A good friend and fellow writer recently introduced me to Medium. NOT the dead-people-seeing-housewife tv show. Medium is a digital publishing platform/story-telling community for writers to engage through feedback, recommendations, and followings. There’s not much fluff—it’s cleanly designed and very simple, with a big variety of writing top. Recently, Medium posed a writing prompt/contest that seemed too ripe to pass up: “I had to have it.” I ran with it, created an account and uploaded my response. Since winning the contest had to do with ‘recommends,’ I don’t think my six followers who somehow appeared when I joined won me any trophies. But having a … Continue reading Publish Thyself?→
In second grade, I was assigned the role of a Pilgrim woman in the Thanksgiving play. I wore a dull, gray dress with an itchy, starched white collar and I had only two sentences to say: “Look, look, the Governor is coming. He is such a fine man.” Even as a seven-year-old I recognized that this was a smarmy speech and a bit part, but such was the lot of us Pilgrim women. We all delivered our brief lines and then stood back, pretending to stir things while the Governor and Squanto got all the action. … Continue reading My Pilgrim Problem→
When I first moved to Qatar ten years ago, I was disappointed to find that the desert of the Qatar peninsula (on the northeastern coast of the Arabian peninsula) was not as lush as that of Arizona, where I previously had lived and fallen in love with Sonoran plants and animals. At first, Qatar’s desert appeared to be nothing but a barren wasteland. Then I was introduced to a local artist and wildflower expert who, every spring after the rains, took us out into the desert to search for flowers and other … Continue reading Desert Ecology: Lessons and Visions→
And you know I don’t mean Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. You do know that, right? I notice that the newspapers, the internet, the TV, are all full of stories about the seasons coming, by which they mean Thanksgiving and Christmas — just as they have been full, of course, about the season past, which is to say Halloween. This is certainly an effect of capitalism, which the media, being its children, cannot ignore. It’s their business, after all. Halloween? Buy lots of candy! Thanksgiving next, buy your turkey here! Christmas after that, be sure and … Continue reading It’s Coming, Ready or Not – A Rant→
As I write, Halloween is upon us. Not that I need to say anything. Signs of its approach have been around for a while. It is unlikely to slip by unnoticed. Depending on how you measure such things (public displays, retail spending, poll numbers), Halloween is challenging Thanksgiving for second place among our culture’s favorite holidays, and it has the momentum going forward. Poor All Saints’ Day, the original reason, after all, that there is such a thing as Halloween. Safe to say that most people who enjoy the make-believe, the trick-or-treating, or the … Continue reading All Souls→
Western photographer Katherine Minott moves in close in color and black and white. Her closeups — abstracts as well as things recognizable — explore “the beauty hidden in every day objects, the sacred hidden in the mundane.” Her subjects from broken eggs and weathered wood to purple kayaks and hot pink splattered paint, highlight intense contrasts and intimate observation. Minott equally enjoys shooting in color and black and white. “Often black and white lends itself to capturing the ‘soul’ of something, like a tree with sunlight streaming through leaves,” she … Continue reading Up Close in Color and Black & White: Katherine Minott→
Charlottesville’s Les Yeux du Monde Gallery is presently exhibiting a solo show by mixed media painter and landscapist Anne Slaughter, profiled earlier in Streetlight. Slaughter is known for her layered sculptures and earthy, semi abstract landscapes, works that show the effects of weather and time’s relentless passage. Her present show, Connections, is dedicated to figures, although faceless, for the first time. Slaughter’s show will run until November 16th. Visit https://www.lydm.co/ to read more. The McGuffey Arts Center’s Sarah B. Smith Gallery is now showing samples of the Charlottesville area’s quality pottery, fiber art, furniture, jewelry, glass, leather and … Continue reading Art Notes by Elizabeth Howard→
This coming Saturday Charlottesville’s WriterHouse will host its own special segment of an international event in which poets all over the world will be gathering in a spirit of global uplift. The Charlottesville segment will take place Saturday, September 27 at WriterHouse (see: Writerhouse.org) from 4:00 P.M. till 6:30. It’s free. I attended this event last year at WriterHouse and want to draw your attention to it. Polly Lazaron, organizer for the event, reports that this is the fifth of these events in which she has participated and the second for which she has been … Continue reading An International Celebration of Poetry Right Here In Charlottesville→
Lydia was larger than life. Her paintings, installations, lectures and scholarship were all intertwined, embodying her probing and profound intellect and her far ranging quest to decipher modern culture through the art of Pablo Picasso and other artists. Born into a Jewish family in Focsani, Romaniain 1926, Lydia Csato survived the German occupation of her country during World War II and went on to study art and the law at the University of Bucharest. By the 1950s, she was one of the most successful painters working in the Social Realist style mandated by Romania’s Communist … Continue reading Picasso, Lydia and Friends by Lyn Bolen Warren→
On August 7-10, I had the privilege of attending the Virginia Quarterly Review’s first writers’ conference, along with roughly 25-30 participants, at the Boar’s Head Inn right here in Charlottesville, VA. Three workshop leaders, poet Beth Ann Fennelly, Fiction writer Richard Bausch, and non-fiction/fiction writer Wells Tower each shone in their own way over the weekend; Beth Ann led a lively, ear-opening craft talk on sound (and a pretty great poetry workshop); Wells read from his GQ essay, “The Old Man at Burning Man,” sharing his experience of the event with his aging father; Richard … Continue reading VQR = GRT→
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