After an eighteen-hour flight with a connection in Dubai, my daughter, Tempe, and I landed in Delhi. Throughout the trip I posted photographs on Facebook with simple descriptions. Palace of Winds, the Baga Border at sunset, a boat ride at dawn on the Ganges. Before the trip I had wondered if I would be gifted with a dramatic adventure tale, as travel in my hippie-chick days provided when I hitchhiked through Europe, a sleeping bag and dulcimer strapped on my back and a chip of acid hidden in a lipstick tube and no return ticket … Continue reading A Small Marvel by Trudy Hale→
I am scheduled for a tri-annual colonoscopy soon and like most people, I buy into the statistics of cancer prevention, though it is not an event most people anticipate with joy. I have waited for my appointment for six months and at that have been squeezed into the hours of operation at 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday. Though our lives are for the most part based on past experiences, anticipation, by definition, deals with the unknowable future. We may not categorize anticipation as an emotion, but it can be emotional. Think of the hope of the … Continue reading Some Trepidation by Fred Wilbur→
I was working with a new client who had come to me because she said she hated her writing life. As I sat with her on Zoom and asked her questions about her writing, I watched her face change as she described how she used to feel about writing when she was much younger, and how she felt about it now. She looked troubled, and sad. And also confused. Why was writing so hard for her now? she asked. She didn’t understand why it felt like pulling teeth to sit down and crank out five … Continue reading When Writing Isn’t Fun Anymore by Lauren Sapala→
I once wrote a piece for Publisher’s Weekly about how even people who are terminally disorganized can craft novels. I offered a five-step alternative to the (impossible) task of manufacturing a pre-writing blueprint. Of these: one-sentence plot description writing what you know asking what if retrofitting action and, creating three-dimensional characters It is the final that is most crucial. In order for your narrative to take off, your cast needs to be sketched out (with well-rounded backstories that include things like the meaning of hidden tattoos, food allergies, wardrobe choices, cat or dog preference, conversational … Continue reading Put Some Meat On Their Bones by Erika Raskin→
I didn’t start making art until after I’d graduated from college. While I never got much of an artistic education, it turns out that you can learn a great deal if you are persistent (read: stubborn) enough. After a few years of study in McGuffey Art Center’s figure drawing sessions, I eventually produced a drawing that was put in a show. Someone asked me, “What is this drawing about?” I blanked: my art wasn’t “about” anything. I just wanted to be an artist. So I studied Dalí and Picasso, Tamer and Turner and … Continue reading Fisher Samuel Harris Shows at McGuffey Art Center→
Many, oh, many, many, years ago, a friend and I took a plane trip to Minneapolis, Minn. It was not a first flight, but it was a first time west for both of us. Our flight began in Newark, N.J. This friend believed, or professed to believe, that airplanes only stayed in the air because the passengers kept willing it to do so. Perhaps she was being facetious, but in any event, that was probably our only worry. In those days, no one searched your luggage and the rows of seats seemed not to be … Continue reading A Very Small Adventure by Susan Shafarzek→
Five years ago, my wife fell in love. I’m not talking about me (we have been married thirty-nine years, so I hope the falling in love thing happened much earlier). Through her genealogy research, my wife, Vicki, discovered a ninety-three-year-old cousin living on her own in Montreal. Vicki’s research started with one item that she found among her late parents’ belongings: a postcard, sent from Poland and written in Yiddish, that had been addressed to her paternal great-grandfather. This was her first inkling that she might have family that had not emigrated to the United … Continue reading My Wife Is In Love by E. H. Jacobs→
When I was about twelve years old, I found John Christopher’s YA Tripods books in the library. In this series, the humans on Earth have reverted to an agricultural, village-based society dominated by aliens who stalk the planet as giant “tripods,” three-legged metal vehicles in which the domineering hierarchy scans the population to make certain there are no outliers plotting to overthrow them. The aliens use technology to place a “cap” hard-wired into people’s heads when they are twelve or thirteen, and there’s a ritual ceremony surrounding it. The cap keeps humans docile and obedient … Continue reading In Which She is Briefly a Curmudgeon by Ann E. Michael→
When I was very young, I memorized the poem “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas, unaware that I had been drawn into poetry of place. Short-sighted, I read it as a poem about the loss of innocence which mirrored some of my own morphing into an adult. Now I realize the poem does what good poetry of place does; it brings us into imaginative relationship with the land we have separated from. Loss of innocence? Perhaps, but more the inevitability and shifting of perspective that underpins our perceptions of home or homelessness. Many poems of place … Continue reading Thoughts on Place by Sharon Ackerman→
Between the two American holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, it seems appropriate to write about one aspect of both: food. Traditionally the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of a successful, or at least adequate, harvest with the hope that such would carry the Pilgrims through the hard winter to come. Occasions for such thoughts, no doubt, are ancient and center around family and tribe sustainability. An official thanksgiving holiday was not celebrated until 1863 when Abraham Lincoln declared one, a few hundred years after the “first” Thanksgiving in 1621. We collectively count the blessings … Continue reading Beware the Feast by Fred Wilbur→
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