By Phyllis Leffler American cities can and should be places of civic history and civic virtue. Most are not. My city of Charlottesville is not – despite its progressive government and mostly well-intentioned citizenry. Its monuments to history embed narratives that disrespect large numbers of us. The people represented in its Civil War and Jim Crow statues glorify those who would maintain slavery, fight to divide the American union, and seek to maintain white supremacy by promoting the Lost Cause once the war ended. To become the city that fully justifies its reputation as one … Continue reading Bringing Art to a Charlottesville Conversation→
By Janis Jaquith Is it pathetic that my gray roots are showing? What about wearing yoga pants to the grocery store – are people thinking I should know better? Women have always been subject to physical scrutiny and now there’s the added hell of being judged by our work/life balance. Lean into your career and neglect your family. Stay home with the kids and lose ground in your career. We’re zealots. We’re slackers. I feel like I’m tap-dancing for an unseen audience, hoping I’m good enough. Good enough for what, I’m not sure. To occupy … Continue reading Do They Think You’re Good Enough? How to Stop Giving a Rat’s Ass→
By Stefanie Newman I spent most of my life at a loss for words. On job interviews I could never describe my good points or my bad. As an art professor I would get student evaluations that said She was nice but I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Life’s important moments found me rooting around for words with the dogged persistence of somebody looking for their car keys I had a reverence for language that only a visual artist could have. Color and form were slippery and vague, but I was sure that … Continue reading When Words Fail→
Streetlight’s upcoming spring issue (due out on April 6th) will feature three winning essays selected from the trove of entries submitted to our 2016 Essay/Memoir Contest, so expect some amazing writing next month and in the future as well. This latest writing contest follows on the success of last year’s poetry contest, and promises to become a major fund-raising event for our not-for-profit web publication. Our editors delighted in the response this year to our call for entries, but choosing just three essays out of all the wonderful submissions is no meager challenge, so you … Continue reading Don’t Miss Our Spring Issue!→
The coffee shop was closed. I would not have made the detour into Leland if it hadn’t popped up on my smartphone map. And who would have expected that a coffee shop would be closed at 9 am? So there I was peering in the dusty glass, trying to conjure some sign of activity inside, sweating already on a Mississippi August morning. It didn’t look so inviting anyway. Next door, by the package store (Cheer!), a brick facade failed to conceal the implosion beyond. One step through that door and you’d be in the middle … Continue reading The Coffee That Didn’t Happen in a Delta Town (and All that Did)→
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ~ Lao Tzu My father gave me a brand new digital camera for Christmas in 2005 and it sat on a shelf for a year and a half. “How are you liking that little camera I gave you?” he asked me one day. “Well, I haven’t really opened it up yet,” I had to confess. “Well, get it out and fire it up!” he chimed. I wanted to take pictures, but part of me didn’t want to have to open it. That would … Continue reading The Creative Path: From Couch Potato to Camera Buff→
Sometimes we need to write about writing. Sometimes we need to list all the reasons we love to write, or why we hate to write or what we want to write about. I write because I want to find out what I think, how I feel, why I believe and who I am underneath the makeup and the clothing and the skin. I write because writing is the best revenge and the best way to avoid goodbye. I write because it’s a vehicle for feelings that didn’t want to take the train. I write because … Continue reading Writing a Bridge→
Write It Right! Free Grammar Resources for Writers. Sometimes even the most erudite writers use bad grammar or misspell words. Hey it happens. English is a living language after all and subject to change. Dictionaries frequently bow to popular misusage of words and then permanently alter their acceptable meanings (podium, ironic, fortuitous), and as any person that grew up with a smart phone as an extra appendage will tell you: more and more chat-speak is creeping into acceptable usage. On top of that, the Internet creates crossover platforms for UK English writers and American English … Continue reading Write It Right!→
9 Pieces of Advice for Writing Fiction From Streetlight’s Fiction Editor First off, crafting stories is a skill that can be learned. (Unlike, say, the ability to keep house.) So here are a few pointers from someone who writes and reads. A lot. 1. Plotting: There are many different ways to do this. I know writers who cover their walls with blueprints, mapping each chapter like cartographers before embarking upon the very first sentence of any project. On the other extreme are those of us who take a more minimalist approach. We are … Continue reading Writing Advice→
My father was an aviator in the Great War. He was also 40 years older than I, and understandably we did not share a lot of the things little boys and daddies are supposed to share: like tossing around a football or baseball or his telling me stories of his youth and how he became who he was. And, he was a hard-driving, self-made man, from the slums of South Bend Indiana and yet gained entrance into the Notre Dame School of Architecture, from which he left to join the American army sometime … Continue reading Slipping and Falling…→
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