It is just after 5:00 a.m. as I browse among the books that prop up my life. I say prop because books are so often a means of leaving my surroundings, tuning out, turning off. I say prop, but more accurately, they are the existential nail on which I hang my time and effort. Poetry, mostly—Ron Rash, Ted Kooser, Wendell Berry, Kari Gunter-Seymour. Mountain words, plains words, red clay words, river words. Places where I am utterly myself and utterly absent in this fading night whose silence is suddenly shattered by the rattling of a … Continue reading Visitatio Divina by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
Nigerian artist Sefunmi Adeola puts his sharp eyes to work as a photographer, illustrator and textile designer focusing on his African people. “I became interested in photography around 2014/2015,” says Adeola. “At the beginning, I was very interested in street photography and abstract street photography. I studied the works of artists I admired, looking at the tone, color, themes, and image-making. “I was utterly fascinated by the black and white images of artists like Ralph Gibson, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode as well as Sunmi Smart-Cole, Robert Frank, Robert Capa, Annie Leibovitz, and Diane Arbus.” Adeola prefers … Continue reading Sefunmi Adeola’s Focus on African Subjects→
Recently, my wife and I attended a dinner gathering of ten academics of which half were retired. We had met all before, though only a few do we consider knowing well. There was pleasant conversation as folks arrived—much about the inconveniences of the recent snow and ice. These folks were mostly scientists, with a good balance of humanities scholars and all are relentlessly curious and well versed in a range of subject areas. Dinner conversation bounced from tick-borne alpha-gal, to the absence of haggis being Robert Burns night (postponed because of the snowstorm a week … Continue reading A Necessary Addiction by Fred Wilbur→
We had warning. A dangerous blizzard sweeps across the eastern United States. Be prepared. The young man stacks firewood on my porch and in the barn. I fill up jugs and a bucket with water in case of a power outage. Pull out candles and battery lanterns. The storm rolls in after midnight. Snow mixed with sleet and frozen rain. The temperature drops and keeps dropping. In the morning, still sleety and snowing. Yet, tree limbs and cedars are not fluffy with snow. The snow, it seems, viewed from my window, not all that pretty, … Continue reading After the Blizzard by Trudy Hale→
What happens to the homes where we once lived? Homes we left behind, in childhood when it wasn’t a choice, as an adult when it was necessary for work or, as elders, for health reasons or to be closer to family. We can track them down via Google maps, but I suggest they no longer exist. Those places where we once lived, and especially those we once loved, exist only in memory, and, if we’re lucky, in the imagination. I hold onto places I’ve loved by writing fiction set there. Writing helps me process loss. … Continue reading Holding Onto The Past Through Fiction by Virginia Pye→
Lisa Macchi took twenty-five years off from art, but now she’s painting Charlottesville red. Sitting in her McGuffey Art Center studio, radiating an energy that belies her eighty years, Lisa Macchi has some advice for young artists stressing over how to start a painting. “You have to break the silence,” she says. “The first thing I do is just get paint on the canvas. I put it there and see if it makes sense. It doesn’t even have to relate to how the painting … Continue reading Lisa Macchi: Disrupting the Paint by Russell Hart→
I’ve been using an old refurbished desktop, just a couple hundred bucks. It’s okay—except for its geriatric pace and annoying habit of turning itself back on after shut down. Then I started getting threatening messages from Microsoft reminding me it can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 and will become even less capable and more vulnerable. Its days are numbered. My new Dell arrived last week and I began prepping for the switch. Since I didn’t want my files in the cloud (I’m under the illusion that I have some privacy left), I needed to back … Continue reading Just One Thumb by Gayla Mills→
The New Year has ambled in and made itself at home, decorations are packed away, the refrigerator leftovers are cleaned out, life is out there in the future. It is checking up on our resolve to do, to be, and to think better; to lose weight, to be kind to the homeless, to take our children to exciting places. How are we doing three weeks in? I sometimes wonder about the difference between planning ahead and prediction. The first has always seemed to me like a wise strategy, though I confess I anticipate (worry?) a … Continue reading Future Tense by Fred Wilbur→
I’m a Chicago-based visual artist working primarily with street photography and short-form video. My work focuses on capturing the city through a retro, nostalgic, movie-like lens—observing everyday moments, people, light, and atmosphere as they naturally unfold. I’ve been building my creative profile for a little over three years. Much of that time wasn’t spent posting content or chasing metrics, but studying. I immersed myself in different formats, references, and visual languages, paying close attention to how artists translate reality into something emotionally recognizable. Nearly a year and a half was dedicated specifically to observing street … Continue reading Why Visual Identity Matters More Than Ever in the AI Content Era by Art Meder→
When she walks out to the barn for the evening feed, what she notices first is how dark it is already, and how, with the darkness, a stillness sets in. Stillness is not the same as quiet. The soft but urgent whinny of the pony wanting dinner ripples from the front pasture, the drumbeat crunch crunch crunch crunch of hooves hitting fallen leaves begins as the herd files into the paddock. The pony and two donkeys stop at the gate that leads to their side of the barn. The two horses walk to their stall … Continue reading Feeding Horses and Other Things by Billie Hinton→
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