The dogs at Chicago’s Belly Shack are the best. In the bare, post-industrial setting of this diner beneath the rumbling tracks of the L, you can get a Belly Dog loaded with egg noodles and pickled green papaya. A […]

When I returned home from the grocery store a few weeks ago, in the Boonsboro neighborhood of Lynchburg, I looked up to see that my next-door neighbors’ shutters had been removed from the front façade of their ho […]

A conversation with writer director Eleanor Gaver
I met Eleanor Gaver in a writing workshop in L.A. and we kept in touch after she and her husband and daughter moved to NYC. I knew she had recently finished a […]

by Laura Marello
Three years ago I phoned Specialty Exterminators in Lynchburg. My side yard, viewed from my screened porch, was starting to look like a cheap horror movie: rats, mice, and baby mice, running from […]

A few years back I took a trip to Texas with Bill Clinton. It was not a fun trip. Clinton is pathologically self-referential and by the time he’d repeated the phrase, “Let me tell you one more clever thing I said […]

By Laura Marello
 

Imagine that, 20 years ago, my father and I were visiting my sister in her apartment. It was a warm, sunny day. My sister was making us ice tea. I was sitting in the living room with my […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]