For most of my youth, I lived in a secure blanket of belonging. I belonged to the groups of people that surrounded me at my school and church: white Christians, married couples with children (children like me), […]

23 Feet Deep
 
The footway we walk sketches
brown lines on green fields that seem
to hover over the Irish Sea. All around us
sheep and cows hold their mouths to grass,
unmindful of heaven. This perpetual […]

Catherine carefully dumped the coffee grounds onto the center of the front page and then folded over the four corners, making a neat bundle. Robert didn’t like to read the news and she was always ca […]

In my old age, I have become an artist’s model. Every couple of months, I remove all metal adorning my body, enter a radiation-proof inner sanctum, climb up on a conveyor belt that carries me into a cavernous […]

You have stalked about fifty agents and know what they like with their toast and where their poodles get their haircuts. The ten minutes you got to spend with some of them at writers’ conferences bought you n […]

I first read Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” when I was in college. Five American Poets was the course, taught by a ruddy-faced Midwestern professor who began class by reading aloud a poem, often reciting it from m […]

As a child, one of the most thrilling things to me was the story my father told about how he, at the age of ten, first encountered Indians on a dusty road near the Flandreau Santee Indian Reservation in South […]

2nd place winner of the Streetlight 2017 Poetry Contest

My Grandmother Kills a Chicken
 
The hen house her grocery,
she strode the aisles of cluck,
straw, and feathers for eggs
reaching under each bird […]

1st place winner of the Streetlight 2017 Poetry Contest

Thoor Ballylee
Home of W.B. Yeats
Massive stone, empty air, the river’s
cool breath, a space the poet enters.
Image stacked upon image reveals
his w […]

3rd place winner of the Streetlight 2017 Poetry Contest

Witness
 
It seemed an unlikely spot for a prophet, the annual library book sale
in a dim warehouse on a summer day, but there she was,
rocking side […]

We were the ones who fell between the cracks in the social order. We loathed the popular kids—the jocks, cheerleaders, and rich kids. We pitied the stoners and the nerds. To all of them, we were invisible, s […]

I did the same thing in the first two minutes upon meeting her for the first time that I did while sitting with a friend of more than 20 years two days before. I cried. I felt humbled and felt the tears well up, […]

This past week I had an unusual experience in a memoir class. Several of us had turned in an excerpt to be critiqued during class. The workshop leader asked another writer to read my excerpt aloud. We were not to […]

She felt the first loose tooth at 5am on Tuesday. A back tooth on the lower left side, her wisdom tooth? She felt it the moment she woke up, lying in bed while the monitor screamed in her ear.

She […]

Writing a story from a foreign or external perspective offers not only the reward of expanding your own awareness about people but can also lead to empathy for others that you may not have had before. To write […]

The squeaky snow in Indiana reminds me of growing up in Poland. So does the temperature, seven degrees Fahrenheit. I’m glad it’s not seventy and sunny. Better days for sitting down and writing rarely come […]