Submissions for the annual Streetlight Magazine Poetry Award are open and I want to encourage participation from everyone, those new to our magazine as well as regular readers. The closing date for this year is 29 November, just a few weeks away. The rewards are recognition by the posting of the winning entries in our magazine and print anthology, and monetary prizes of $125, $75, and $50. In past blogs, I have advised writers, especially poets, to be realistic in their desire for recognition, but I want to promote here our poet-friendly process for … Continue reading Invitation: R. S. V. P. by Fred Wilbur→
People have lost their minds. Seriously. They’re comparing masks to yellow stars and saying vaccine passports are signs of tyranny, refusing to comply as a sign of resistance. Please. My dog has to produce a vaccine passport before getting his anal glands expressed. Asking for evidence that he’s up-to-date on his boosters is hardly symptomatic of a dictatorship. It’s proof that as citizens we care that the groomer is not exposed to rabies if bitten while performing an unenviable task. Our fellow citizens are being manipulated into believing that Democrats are manufacturing a pandemic, … Continue reading We Need to Talk by Erika Raskin→
Art creation is an organic process for me, where inspiration takes the lead and my hands merely follow. The traditional media in my repertoire includes pen, colored pencil, and acrylic paint. I am also fond of using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I explore the juxtaposition of traditional and digital mediums within my art because this combination is a versatile method of self-expression. I blend realism and surrealism to represent the beauty and strangeness of my subjects. I find inspiration in majestic natural wonders and in small, delicate objects such as wildflowers. My … Continue reading Deconstructing My Process by Jury S. Judge→
Do you constantly compare yourself to other writers? Do you set goals for yourself as a writer and then somehow fall short of them every time? Do you start new writing practices full of enthusiasm, but then sooner or later you dread sticking with it? If you’re like so many other writers out there, the answer to these questions is sadly, “yes.” And every time something like this happens to you, you end up in a pit of despair, right? You question yourself, your writing talent, and your ability to make your dreams happen. It’s … Continue reading Here’s One Quick Secret Writers Can Use to Conquer Self-Doubt Forever by Lauren Sapala→
This summer, I have performed two activities that strangely seem similar: shredding dozens of family documents and serving as a screener for a poetry manuscript contest. Many of our older readers have, no doubt, had to settle their parents’ or close relatives’ estates. I am past that stressful situation, thankfully, as my mother, pre-diseased by my father, died ten years ago. For that decade six or seven banker’s boxes squatted on sturdy shelves made especially for them. After consulting my surviving siblings, I spent many hours sorting (in some cases saving) and then shredding … Continue reading Two Tasks by Fred Wilbur→
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→
One of the most surprising things I’ve discovered about writing is that while putting words on the page can be a solitary act, “being a writer” can’t be. Mind The Gap There is a gap between what people think the writing journey looks like, and what it really looks like. Non-writers picture you, alone in a book-lined room, dashing off deathless prose from Once Upon a Time to The End, occasionally gazing moodily into the distance as you wrestle with a creative demon, but ultimately in charge of your story all the way. Even … Continue reading Don’t Walk the Writers’ Path Alone by Julie Duffy→
I am in the middle of writing an essay that spans a full twenty-nine of my thirty-two years of life. It hinges on an event that happened three Thanksgivings ago, but reaches as far back as my third birthday and as far forward as—well—now. And it is here, half-way through the writing of this essay (which is as heavy in terms of my emotional investment as it is long in word count), that I pause, close my laptop, and momentarily step away. Last week, I read a piece of the essay to my beloved writing … Continue reading Writing in Retrospect by Dana Mich→
Once again we have had the good fortune to be invited into other worlds, each unfurled in just 500 words. The skill involved in presenting backstory and insight—with minimal description—is great. And, as always, trying to rank submissions to Streetlight‘s Flash Fiction contest was very difficult. In terms of the mechanics, Suzanne Freeman and I present each other with our subjective responses to the narratives. We then take a Venn Diagram approach, winnowing down the entries by those that overlap in our respective hierarchies. It’s interesting (and difficult!) to see how many stories fall by … Continue reading 2021 Flash Fiction Contest by Erika Raskin→
In the quarantined Covid year of 2020, I returned to exploring the figure in my mixed media paintings. Even though it’s been years since I’ve used the human figure as a subject, I’ve always considered my paintings “figurative,” containing representations from the real world as they do. I seem to land somewhere between abstraction and representation where composition, layering and playing with the space steer me through the painting. I’ve never been interested in replicating what I can observe outside my window like a photograph. I don’t ever want viewers to forget they … Continue reading New Works by Linda Laino→
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