Streetlight Magazine | Trudy | Activity https://streetlightmag.com/members/trudy/activity/ Activity feed for Trudy. Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:11:32 -0400 https://buddypress.org/?v= en-US 30 hourly 2 69a80b31f53e263862ce91bb103a7b59 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=41852 Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:00:04 -0500 After the Blizzard by Trudy Hale We had warning. A dangerous blizzard sweeps across the eastern United States. Be prepared. The young man stacks firewood on my porch and in the […]

]]> 52664aaaa341be0d769f85dbc2b5ac9a Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=41535 Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:00:50 -0500 Ho Ho Streetlight by Trudy Hale The season of Christmas swoops in, ahead of me and my best intentions. I’ll never be a person who has all the family and friends crossed off the l […]

]]> 29758bb76cacf0596a8a4b3bba1658ac Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=41373 Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:00:43 -0500 With a Little Help From My Friends by Trudy Hale In the pre-dawn morning, thirty-six hours before my daughter’s wedding, she enters my bedroom. Her flashlight beam wakes me. Good heavens. Half awake, […]

]]> 82877f4e7e65ee12c15d34bcdb533970 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=41125 Mon, 15 Sep 2025 12:00:24 -0400 The Wedding Dress by Trudy Hale Weddings create their own weather. I had no idea. I did not have a big wedding myself. It was spontaneous and the only white article of clothing I had […]

]]> bf8e79916fb9561ce874dd02307e702f Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=40807 Mon, 04 Aug 2025 12:00:51 -0400 To See the Universe in Cinderblock by Alex Joyner With all due respect, Mr. William Carlos Williams, it’s not the red wheelbarrow on which so much depends. It’s the cinder block car was […]

]]> 8656885f14c6750f076b7fbe449e76c9 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=40520 Mon, 09 Jun 2025 12:00:51 -0400 On Writing A Condolence Letter by Trudy Hale I find it hard to write a condolence letter, not a note, but a letter. And three condolence letters wait for me. They sit like black crows on a fence, […]

]]> a19e7c709250894c878db12bcf15cf43 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=40364 Mon, 12 May 2025 11:00:19 -0400 Ars Poetica by Trudy Hale The forsythia outside my window has given up the brilliant citrus yellow and is fading back to the sticky green leaves. I am trying to hold a dull […]

]]> 0048173cb830e98812bcba964c20016a Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=40093 Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:52:24 -0400 Father's Day in Bujumbura by Alex Joyner She said she knew that it was Father’s Day in the U.S. and she began to tell me a story from the back seat as we bounced down rough dirt roads on t […]

]]> f8f06dada8e9f8a969d84796fa5ec1fa Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=39831 Mon, 03 Feb 2025 14:00:22 -0500 Wild Fires by Trudy Hale Tuesday, Januay 7th. My son Charlie called. He was breathless. He had barely escaped the Palisades. The sky had been clear, he said when he took […]

]]> 913a284475cc9d2c154db5e05b5f8319 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=39508 Mon, 02 Dec 2024 12:00:44 -0500 On the Edge by Trudy Hale When have you been convinced to change your mind? How did it happen? By negotiation? By beauty? By lament? By shock or threat? By what? The […]

]]> 5136c37b0f9c63f9aa2d597c9c2da06c Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=38844 Mon, 02 Sep 2024 12:00:13 -0400 The (Very Uncomfortable) Art of Letting Go: When Movers Lose All Your Furniture by Katie Wilkes “Your new life is gonna cost you your old one.” —Margot Berman I forget if it was around the time of a full moon or another supercharged energy p […]

]]> 40fa8c52cd6da7f3447c204ed267b125 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=38778 Mon, 05 Aug 2024 11:25:23 -0400 Once Upon A Memoir by Trudy Hale I am in an abusive relationship again. This morning was the first time it occurred to me to label it as such. Not a lover or husband, or friend, but […]

]]> 02dde483d168641f513b573d576ce9ae Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=38071 Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:00:21 -0400 A Leg in the Darkness by Alex Joyner When the leg appeared out of the darkness, flung over the gate of the neighboring corral, I was howling along with Emmylou Harris. “Beneath Still W […]

]]> 1a4610cf2d3df11f3b2d271a63d00dcf Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=37748 Mon, 26 Feb 2024 13:00:48 -0500 Thoughts About the Universe These Mornings by Laura Marello Everything is connected. Most of what the universe energy is, creation/destruction energy, we don’t understand. We underestimate the […]

]]> d51aeac4a850d33df225aded456650da Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=37661 Mon, 29 Jan 2024 11:00:34 -0500 A Winter's Tale by Trudy Hale 4:30 a.m. A barely audible humming wakes me from a deep sleep. It’s a faint yet unfamiliar sound. I am used to the quiet, to the ordinary sounds, so t […]

]]> eb9a603322cb14f7e1ac71499c51d685 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=37455 Mon, 25 Dec 2023 13:00:11 -0500 Merry Christmas from Streetlight!   Merry Christmas from all of us at Streetlight!!

]]> 08328a63b9b4e3b111e8578d68fe98c7 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=36844 Mon, 09 Oct 2023 12:00:35 -0400 Call of the Wild by Trudy Hale I wanted to write about hunting season here in the rural countryside, the howling packs of dogs, the men and women who sit in muddy trucks on the side […]

]]> e5fd47c11e07b31bcc78f7312df927e6 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=36594 Mon, 28 Aug 2023 11:00:36 -0400 One August Afternoon by Trudy Hale I am waiting at the Chicken Co-op, pronounced ‘coop,’ inside the Exxon gas station and convenience store in Lovingston, Virginia. A couple of blo […]

]]> c311b2cf7accea22252a6391420f6a56 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=36287 Mon, 17 Jul 2023 10:00:35 -0400 A Bridge to Somewhere by Alex Joyner Something there is that doesn’t love a bridge. At least on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Oh, when I lived there, we were proud of the engineering mar […]

]]> 5050743f8be9f5a57d8bd4e5cf6ab195 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=36023 Mon, 29 May 2023 12:00:15 -0400 The Pleasure of Ruins by Trudy Hale Not too long ago, I was walking my black lab down Norwood Road when an acquaintance stopped his truck to chat. He said he was concerned about my […]

]]> b3ce9acbf5b9bf623c78eca595f26aec Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=35764 Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:00:50 -0400 I Can't Believe It. I Forgot to Read Jane Austen! by E. H. Jacobs I can’t help thinking about what I haven’t read. Every year, I try to read at least one piece of classic literature that I had overlooked, never got […]

]]> d041a003f49791a9cbebb82af37728ad Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=35466 Mon, 27 Feb 2023 11:00:56 -0500 A Small Marvel by Trudy Hale After an eighteen-hour flight with a connection in Dubai, my daughter, Tempe, and I landed in Delhi. Throughout the trip I posted photographs on […]

]]> 0e21cce01dff3f6fe86f6eb8ac72ac8f Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=35175 Mon, 16 Jan 2023 11:00:27 -0500 My Wife Is In Love by E. H. Jacobs Five years ago, my wife fell in love. I’m not talking about me (we have been married thirty-nine years, so I hope the falling in love thing happened m […]

]]> c813db69a092e8dca629b7f5415d3489 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=34897 Mon, 05 Dec 2022 10:00:13 -0500 I had heard when you get older you revert to a lot of your tastes and activities when young, but I disregarded it, until I started buying old Joni Mitchell and Buffalo Springfield albums, and listening to the […]

]]> 83494ec430478e2e7ee50ecbe0e79bc7 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=34725 Mon, 07 Nov 2022 08:00:10 -0500 ‘The silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from nowhere, as if I’d been hit by a plank. It dropped from the heavens above me like yard goods; ten acres of fallen, invisible sky choked the fie […]

]]> e0dcd2cc241bfe345644eb4773deee22 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=34315 Mon, 29 Aug 2022 10:00:28 -0400 When I was thirteen, my mother left us. It was on a Sunday and she knew that Daddy, my brothers and I were away, visiting a family out on the old Nashville road. A moving van pulled up to the duplex and my […]

]]> eedb63afff760ea79ea22e88f152b6b2 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=34201 Mon, 01 Aug 2022 12:00:56 -0400 I once held my cousin in a Dixie cup. At least a part of him. The improvised committal on the banks of Nottoway Swamp was a fitting send-off for a man who wanted no ceremony. Prone to eccentricity and melancholia […]

]]> 8c39f1093b75c9486bafe87342fba304 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=33474 Mon, 25 Apr 2022 13:00:40 -0400 When my late husband set out to write his memoir he purchased Life As Story, by Tristine Rainer. He studied the book’s exercises and wrote in the margins. I want to read his annotations again. Feel the swoop of […]

]]> 58a5b218009a5edc56f1e7d22349972d Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=32713 Mon, 14 Feb 2022 08:00:29 -0500 There is a 1990s concept, or perhaps an older concept made new and currently gaining currency, called “re-wilding.” It is the prospect of making tamed and domesticated things wild again. Since 2008 or so, this con […]

]]> 0a2941f8eb7e9689b8b199fac39589b5 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=32375 Mon, 15 Nov 2021 10:00:46 -0500 The Twitter world ‘blew-up’ with writers weighing in on the “Bad Art Friend” article in the New York Times in early October (NY Times link below).

I had sympathized with the kidney donor whose life and letter […]

]]> 6cc8648858d1a1076421c0114145934e Trudy commented on the post, Once Upon a Time In Montecito by Trudy Hale https://streetlightmag.com/2021/09/13/once-upon-a-time-in-montecito/#comment-309456 Tue, 28 Sep 2021 22:55:21 -0400 Dear Bess,
Thank you. Yes, Billy would have loved the absurdity
of it all.

]]> 571a64f1a60ecb515ae39108b0418cb1 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=32173 Mon, 13 Sep 2021 10:00:05 -0400 This is a true story.

After my husband Billy died in June of 2020, his ‘step daughter’ Zoe, a beautiful and vivacious woman of fifty offered her home in Santa Barbara to hold his memorial. We waited until the […]

]]> cbb09f48eddaebd82aa3cce0868d105d Trudy commented on the post, Resources for Writers: Snowflakes in a Blizzard https://streetlightmag.com/2016/10/03/resources-for-writers-snowflakes-in-a-blizzard/#comment-296267 Thu, 02 Sep 2021 16:00:16 -0400 Hi Don,
I’m not sure what you’re asking.
If you like you may email me at trudyhale@gmail.com
so I can be more prompt in my reply.

Thanks,
Trudy Hale, editor
trudyhale@gmail.com

]]> 2097f5849c51f3295e938e2541ef44a6 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=31565 Mon, 07 Jun 2021 09:00:12 -0400 In your final manuscript, every scene should contain a conflict that’s essential to your narrative arc, something that simultaneously captivates the reader and catapults your story forward.

Like s […]

]]> d5571849625e9e6b2269c9424d6e6eca Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=31361 Mon, 10 May 2021 10:00:34 -0400 I live in a writers’ sanctuary, a nineteenth century three-story house overlooking the James and Tye Rivers. The back stairway off my kitchen leads to my office and bedrooms; a long narrow hall on the second floor […]

]]> 74de35b04fe42a5e4d29d21d36645e9d Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=30724 Mon, 18 Jan 2021 13:00:19 -0500 My evolution from wanting to write, to loving writing, to having to write did not proceed quietly. The more I lost myself in the craft, the more I anguished over what it meant to be “good enough” and, once goo […]

]]> c44216c608967dade579698509dcf213 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=30496 Mon, 14 Dec 2020 08:00:33 -0500 I was on the patio in my lounge chair journaling. The year was 2017 and I had been living in Los Angeles for the past twenty-three years, having moved from Chicago. I loved my husband Dave, family and friends but […]

]]> beb259e6229639e9d7251aabc04c00bf Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=30458 Fri, 11 Dec 2020 12:00:32 -0500 Anne Whitehouse’s moving new poetry collection, Outside from the Inside (Dos Madres Press, 2020), takes us on four journeys, each with its pains and losses, its accretions of insight and moments of joy. In the f […]

]]> 05285c1b4269e2baac197292e54d5247 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=30193 Mon, 02 Nov 2020 12:00:03 -0500 You tiptoe back towards religion, in my experience, cautiously and nervously and more than a little suspicious, quietly hoping that it wasn’t all smoke and nonsense, that there is some deep wriggle of genius and p […]

]]> 2baec6b786b1793553c984a52c058ef2 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=29944 Mon, 21 Sep 2020 11:00:17 -0400 Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Simone Weil
Love is not merely an emotion. It is a meltdown that reestablishes a more unified space of brilliance, goodness, and sadness. This is the real function of love […]

]]> 3e2b6644c481a882d256b594a2b05714 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=29507 Mon, 27 Jul 2020 10:00:15 -0400 It all started when a friend in California sent me three used paperbacks that someone donated to her sidewalk library. My friend and I hoped that my nephew who is stranded here during the pandemic without school […]

]]> 253b6ca28769323ba5b791da5bd9cc2b Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=28404 Mon, 11 May 2020 10:00:32 -0400 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 […]

]]> 17d1837a8b4ddc6e569287832bf6dbe6 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=28320 Mon, 27 Apr 2020 11:00:37 -0400 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 […]

]]> 9363fdce681e152301dcf69fb365ef38 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=28049 Mon, 16 Mar 2020 10:00:27 -0400 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 […]

]]> 047b0d537d99b66265c888d7665bf00f Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=27644 Mon, 27 Jan 2020 14:00:10 -0500 Once I spent an afternoon at Appomattox walking the Via Dolorosa of the Confederacy. The Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road is mostly just a trace now but this is the scene of the last march. Here’s where Bobby Lee r […]

]]> cd2257e701e501fcb931deaea71d8b00 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=27356 Mon, 02 Dec 2019 13:00:12 -0500 Wednesday night in Deep Ellum, the eclectic little arts neighborhood lingering in the shadow of I-45 east of Dallas’s downtown. Ever since the 19-teens when Blind Lemon Jefferson came to the barbershops and d […]

]]> fc4781b8407eca0f35fd8cce44fba621 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=26876 Mon, 30 Sep 2019 11:00:34 -0400 I live a runaway life. I’m a writer, a wife, and a mother and, like a lot of women who tire of the multi-layered duties that come with that combination, I need to get away. Right now, what I’m running away fro […]

]]> 61b373a7968a89951713721611840f3b Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=26640 Mon, 16 Sep 2019 11:00:38 -0400 When I was seven, I made my own journal out of legal pad paper—a little book that sparked a lifelong passion for writing down my thoughts, feelings and desires. E.M. Forster asks, “How do I know what I think u […]

]]> 2cd595d9e0570c7cd89cb8cc137417d9 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=26385 Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:00:25 -0400 ALLOWING THE LEAF

For an ultrasound exam, I ran on a treadmill and then was hooked up to a machine that showed my heart pumping blood. It was an incredible thing to see my heart keeping perfect time, beating […]

]]> c2a372b0d5fdfb94febba1b6d1509728 Trudy wrote a new post https://streetlightmag.com/?p=25949 Mon, 17 Jun 2019 12:00:56 -0400 So delicious—this light, this air, this time, my time, because I have constructed a solitary life in order to free up time to write. Ice chatters in cool, stevia-sugared lime juice; I look out through the window a […]

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