Beyond the obvious grief of losing a parent or relative to old age, there is a particular tragedy that accompanies a person’s passing rarely whispered inside the comfortable blandness of funeral homes or o […]

I live in a town where the writer who cranks it out rakes it in. I can’t get past page three in any of John Grisham’s books before I give up. Those books are page-turners though, you betcha, the whole who […]

Over the past year, I watched Mike, one of my best friends, die of a brain tumor. In the midst of this misery, I came to think about things that make life worth living. Foremost is love, of course, but after that […]

All right then. I get it.

The San Souci Motel is called the San Soo-chee, not the Sahn Soo-cee. People in Buckroe Beach, Virginia, do not go in for Frenchification. At least according to my husband’s family, w […]

I’ve encountered many different roads to take on my quest to develop my style as a poet. Sometimes I’ve moved forward and sometimes I’ve stayed still, uncomfortable with change. I expect this has been the case […]

One day I decided I wanted to write a short story with a sex scene in it. I decided this for two reasons. One, first and foremost, I had read a short story by my sister’s high school boyfriend and he e […]

I was a typical child of Depression-era parents—left to fend for myself as long as I didn’t bring unwanted attention to my respectable, Southern family.

I, like most of my age group, was what I call a sel […]

You’re watching a show, and suddenly it happens: the story cuts to a scene of a naked woman about to take a shower. Her breasts — huge and gravity-defying — jiggle and roll as she enters the shower stall, […]

I have always thought of myself as being by nature a slow kind of person. I am, and always have been, slow in the morning to awaken to the day and slow in the evening to let go of it, though my habits are changing […]

Juliet Da Luiso, also known as Judy Longley when writing poems,

studies abstract oil painting with Jean Sampson at Macguffey Art Center.

Juliet talks about her painting:

“Poetry has consumed my […]

Ben had wanted to leave earlier but his brother couldn’t take any more time off. Ben glanced at Willy, who was leaning against the passenger-side door, smoking like a chimney.

“Can we stop for food?” Willy […]

When I was in college there was this bar that had bouncers who took turns playing St. Peter. They stood outside the door going:

You.
You.
You.
Not you.

The whole idea was so ghastly to me (for a […]

The day Septima left, she said, “I believe I am a promise you are tired of keeping.” Minutes before, Turk had pitched a bottle of beer at her. He had missed, but only barely. Green glass and yellow ale spl […]

There is a saying that if you don’t know what you’re doing, ask your neighbors. Once upon a time when I first moved to Nelson County, Virginia, and knew no one, I experienced an untethered queasy feeling of not […]

At the old house, Leslie had walked to school. Here, the school was closer, but she had to take the bus. The old house had been on the outskirts of a smaller town, not a former murder capital of the world. […]

I move around a lot — not kinetically, but like a hermit crab from home to home. And as a consequence, my Facebook account has become cluttered with groups of friends from all the various cities where I have […]

Whenever I run into Lisa Russ Spaar she seems scarcely to have aged since I first met her, eons ago, in Gregory Orr’s graduate poetry workshop at the University of Virginia. Tall and lithe, with long blonde h […]

When I was an adolescent, I read novels voraciously, and the genre of sword-and-sorcery fantasy appealed to me most. It combined supernatural magic, an element seeded into countless cultures and religions, […]

The miracle is that we have integrity at all. O, not fidelity to a moral code. That’s a pale shadow of the integrity I mean. Stable identity. Some semblance of unity. Or, to put it in the word that has h […]

Growing up on a dairy farm in Northern New York, in Southern Jefferson County during the 1960’s meant, for my family, doing most of the work with our physical bodies. With a maximum of 25 dairy cows, one t […]