The old cantor and the new rabbi were to meet in the lunchroom behind the office wing of Congregation Beth Tzedek, the House of the Righteous. There was no empty office for the new rabbi, Jacob Kleck, to occupy, […]

That Sketchy Area Known as Writer's Block by Erika Raskin Sometimes trying to write is like playing Scrabble (old school—not virtual) and reaching into the bag for more letters o […]

I wrote an entirely new Chapter 1 for the new edition of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt 2006; rev. 2016). The idea to open the biography at a low point in the her life, instead of during childhood […]

My father seemed well enough when I saw him, though he did remind me of someone who’d been woken up too quickly from a deep sleep and was trying really hard not to bump into any walls. I’m not sure how rel […]

I met Sharon one Saturday morning in late September at Writer House in Charlottesville, Virginia after dropping a writer off at the train station who had been at Porches writing retreat. We talked about Playing […]

An essay on creative process by Rachel E. Diken

The Open Road had long been a solace to me, until a highway crash many years ago where faulty brakes caused a high-speed tumbling wreck. I was moving from the […]

Thirty-Three
 
The number of vertebrae in the human spine
when coccyx bones are counted individually.

The temperature at which water boils on the Newton
scale. In Fahrenheit, just above freezing.

It’s a […]

Bonnie took a toothpick and dug at her fire-eaten scalp. Fifteen more minutes. Her mama always loved Bonnie’s red curls. “Just as sweet as the bluebirds singing in the oaks,” Mama would whisper to her. “God […]

I am but a mouthful of sweet air – W.B. Yeats

I take special pleasure in sitting outdoors. There’s displeasure, too, in the form of bugs and mercurial weather that I can’t control, but mostly I take pleas […]

“Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” the actress Bette Davis famously said, and these words reeled through Muffin’s head as she crammed a pill pocket down the throat of her ancient basset hound. Ernesti […]

At 7:40am, the streets of downtown Charlottesville are eerily quiet. If not for the barricades, it would be hard to believe these streets will soon teem with people: busloads of Nazis come for the Unite the Right […]

My second novel, Best Intentions, is a medical thriller that falls solidly between Write-What-You-Know, a form of untaxing research I heartily recommend, and Write-What-You-Worry-About, a selfless act of spreading […]

Once a decade, the European cities of Venice, Kassel, and Munster form a trifecta for the contemporary art world. There’s the every-two-year Biennale in that glorious jewel on the Adriatic.

And a mammoth s […]

Beatitude
 
It is winter. It is cold.
Meek sky offers no color.
Hardwood skeletons assemble
along the treeline. Roots knuckle up
through blizzard’s encumbrance, grasping at sunrise.

Rhododendrons sa […]

“While you’re not doing anything—again, today,” Manda said, “you can get estimates on having that tree cut down.”

Ben rolled over and propped himself against the mahogany headboard. He pushed a strand of g […]