Ben had wanted to leave earlier but his brother couldn’t take any more time off. Ben glanced at Willy, who was leaning against the passenger-side door, smoking like a chimney.

“Can we stop for food?” Willy […]

Rick Weaver seems an artist equally interested in what can and cannot be seen. Whether working with paint brushes, carving tools or modeling clay, his creations blend the subject at hand with what he […]

When I was in college there was this bar that had bouncers who took turns playing St. Peter. They stood outside the door going:

You.
You.
You.
Not you.

The whole idea was so ghastly to me (for a […]

The day Septima left, she said, “I believe I am a promise you are tired of keeping.” Minutes before, Turk had pitched a bottle of beer at her. He had missed, but only barely. Green glass and yellow ale spl […]

 
                                            LOOK3…
 
June 10-13th all eyes will be on LOOK3, Charlottesville’s stellar photography festival now in its seventh year. The town will host numerous famous […]

There is a saying that if you don’t know what you’re doing, ask your neighbors. Once upon a time when I first moved to Nelson County, Virginia, and knew no one, I experienced an untethered queasy feeling of not […]

At the old house, Leslie had walked to school. Here, the school was closer, but she had to take the bus. The old house had been on the outskirts of a smaller town, not a former murder capital of the world. […]

Birds in residence are the stuff of metaphors and dreams for New York City artist Dina Brodsky.

Mysterious feathered fowl — from crows to blue jays — land in unexpected interiors, their res […]

Whenever I run into Lisa Russ Spaar she seems scarcely to have aged since I first met her, eons ago, in Gregory Orr’s graduate poetry workshop at the University of Virginia. Tall and lithe, with long blonde h […]

The miracle is that we have integrity at all. O, not fidelity to a moral code. That’s a pale shadow of the integrity I mean. Stable identity. Some semblance of unity. Or, to put it in the word that has h […]

 
    What is the difference between illustration and fine art? 
 

Streetlight’s featured artist Kate Samworth, and Nick Clark, former Chief Curator and Founding Director of the Eric Carle Museu […]

Imagine a world without bird song. A world without bird beaks, long, sharp and charmingly curved. A world without feathered wings red, gold and green.

Artist Kate Samworth did, in fact, imagine s […]

Later, when asked to speak about what happened for the second time, Harlen recalled that it was in fact a single object, faint and blurry one second, close and vibrant the next. It hovered overhead: two blazing […]

The premier poetry event of this year’s Festival of the Book in Charlottesville was “Shrines to Longing,” the March 20 reading by Charles Wright, America’s current (20th) poet laureate, and Mary Szybist, who was […]

In 1995 Kay Redfield Jamison published her ground-breaking memoir, An Unquiet Mind, A Memoir of Moods and Madness.  For my husband who was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in 1987, and myself living through his m […]

“Nothing stays long enough to know.
How long since we’ve been inside
anything together the way

these birds are inside
this tree together, shifting, making it into
a shivering thing”
 

—Mary Szyb […]

“I have an attraction to Berlin, especially the 1920s, when it was an art and science haven for the best and the brightest. I am also fascinated with German Expressionism, and many of the ar […]

January is upon us and with it the start of several weeks of bone-rattling cold and snow-cancelled classes erroneously dubbed “Spring Semester.” For me, it heralds the beginning of a poetry class I teach at the […]

Photographer Sam Abell is a seeker, camera in hand. A National Geographic staff photographer for 33 years, Abell has traveled from Japan to Newfoundland, from Australia to Russia discovering and shooting […]

I don’t know why I believe that I’ll find the truth about America in Mississippi. It’s a dreamscape, really. So overlaid with lies, oppressions, and Faulknerian legend that to expect anything authentic about the p […]