In my own personal experience, art, poetry especially, has always been political, has always been protest, rooted in my own mixed ethnic and poverty-class background. It rose from my father’s Irishness—Dad reciting Yeats regularly, the earliest poetry of my memory, those lines documenting our family history in Easter 1916, the heartbreaking tales told round our table of “the troubles” and what they referred to not as a famine, but as ‘the Great Hunger.” It grew from my mother’s childhood in abject Appalachian poverty, the barbs I knew personally of class divisions, the broken Southern diction … Continue reading Radical Reach: Thinking On Art as Activism by Mary Carroll-Hackett→
Dear Dhriti, You’re 4 months old now and have learned how to lie on your stomach and roll over again. You’re reaching for teethers and toys, your mom proudly declares when I badger her for baby deets. She says this is fast, but all I want to scream is “Motor, you slowpoke!” Can’t you grow a little faster? Can’t you see that I’m waiting for you to start reading? I want to buy you your first book and hopefully, all the books in your future bookshelf. I’ll start you on fairytales and then bring … Continue reading A Letter to My 4-Month Old-Niece by Shruti Ramanujam→
Late on a warm summer night in 1979, my housemate Lenny and I were shooting the breeze at the kitchen table when we heard a long squeal, followed by some loud bangs, interspersed with another squeal and, finally, a crashing sound that seemed to occur in slow motion. At least it went on long enough for Lenny and me to look each other quizzically in the eye. At the time I was renting a room in a house on Broadway in Somerville, Massachusetts, sharing kitchen and dining areas with seven other twenty-something men and women. … Continue reading A Late Night Scare by Miles Fowler→
Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. We are not handed a guide at birth entitled Fail-proof Steps to Living This Life. As such, I’ve lived most of my life through a lot of trial and error—heavy on the error side. I’ve also learned that sometimes I just have to take the next right step and try not to run the entire marathon at once. I’m getting ok with that practice. There is a source that I go to often for life advice. Poet Mary Oliver never fails to enlighten me or ease my weariness. She … Continue reading Taking the Right Step by Cheryl Traylor→
2017 was an amazing year for Streetlight Magazine owing to the excellent content submitted by writers and poets from all over the world. Our editors chose six nominees for The Pushcart Prize (best of small presses) for excellent writing in non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. We would like to publicly acknowledge these six authors for their incredible talent and wish them future success. Thank-you for allowing Streetlight Magazine to publish your work! Essay/Memoir nominees: Alex Joyner for Spirit Duplicator Anne Carle Carson for Sliding Poetry nominees: Linda Nemec Foster for Blue Brian Koester for Where … Continue reading 2017 Pushcart Nominations→
(Unless otherwise noted, all paintings are watercolor/mixed media on hand-felted wool and rice paper.) I am kind of an image junkie, especially images of the subconscious or dream state. I became interested in art as a teenager and the Surrealists were who I found first. I began my actual art career working in fibers. In undergraduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University, I was a weaver and felt-maker and worked with many materials and textures. I taught all of these processes as well as papermaking and became enamored with paper, the simple beauty and … Continue reading The Art of Linda Laino→
Last week was a mess! Well, at least that’s what I’ve been told. In my purpose-coaching practice, I had four clients in a row who used the word “mess” to describe their life these days. One client said, “because I’m at a job that requires me to be professional all the time, I have to constantly appear as if things are together but underneath it all, I am a fucking mess.” Another client spoke about how his artistic perfectionism doesn’t allow for anything to get messy and yet he went on to describe his myriad … Continue reading The Purpose of Mess: Food for Your Life by Day Schildkret→
I started to become a writer with the first writing exercise I was ever given. I was 12. Mrs. A, my seventh-grade teacher, called it a ‟theme.” She said a theme should have a title, like ‟I Like Horses,” and then the paragraphs that followed would explain why the author liked horses. I did like horses, so that’s what I wrote: “I Like Horses.” When the themes were graded and passed back, I saw I’d made a C. My theme had too many misspellings and was too short. My teacher was also bothered by the … Continue reading Chosen by Mariflo Stephens→
Most things, no matter how trite and mundane, have intrinsic beauty or interest when presented in just the proper way. This is the core premise underlying Forensic Foraging, an alternative technique for digital photography. This emerging motif employs the same throwback principles that made color photography great during the heyday of the New York School, perhaps beginning as early as the 1940’s with Saul Leiter. Creative framing, high contrast, and very heavy color saturation are key elements. Moreover, the forage, borrowed from early forensic crime scene photography, employs the intense sifting, sorting, and shooting of … Continue reading William Crawford’s Forensic Foraging→
Discussion about multiculturalism can have a polarizing effect on people and it often slides into train wreck conversations or initiates a war of words. People tend to pick sides based on affiliation and then drown out the opposition. You’ve probably seen this happen on any number of news discussion shows. I recently witnessed such an encounter: two white men in a small group listened to a talk about social privilege during an organization’s diversity training class, and an argument ensued afterwards as the men refused to acknowledge the impact of social privilege on others and … Continue reading Difficult Conversations of Multiculturalism→
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