The heavy, punishing rains have stopped for now, and I step out onto the sun-warmed deck facing our back yard. A third of the space is now a lake, and in the center of this six-inch deep water stand our bird feeders. One with a metal green box perched on a steel pole is full of basic mix composed of sunflower seeds, millet, yellow maize chips. The others hang eight feet away offering sunflower seeds, and suet. Tufted titmice, cardinals, sparrows, nuthatches, and the persistent chickadees are busy at each feeder. A blue jay swoops … Continue reading The Birds of Spring by Roselyn Elliott→
As a retired college English professor, I much enjoy editing manuscripts part-time. Clients find me via a University of Virginia website called Professors as Writers, a service intended for UVA faculty and grad students seeking help with their writing. The service is also available to anyone else accessing the site. About five years ago, I received a call from a Nigerian man who lives in Virginia, teaches full time at a university, and had just finished drafting a book manuscript that was a defense of God and Christianity. I accept only editing jobs that intrigue … Continue reading Editing as Channeling: A Dangerous, Necessary Evil? by Dick Harrington→
Being disowned by your family is often an integral part of the queer experience. It’s a common story that I find is meticulously avoided in popular, escapist/pulp media—an effect of heterosexism that erases and denies the reality of gay lives: “No kween, make us laugh!” Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if my father and mother had disowned me. It would be revealing to watch a movie of my life without my father’s influence—a twisted version of It’s a Wonderful Life. My family didn’t disown me. However, they also have never been … Continue reading Placeholder Son by Spriggan Radfae→
One evening, damp and full of anguish, I arrive at a camp and basically fall apart. I want to talk to my boyfriend back home, but as usual have no signal. I start climbing on soggy leaves, moving higher, hoping. Finally, a few circles fill in on my screen and I call. His voice is like a hug, but as soon as we start speaking the raindrops start up again. Reluctantly I let him go and trudge downhill to the shelter, set up for the night. In an iPhone advertisement from when FaceTime was new, … Continue reading A Dream To Disconnect, by Mathina Calliope→
Write what you know. That was the mantra when I was in graduate creative writing school. We were admonished to write from our own experience, not to try to reach beyond our boundaries and try to re-create worlds about which we had no real knowledge and which would, thusly, come across as fake. But like all mantras, this one has its limits. For instance, my first book, The Algebra of Snow, is about a mathematician alone in the Adirondacks in winter. Anyone being less mathematical than I would be hard to imagine—I struggle with addition. … Continue reading In Praise of Not-Knowing by Ginger Moran→
I grew up telling it to whoever would listen—mostly that fell on my mother’s shoulders. At the breakfast table, at the dinner table, I proselytized with the fervor of a repenting sinner. And it began when I was only three. “Oh, oh, I‘m so be-cited!” I squealed like Horshach from Welcome Back, Kotter, after seeing my mom’s birthday cake all lit up with candles. “Nice pants,” I added, grabbing my pink, kid trousers for comfort. We all have a need to tell it, the big events of our lives, the small moments of our days, … Continue reading Listen Carefully by Karrie Bos→
Dear writing one, There will come a day when you will stop writing, for no good reason. There will be no drama, no single event that sinks your writing heels into the ground. You will come home from a writing retreat with good pages and confidence and work still to do and you will intend to keep doing it. Life itself is what will intervene. It is not you being lazy. It is not you being blocked. It is not you abandoning writing. It is not writing abandoning you. You will try to figure it … Continue reading Letter To Self On Lying Fallow by Billie Hinton→
Since changing paths on my photographic journey about three years ago, I continue to find great excitement and inspiration—as well as endless thematic possibilities—while experimenting with light painting techniques. I think of these techniques as a photographic toolkit that I use to emphasize the precise lighting of a subject and to capture with numerous separate photos, then layering/blending them in Photoshop to create the final whole photograph. Like any set of tools, they become more comfortable and versatile the longer I work with them. Less attention is required to use the tools properly. Less time … Continue reading New Visions by Fax Ayres→
My granny Sally, who had a pillow-like soul (except for when she was playing gin rummy and this badass alter-ego would jump out and stomp the competition) used to warn my siblings and me to wash our hands after touching money. We’d crack up thinking it was just an old (Jewish) wives’ tale that somehow involved sticking dollars down one’s pants. But last weekend I noticed something stamped on a $10.00 bill. Intrigued, I went to the .org address and discovered it was a website for some Aryan Nation group trying to drum up … Continue reading Do You Know Where That Money Has Been? by Erika Raskin→
You’ve gotten over the idea that writing poetry is only for strange people who carry around moleskin notebooks with ribbon bookmarks. You may have even admitted to people you’ve met in airports, knowing you will never see them again, that you write poetry. Perhaps after supplying an alibi, you’ve even gone to an open mike poetry reading and mustered the courage to read a poem or two of your own. What do you do now with those poems you have labored over, edited and re-edited, let stew and percolate, honed and polished until you think … Continue reading A Place for the Genuine by Les Bares→
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