All my life I’ve gotten into random conversations with people where the subject of our life trajectories comes up, and I always end up feeling kind of weird. This past weekend I hung out with a friend who told m […]

So delicious—this light, this air, this time, my time, because I have constructed a solitary life in order to free up time to write. Ice chatters in cool, stevia-sugared lime juice; I look out through the window a […]

“We’re walking to the midnight service?” my daughter asked. “With all the hooligans out there.”

It was Christmas Eve. I looked out the window onto the streets of our Eastern Shore town. A mostly full moon moved […]

Both the Irish and Ukrainian/Russian sides of my family settled in Allegheny County, and the men worked in the steel mills and coal mines. My mother got on a bus one day and moved to central Ohio. She […]

I grew up in Southern California with a darkroom in my garage. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all photographers. As a child I didn’t spend much time with photography, even though I wa […]

Body painted women. Haitian orphans. Black Elvis. Models for hip-hop and Votre Nom. The homeless. A budding coquette in the summer sun.

These are but a few of the fascinating faces caught in telling […]

By and large, the biggest problem I run into with struggling authors is the challenge they have around marketing themselves. I hear a lot of different reasons for this: “I’m too introverted.” “I hate anythin […]

Shoes is the story of the artist’s aging father who needed to give up a good pair of shoes because they no longer offered enough support. Harris inked the soles of these shoes and walked in them to make p […]

Collage has always been at the center of my creative work. I began by accident or twist of fate, with a pile of magazines and a pair of little pink scissors. A fun project to do something crafty turned […]

Sometimes, modern life feels dried out and far away from what nourishes. In our chase to connect, we climb ladders that promise better tomorrows and disconnect from what feels good under our feet. We forget the […]



Podcast: Down and out and on the brink of even worse.

A short story performed by Joe Guay.

Read the story online: Turkeys by R.H. Emmers

I probably started working towards becoming an artist in middle school in Charlottesville. I made little comics to sell to my friends and I’d fill up my homework and test sheets with doodles in the […]

My name is Mario Loprete. I live in Catanzaro, a small Calabrian city in the south of Italy. We are in the land that the ancient Greeks called “Magna Grecia,” rich in culture and history.

I also travel a l […]



Podcast: When a woman faces the loss of a beloved, aging pet, she finds herself confronting her own experience with age and death.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: E […]

When whales and porpoises beach themselves en masse, people react and mobilize in response to the tragedy. The sight of cetaceans dying from dehydration or drowning, and the inevitability of their slow, suffering […]

It’s hard being human, especially when the world feels hard. Nowadays, we live in a fishbowl of constant exposure to the unnatural noise of unnatural tweets and digital pings, chimes, and chirps. I miss bird song […]

I was born in Montreal, Quebec. My parents were highly cultured people; they had a large collection of books on art, music and sculpture. I was a curious child and doubtless my parents’ interests rubbed […]

“Simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”

—Nan She […]