When I first started writing, I couldn’t even call myself a writer. I had been NOT writing for seven years before I joined a silent writing program that I went to once a week to sit down and scrawl out a m […]

The day slipped into dusk as the ambient light ebbed imperceptibly like the liminal moment before the tide changes direction. Robin removed her Ray-Bans and stared up at the wide-open heavens above the El […]

Sometimes I am asked to compare current artwork to pieces of the last few years. I can only do so in the most general terms: the images of my newer digital paintings may be a little sharper and co […]

From beneath the dining room table he spots wisps of dust on chipped gray floorboards across the room. He hears his grandmother clop around the kitchen in her low-heeled shoes, into the pantry and out again. […]

Yasser Alaa Mobarak grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. When the Egyptian Revolution started in 2011, he was an eighteen-year-old teenager. “The protest took place in Shatby Station, Alexandria. It called fo […]

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
 L.P. Hartley
That quote knocks me out so much I wanted to use it to launch into a safari through my own history. Perform a little dispassionate […]

Summer

Elmer Toon was always a little beyond the edge.

Elmer shot across the bridge from Dorsey Street and onto the big parking lot, head thrust out over the front wheel as he peddled full tilt on a […]

I run a writers’ retreat in a nineteenth-century farmhouse on the James River in Norwood, Virgina.  My quarters are at  the rear of the three-story house and consist of a large country kitchen with a woodstove, a […]

If you’re a writer with even minimal involvement in the online writing community, chances are that you’re familiar with the terms, “plotter,” and “pantser.” And if you’re a plotter who manages to successfully […]

Right now, sitting in my armchair, I’m imagining myself at the Camilla House bed and breakfast in Penzance, listening to Fiona, the charming proprietor, as she tells me about her favorite local restaurants and p […]

Hannah Fisher keeps the curtains closed in every room of the farmhouse night and day. Windowsills are stuffed with juice glasses brimming with seasonal wildflowers: delicate, snow-white Queen Anne’s Lace, purple c […]

March 19. It was the first day of spring. Cardinals trilled at dawn. Trees were starting to smudge pink, white and green. I smelled mulch, and fresh, overturned earth. Beauty and hope were in the a […]

It was raining hard and Eunice’s husband, Oliver, insisted on getting the car from the lot and bringing it around to the front of Brucie’s, where they were regulars. You could get supper for two, dessert inc […]

One time I was on a literary panel and the interviewer asked why I chose to have three kid characters in Best Intentions. I sat there thinking (all eyes on me), ‘Eek, is he saying that was too many? Should I h […]

I just wrote a new book of poems called Celestial Navigation. One of my favorite stanzas says:

Penguins man the caps,
huddle
against the wind, sheltering
downy chicks
flaunting their […]

Photography for me started as a hobbyist’s yearning for perfectionism and how to depict it using one of the simplest formats—the photograph—rather than any real try at becoming a profes […]

I’m a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and painter. I was born in Jerusalem, Israel. Although my parents did not have any special interest in the arts and never painted, I started painting in childhood, […]

To me, being alive means dealing with one challenge after another—some glorious, others not so much. My current, decidedly inglorious challenge is having chemotherapy for metastatic cancer. I think of ch […]

 
I’m drawn to the wild juxtapositions that collage creates. I love the idea that anyone armed only with scissors and glue can construct an image that’s as fresh as a dream and just as st […]