to Yellowstone. But … Continue reading Re-Wilding by Laura Marello→
The Twitter world ‘blew-up’ with writers weighing in on the “Bad Art Friend” article in the New York Times in early October (NY Times link below). I had sympathized with the kidney donor whose life and letter had been “borrowed” and “stolen” by the short-story writer. The organ donor writer seemed to be the underdog. I was thinking how I would have felt, if a fellow writer friend, had taken my experience and wrote a story that was published and hailed by the literary community. It was an emotional and ethical kind of thing for me—the … Continue reading Whose Story Is It? by Trudy Hale→
This is a true story. After my husband Billy died in June of 2020, his ‘step daughter’ Zoe, a beautiful and vivacious woman of fifty offered her home in Santa Barbara to hold his memorial. We waited until the 2021 vaccines and chose the month of August. Zoe’s mother had been Billy’s girlfriend in the Seventies, and she and Zoe lived with Billy in Hollywood. Zoe’s mother and Billy never married. Zoe would laugh and refer to herself as the ‘step-daughter’ and make quotation marks in the air. While our daughter Tempe and son Charlie … Continue reading Once Upon a Time In Montecito by Trudy Hale→
In your final manuscript, every scene should contain a conflict that’s essential to your narrative arc, something that simultaneously captivates the reader and catapults your story forward. Like stories, scenes also have a shape. Some work well, while others fall flat. When you spend a lot of time on something in your story, you’re saying, “Hey reader, this is super important, so pay close attention to these details.” In other words, you’re giving this part of your story some weight or importance. In an effective scene, your main character has a conflict that peaks in … Continue reading Fix Your Scene Shapes by Lisa Ellison→
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