By Laura Marello
I’d never owned a house before, and when I finally bought one in Lynchburg, I found that I enjoyed decorating it. The rooms would take on a life of their own, sometimes a history of their own a […]

By Michael Lachance
I have been thinking more and more about art in my life and the special appeal photography has for me, especially black and white images. We are assaulted daily with media and the volume can […]

by Patrice Calise

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be one of the boys. No shock there: I grew up in a house with four older brothers, our parents, and several male dogs. My brothers got to run […]

By Phyllis Leffler
American cities can and should be places of civic history and civic virtue. Most are not. My city of Charlottesville is not – despite its progressive government and mostly well-intentioned c […]

By Janis Jaquith

Is it pathetic that my gray roots are showing? What about wearing yoga pants to the grocery store – are people thinking I should know better?

Women have always been subject to physical s […]

By Stefanie Newman
I spent most of my life at a loss for words. On job interviews I could never describe my good points or my bad. As an art professor I would get student evaluations that said She was nice but I […]

It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to reach someone in a crowd and you keep glimpsing the back of their head before they’re swallowed up by the thick humanity. The crowd is impermeable— you try e […]

Sometimes we need to write about writing. Sometimes we need to list all the reasons we love to write, or why we hate to write or what we want to write about.

I write because I want to find out what I think, […]

9 Pieces of Advice for Writing Fiction From Streetlight’s Fiction Editor

First off, crafting stories is a skill that can be learned. (Unlike, say, the ability to keep house.) So here a […]

Winter white. Snow White. Bone white. Wedding gown white. Pearl white. Lilly white. White knight. White lies. White lightning. White hot.

Whether cold or steamy, saintly or seductive, ghostly or s […]

Prompts are everywhere all around you, all the time. If you have recently been startled awake from a dream, taken a bite out of an apple, crossed a busy intersection or lived another day, you have new material to […]

It’s a highly discriminatory practice, but on this small tump of an island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, dark-haired boys are the ones rewarded as harbingers of good luck for the coming year. If such a c […]

The Ones Who Stay by Jenna-Marie Warnecke August 2012 Paris is empty. There’s no one left except the tourists who planned poorly, or cheaply. All the Parisians a […]

Last week it rained for three days. Outside my window the light pearled gray and rain drumming on the roof inspired me to ignore my to-do-list and wander among my bookshelves. My books have a way of wandering […]

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

Not fast enough, you don’t reply.

You have somewhere to be, and you can’t get there quickly enough. It’s not your own bed (that’s where you just came from) and it’s no […]

On the day I found out that I was pregnant I went to a bar and drank heavily with my boyfriend. It was early afternoon and I had a spicy bloody Mary and followed it up with a few craft beers. He drank the same. We […]

I’m a writer which means I am constantly taking in interesting things. Even when I shouldn’t be. I can be having a very serious conversation with a doctor, for instance, while simultaneously po […]

There is a dog on my runs who doesn’t like me. He lives on an Amish farm one and a quarter miles from my house. I take Bake Oven Hill Road to Middlecreek Road and can get in a moderately challenging run out and b […]

On a drizzling November day our poetry group gathers around the workshop leader’s kitchen table. Before we begin the critique of our poems that we wrote during the week, our workshop leader, Sharron Singleton g […]

I had a fantasy when I began volunteering for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Charlottesville. I would help newly arrived refugees document their identities, tell their stories and illustrate […]