One evening, damp and full of anguish, I arrive at a camp and basically fall apart. I want to talk to my boyfriend back home, but as usual have no signal. I start climbing on soggy leaves, moving higher, hoping. […]

I grew up telling it to whoever would listen—mostly that fell on my mother’s shoulders.

At the breakfast table, at the dinner table, I proselytized with the fervor of a repenting sinner. And it beg […]

Dear writing one,

There will come a day when you will stop writing, for no good reason. There will be no drama, no single event that sinks your writing heels into the ground. You will come home from a writing […]

On the face of it, it wouldn’t seem to be a match. Beat writers and military cadets. But Gordon Ball, Allen Ginsburg’s farm manager, taught Beat Generation writers to cadets at Virginia Military Institute for 26 […]

In my own personal experience, art, poetry especially, has always been political, has always been protest, rooted in my own mixed ethnic and poverty-class background.

It rose from my father’s Irishness—Dad r […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I am but a mouthful of sweet air – W.B. Yeats

I take special pleasure in sitting outdoors. There’s displeasure, too, in the form of bugs and mercurial weather that I can’t control, but mostly I take pleas […]

At 7:40am, the streets of downtown Charlottesville are eerily quiet. If not for the barricades, it would be hard to believe these streets will soon teem with people: busloads of Nazis come for the Unite the Right […]

by Mary Carroll-Hackett
 

I move too fast. Always have. I talk fast, walk fast, read quickly, even had to be taught as a child to slow down while eating, Mama saying things like It’s not a race, Mary, or You […]

       by Laura Marello

Many people knew him better and longer. Many can say more articulate things about his work. I always loved him so much. I remember many details of our ten months at the Fine A […]

I talk to dead people. Oh, don’t get worried. It’s not like they talk back. Although, there was that time…

What I’m saying is that I have some graves that are my favorite haunts. (And just to be absol […]

I did the same thing in the first two minutes upon meeting her for the first time that I did while sitting with a friend of more than 20 years two days before. I cried. I felt humbled and felt the tears well up, […]

This past week I had an unusual experience in a memoir class. Several of us had turned in an excerpt to be critiqued during class. The workshop leader asked another writer to read my excerpt aloud. We were not to […]