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 being entirely in my world. This unconnected-ness with my new surroundings produced an awful feeling of dis-location with self and was something I had not expected from my move to Virginia. This unease persisted for weeks, months. The first hint of relief occurred when I had to call on one of the farmer families in … Continue reading Gossip→
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. Leslie’s mother had grown up just a few miles away from the new place and worried about drug crime crossfire and dirty old men. “It isn’t safe,” was her excuse for everything. “Trust me. I know what I’m talking about.” The two of them had moved right before the end of eighth-grade, in time … Continue reading No Good by Jody Hobbs Hesler→
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 lived. So recently, in a bitter night of un-Friending, I purged gangs of them from my Friends list. It’s not that I had reason to suddenly dislike them — most were wonderful people — it’s that I became acutely frustrated with Facebook and how it has affected me. Since I was born before the advent of … Continue reading A Spy Among My Peers→
The following is reblogged from Charlotteville’s C’ville Niche (check it out!). Jean Sampson is a past contributor to Streetlight, both in poetry and art — and we appreciate her! Hope you enjoy hearing more. Susan S C’ville Niche – Find out the Buzz of Cville {live.love.local} Local Artist Check-in: Jean Sampson Posted on May 13, 2015 by Raennah Lorne Painter and poet Jean Sampson has a long history with the building that houses the McGuffey Art Center as she graduated there in 1960 from what was formerly McGuffey Elementary School. She now paints in her … Continue reading Checking in on Jean Sampson→
Birds in residence are the stuff of metaphors and dreams for New York City artist Dina Brodsky. Mysterious feathered fowl — from crows to blue jays — land in unexpected interiors, their residencies somehow natural as well as disturbing. “The current series — One More Shelter — shows abandoned places, buildings given over to decay and entropy, yet still containing the memories of its former inhabitants,” says Brodsky. “Albuquerque is a painting based on an incredibly formal, beautiful, and unusable dining room I saw in a New Mexico house. I imagined what the room and the objects would look … Continue reading Fine Feathers: Miniatures by Dina Brodsky→
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 hair she pushes back from her face and a vibrant, lovely smile, Lisa could easily be taken for a grad student. But as we all know, looks can be deceptive, and Lisa Russ Spaar has come a long way in the years since our first acquaintance. She is a much loved professor of English and Creative Writing at … Continue reading The Poetry of Desire→
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, with heroic warriors and monsters, and it allowed me to escape the doldrums of my unremarkable suburban environment. As I grew out of my teens into adulthood, a different type of fantasy fiction began to appeal to me: the horror genre. Writers like Stephen King and Clive Barker wrote engrossing novels that, on the surface, seemed like realism, but they typically possessed a paranormal … Continue reading The Best Sex I Never Had→
When I learned that one of the two main characters in Sue Monk Kidd’s latest novel, The Invention of Wings, is Sarah Grimke, of course I had to read it. I was not disappointed. In an “author’s note” Kidd describes her intention as being not to render a thinly fictionalized account of Sarah Grimke’s life but rather to offer a thickly imagined story inspired by Sarah Grimke. Thickly imagined though she may be, the Sarah Grimke I meet in Kidd’s book is resonant with the image of her I have been carrying with me … Continue reading Historical Inspiration For Novelist→
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 haunted me for some months – coherence. What is the thread that draws us through time and change? When faced with the diminishments of cognition that seem to loom with age, and especially when we confront the specter of Alzheimer’s and the like, how do we hold it together? How did we ever? … Continue reading Here-To-For→
What is the difference between illustration and fine art? Streetlight’s featured artist Kate Samworth, and Nick Clark, former Chief Curator and Founding Director of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, consider the question. Illustration as fine art — and the relationship of children’s book illustration to “art” or “fine” art — are complex questions. In short, they are, or were, the same. Illustration, or “narrative” painting, dominated Western painting for centuries until the mid-1800s. The longer answer requires that we decide what is the difference between “fine” and other art? … Continue reading The Art of Illustration→
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