In his 1971 memoir, Me and the Orgone, Orson Bean recounted his life-changing experience undergoing orgone therapy, a body-mind psychotherapy developed eighty years ago by Austrian-born psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. Reich and orgone played a role in my life, too, beginning in the 1970s when I embarked on an eventually abandoned plan to become a psychotherapist. While studying Gestalt therapy and bioenergetics at Associates for Human Resources (AHR) in Concord, Massachusetts, I learned that these therapies are partly derived from different phases of Reich’s career. As a psychoanalyst in the 1920s, Reich developed a new approach … Continue reading Miles and the Orgone by Miles Fowler→
After I die, prop the bones of a beautiful bird in my mouth. Call a medicine woman back from my home star. Offer tobacco, cedar, sage, sweet grass, the seven silent petitions of passage. For all these words are only feathers that fall from the dark hollow of my throat. Plumes which wait for a wing, a way to lift, rise, fly. To soar from the lips, the fingers, to become a prayer of fire hitching a ride homeward. Sherrell Runnion Wigal is a poet originally from Roane County, West Virginia, now living along the … Continue reading Untitled by Sherrell Wigal→
My name is Mario Loprete. I live in Catanzaro, a small Calabrian city in the south of Italy. We are in the land that the ancient Greeks called “Magna Grecia,” rich in culture and history. I also travel a lot. I rent a house in European cities that could inspire my work and consolidate some work relationships with galleries and collectors that I began on the internet. Artistically, I am self-taught, studying the history of art in Catanzaro and the great masters of art—Mattia Preti, Caravaggio, Rembrandt—without external contaminations. I studied at an art shop … Continue reading Italian Artist Shares New Concrete Ideas→
Podcast: When a woman faces the loss of a beloved, aging pet, she finds herself confronting her own experience with age and death. A short story performed by Jennifer Sims. Read the story online: Ernestine Goes to Heaven by Susan Heeger Follow us!
During a late afternoon P.E. class in fourth grade, my mother came looking for me on the playground in her leather boots that zipped to the knee. In those days she wore her brown hair in a short permanent wave that looked like a little cap of curls from far away. I remember seeing her standing on the foursquare courts between our shrill games and the parking lot. She claims she called my name and I ignored her. I don’t remember the events of the afternoon this way; however, my family had encountered a lot … Continue reading Postcard From the Darkroom by Valerie Kinsey→
When whales and porpoises beach themselves en masse, people react and mobilize in response to the tragedy. The sight of cetaceans dying from dehydration or drowning, and the inevitability of their slow, suffering death can lead to outrage. Some people arrive to pour water on the whales and provide relief. Some coordinate an effort to drag them back into the surf, but then the whales beach themselves again. Marine biologists take blood and tissue samples (why waste such an opportunity?) yet after generations of deaths of innumerable pods, science still offers no more than theories … Continue reading Beached Whales by Spriggan Radfae→
Tara Lindis is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest. The children do not have life jackets. We give them ours. Their slender arms slide through the adult sized holes, we tighten the black webbed straps as far as they can go, and click the plastic buckles. The orange vests rise to their ears; black eyes and tufts of black hair stick out like baby chicks. In the dark early morning, we smell the rain coming, and we know it’s the last crossing before the onset of winter storms. Prayers now. … Continue reading One Hundred by Tara Lindis→
It’s hard being human, especially when the world feels hard. Nowadays, we live in a fishbowl of constant exposure to the unnatural noise of unnatural tweets and digital pings, chimes, and chirps. I miss bird song and the sound of my own inhales and exhales. I miss the wonder of watching a golden eagle soar overhead and stare me down. This is real connection, and I don’t have to push a single button to find it. I just have to put less nourishing things away and step back into the physical, natural world that is … Continue reading Myths Are Good Medicine by Kelly McGannon→
From Isamu Noguchi to Man Ray, Poston War Relocation Center, May 30, 1942 Here, in the internment camp in the Arizona desert our preoccupations have shrunk to a minimum— the intense dry heat, afternoon dust storms, and the difficulty of feeding ourselves on thirty-five cents a day. Outside from the inside it seems history has taken flight and passes forever. Here time has stopped and nothing is of any consequence, nothing of any value, neither our time nor our skill. But I must remind myself, work is the conversation I have with myself, and space … Continue reading Outside from the Inside by Anne Whitehouse→
I never imagined that one day I’d be straddling a toilet while playing upright bass in a steamy bathroom with a naked man taking a shower on the other side of a sheer plastic curtain. But that’s exactly what I did yesterday. It started a few weeks ago when I noticed a buzz when playing a B flat. You might think this wouldn’t be all that noticeable. It is B flat, after all. But we actually play a lot out of that key. It’s a good one for Gene’s voice. We spent some time messing … Continue reading All Steamed Up by Gayla Mills→
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