Among the activities of our local Parks and Recreation Department are youth sports (including cheerleading), a genealogy class, bingo, adult softball, “track chair” outings, gymnastics, Taekwondo, a class on identifying and removing invasive plants, and yoga. The yoga offered may not strictly conform to any of the seven modern varieties or schools (other than the fact that classes are held in a repurposed school building!), but is exactly what most participants need and want. Frankly, there are as many species of yoga as there are individuals: every one’s grimace is DNA different. The class … Continue reading Yoga Today by Fred Wilbur→
Somewhere locked in geostationary orbit over Virginia, a satellite maintains its dumb stare. Prompt it with a series of numbers and you can provoke it to produce pictures of Jefferson’s Monticello or that place you and your friends used to sneak off to by the Rapidan. 38.24521°N, 78.11247°W gets you to a concrete alley back of a post office loading dock. The satellite looks down, but once your thirteen-year-old eyes were looking up from that alley. Feet freezing in your too-tight shoes, slipping through the gray slush of a melting snow pile. Freedom on a … Continue reading The Alley by Alex Joyner→
As I read this year’s contest entries, I accumulated a deep appreciation for the humans who invested the thought and energy to create them and who took the time to submit them to our contest. Thank you, fellow poets. We received 137 entries and co-editor Sharon and I have read then all. Our task was tough as there were many seriously contending poems. I found that I was in conversation with each poem. My wife thought I was mumbling to myself as perhaps a first sign of losing me. In a sense, my interaction with … Continue reading 2026 Poetry Contest Announcement by Fred Wilbur→
Ceramic artist Judd Jarvis finds a thoughtful middle ground between form and function. It’s tempting to suggest that Virginia’s famous red clay soil lured potter Judd Jarvis from the Midwest’s dark earth to Charlottesville. Jarvis’s ceramic artistry is far removed, though, from the utilitarian brick that surrounds us, and even a far cry from the negative-space narratives of ancient Greek red-figure pottery. His work is proof that ceramics, despite the simple functionality that so many people expect of it, is art for art’s sake in the right hands. “I used to be more hung up … Continue reading Pots for Art’s Sake: A Look at Judd Jarvis’s Work by Russell Hart→
It wasn’t when I got the hang of cursing, exquisitely and generously, tutored by the bigger kids at the back of the school bus. It wasn’t when I puffed on my buddy’s mom’s unfiltered Kools in the woods—throat raw, lungs afire, coughing triumphantly. It wasn’t when I thumbed through Dad’s Playboy magazines and delighted at the sight of nipples peeking through an open plaid flannel shirt. It wasn’t when I thought I was the last one on the playground to know how babies are made. (After a night in a tent in the backyard with … Continue reading Splitting Wood by David Sapp→
One day after school, I stepped into my room and immediately felt that something was wrong. My eyes darted to the bed, and my heart stopped. The mattress was gone. My diary—the one I’d hidden so carefully beneath it—was missing too. I rushed to the balcony, where laundry usually fluttered on a frayed line. There it was: my palm tree mattress, spread out in the sun like a giant pancake. But my diary was nowhere to be found. Someone had discovered it. And deep down, I knew exactly who. Then my father appeared from another … Continue reading When My Secrets Were No Longer Mine by Jean Romano→
Sukey Gap Graveyard The road here is pocked with holes, graves strung mostly in mistflower or phlox, apt to spread airy trails. Not a place for plastic lilies who squall into the quiet, but moss with enough give to muffle the whole of your existence, let a mythology larger than your own encompass the knee, the folded hands, words dampening what’s left of sunken or toppled names. One stone says Perninia, my third great grandmother, who holds open the iron gate then closes it behind me, and flies softly into the trees. She sings from … Continue reading Mind the Gap by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
I was listening to NPR on my way home from the dentist today and it turned out to be one of those shows I carried into my house when I got home. The show was about mattering. And how mattering is a meta-need—one that is above the other needs like significance, purpose, or belonging. It turns out we need to feel valued and to feel like we are adding value. This isn’t just a nice, woo-woo part of life, supported by affirmations. This is a nitty-gritty, down to our very core, need. Without it, we risk turning … Continue reading Mattering To Fiona by Ginger Moran→
If you’ve shopped at Aldi, the German-based grocery that’s expanding around the U.S., then you know their shopping cart system. You insert a quarter into the cart handle to unlock the chain attached to the next cart. When you return the cart, you can retrieve your quarter. I love this system. For one thing, it’s efficient. People don’t leave carts strewn around the lot, so the company doesn’t have to hire employees to retrieve them. That’s one reason it can sell a large bag of tortilla chips for under two bucks and a half gallon … Continue reading For the Sake of a Quarter by Gayla Mills→
Nigerian artist Imran Abiola Sulola started by taking pictures of the sun and the moon. Then in 2021, what began as a hobby changed after seeing photographs taken by Martins Deep, poet, portrait photographer and Facebook friend. “His profound, aesthetically edited photographs became the beginning of my portrait photography,” he remembers. Self-taught, Sulola says he immersed himself in YouTube videos and watched the work of other Nigerian photographers including Ilemobayo Ojo, Adesina Taofeek. Michael Emerald and Deborah Ajilore, “Their beautiful works have been an inspiration for me to keep exploring the digital art space,” he says. … Continue reading Nigerian Photographer Focuses on Self Portraits→
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