Succor by Brett Ann Stanciu When the pandemic first shut down our world in the spring of 2020, my fifteen-year-old daughter and I were at home, every day, all day. I had been a […]

Growing up in a small rural town, I felt a strong sense of family, community, and safety.

We had farmers’ markets, county fairs with greased pigs, hayrides, pie eating contest, cake walks, musical chairs, b […]

Jeff Ventura has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest
The love of a husband for a wife, of my father’s love for my mother, is scattered in my memory like peach blossoms after a […]

Susan Valas is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest
It’s a drizzly-gray day in the spring of 1966. I stroll out the back door and climb into my dad’s Thunderbird with minutes to spa […]

Was I crazy to want to attend two different public events on a single hot summer’s day? Maybe, but after two years of the Covid pandemic, there were a couple of Fourth of July events I really wanted to a […]

Catherine Pritchard Childress is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest
Offering food as a form of comfort for those in mourning is as much a part of my Appalachian upbringing as Vacation […]

Who Killed the Video Star by Betty Wilkins Betty Wilkins is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest Rewind. By September 2002, I had been out of college for nine […]

I spent a month in Europe in 1998, doing research for a novel I was planning to write (and still plan to finish). The trip brings back memories, some delightful and others regretful. Often, both had to do with […]

Whenever I say that my extended family camps together in the summer—living in tents, cooking over the fire, and bathing in the river—someone will ask, “And you all get along? For a whole week?”

Sure, I say. […]

In the summer of 1967, the year of my high school graduation, the Newark, N.J.-adjacent town of Plainfield, where I grew up, exploded with race riots. I was in Washington, D.C. when it happened, working as a G-2 […]

The 2022 Streetlight Essay/Memoir contest has concluded. I’m happy to announce our winners: Betty Wilkins, Catherine Childress and Susan Valas. All three essay impressed our judges with their strength of narrative […]

The Moroccan village was the same color as the surrounding hills and empty desert. The landscape had three primary colors: sandy tan, sky blue, and, occasionally, palm tree green. The young couple, tourists […]

When Stevie Nicks was a witch in Florida, I sent her letters on stationery purchased from the canteen.

The new girl at the youth residential center told me her mother was Stevie Nicks, and also a witch. I […]

I wasn’t going to make it. I’d made a mistake; this whole stupid backpacking thing was a mistake. I trudged a step further. A young guy, about thirteen, with Keanu Reeves hair and an Osprey backpack loosely per […]

I’ve noticed that when I get together with friends, we never ask each other, “Did you see [fill in the title of a television program that recently aired]?” as those of my generation once might have. Rather, the […]

I’d met three of the Partons: Randy and Stella at a festival in Georgia when I was a kid and Dolly at a concert, where I snagged backstage passes from a friend who knew one of the backup singers. I recalled my p […]

We met the ram yesterday. The one we were warned about but had forgotten was loose in the world.

After the biblical rains, the world felt charged as if pages in time had fallen open. With gaps just w […]

It is well into night, and she moves slowly. Her sword pierces the water that slides away like sheets of ice. Bubbles spin into small vortices that carry her forward. She pushes the water, and the water pushes […]

During the 1970s, I volunteered to answer phones at two different telephone crisis centers, in two different states, one in Ohio and the other in Massachusetts. When we picked up the phones at these centers, my […]

Timing is key.

I was thirteen when I told my dad that I wanted to learn how to make his special potato salad. He grinned and handed me a knife and a five-pound bag of russet potatoes. “Peel these, and then c […]