A while ago I went with one of my nieces to get matching semicolon tattoos. This was remarkable for a variety of reasons:

1. I was 56.

2. Years before, when my eldest daughter came home from college […]

A year after the car accident that orphaned Nick, the Bishops picked him up from his grandmother’s for a weekend at Fallen Tree Lake. Saddened by his circumstances, the financier and his wife had taken to […]

Write what you know.

That was the mantra when I was in graduate creative writing school. We were admonished to write from our own experience, not to try to reach beyond our boundaries and try to re-create […]

Ingrid Jendrzejewski is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest

 
Mare’s tails and mackerel scales Make tall ships take in their sails.
She’s studied the weather and knows about […]

Emily Larkin is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest
‘I’ll have a shot of anxiety with mint, vanilla syrup, and crushed ice, and a pint of despair. With a lemon wedge […]

Julie Gesin is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest

It’s dark when he reaches home and opens the garden gate, shoulders vulnerable to the pulse of crickets that rattles the gar […]

My granny Sally, who had a pillow-like soul (except for when she was playing gin rummy and this badass alter-ego would jump out and stomp the competition) used to warn my siblings and me to wash our […]

When the bus drops Diana off in the afternoon, her mother is still at work. She lets herself into the silent, spotless apartment, a large box of Oreo cookies and two bags of Mounds in her embrace.

Dropping […]

Apparently, during the fifteen or so minutes while my husband and daughter waited in the car outside Whole Foods, some man had knifed his ex-wife. The injury doesn’t seem serious; she’s slouched in the rea […]

Dear Dhriti,

You’re 4 months old now and have learned how to lie on your stomach and roll over again. You’re reaching for teethers and toys, your mom proudly declares when I badger her for baby deet […]

The old woman fills her days volunteering for a Catholic garden club planting flowers in vacant lots on the town’s east side, where at night gangs shoot it out amid trampled pansies and broken-off cosmos. She g […]

A white pigeon sat in the gutter, waiting. Her wings were folded up like sails of a ship at anchor, her head bobbing in a sea of cobblestones. Slobodanka stopped, crouched down and peered into the bird’s brown a […]

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“The houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us…they insist in us in order to live again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living.”*

I liked to throw a base […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]