“To me photography is a blend of serendipity, of good fortune and conscious selection and structuring. I need to apply skill and I need to get lucky,” says Charlottesville photographer Will Kerner. “The […]

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 […]

Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. We are not handed a guide at birth entitled Fail-proof Steps to Living This Life. As such, I’ve lived most of my life through a lot of trial and error—heavy on the er […]

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 […]

(Unless otherwise noted, all paintings are watercolor/mixed media on hand-felted wool and rice paper.)

I am kind of an image junkie, especially images of the subconscious or […]

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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 […]

I started to become a writer with the first writing exercise I was ever given. I was 12. Mrs. A, my seventh-grade teacher, called it a ‟theme.” She said a theme should have a title, like ‟I Like Horses,” and the […]

Most things, no matter how trite and mundane, have intrinsic beauty or interest when presented in just the proper way. This is the core premise underlying Forensic Foraging, an alternative technique for […]

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, […]

Podcast: A family’s trip to the beach becomes a metaphor for colonialism, gentrification and class struggle.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: Natives by Chuck Nwoke

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 […]

The New World Order Blues is inspired by the late conspiracy researcher and radio personality Mae Brussell, updated for today’s concerns and presented in one of the greatest music styles ever created by A […]

Maybe Joan Söderlund’s mother was on to something.

“My mother wanted to keep me off my bicycle because I had broken a few bones. I think she thought, ‘If we get her into art and painting, it will ke […]

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 […]

Podcast: Marital and family duties constrict the life of a matriarch who contemplates change in her latter years.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: Away by Juditha Dowd

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 […]