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 tractor, a pick-up truck and a few older pieces of machinery that came with the farm when we purchased it, my parents and we older children eked out a living. Our cows were rotated from field to field during warmer months after the hay had been harvested, and during the winter they were kept in the barn, … Continue reading Keeping the Meadow Green by Rose Elliott→
In His Own Right A conversation with U.S. Poet Laureate and Charlottesville resident Charles Wright What the city of Charlottesville, Virginia lacks in size it makes up for in culture. You won’t go ten minutes without passing a building bearing a whimsical mural, a metal sculpture gracing the bypass, or banners advertising book and film festivals and Live Arts performances. So we’re particularly proud to call poet Charles Wright one of our own, and not just because he’s the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Wright served as a professor of English at the University of Virginia … Continue reading Interview with Poet Laureate Charles Wright→
Imagine a world without bird song. A world without bird beaks, long, sharp and charmingly curved. A world without feathered wings red, gold and green. Artist Kate Samworth did, in fact, imagine such a future world and came up with her own creative solution. In Aviary Wonders Inc., Samworth offers environmentalists and bird lovers of all ages, a mail order “catalog” from which to choose a colorful array of anatomy parts to assemble into unique and beautiful birds. Readers also can teach their fledglings to fly and choose the perfect chirps, whistles and … Continue reading Aviary Wonders by Kate Samworth→
Phone Sex in Three Acts Act I. There is nothing noble about having phone sex with your ex-girlfriend in the bathroom of a friend’s apartment. The shower curtain looks offended. Tile ashamed to touch bare feet, toes curling. Mildew in the bathtub corner is judging me. This is no bad porno. No fictional pleasure. I am only flesh, muscle, and blood. A collection of parts that ache and spill over. She loves him now. But we still search the static of each other’s lonely, trying to pull and honest fuck out of the phone … Continue reading Phone Sex in Three Acts by William Knudsen→
A Wild Thing And A Tended One We can talk about these corduroy pillows and how I want to shoot marbles with the ball joint of your right shoulder. Last time I tried to tell you about the guy who came in the Deli, duct tape holding his shoes together, carrying this tarnished bird cage, a finch inside and how his loose laces left a winged trail across my just mopped floor as he went to sit next to regulars, who shifted their metal chairs, and how the ice machine dumped cubes into the … Continue reading A Wild Thing And A Tended One by Maari Carter→
We had just learned how to answer the phone. We liked to grab it first, before it woke our parents. That made us feel like spies and more grown-up than five. We flitted from flimsy top and bottom bunk, almost as soundless as we were sleepless. We lit like two squirrels on a telephone wire, our blonde or auburn hair banded into bushy tails. Red-checked, flame-resistant nightgowns scratched our scabbed-up, tomboy legs. Who would call us so early, the sky still dark through yellowed curtains? We knew who. Both tottering on a single metal chair … Continue reading Granny by Sharon Harrigan→
The premier poetry event of this year’s Festival of the Book in Charlottesville was “Shrines to Longing,” the March 20 reading by Charles Wright, America’s current (20th) poet laureate, and Mary Szybist, who was a student in the University of Virginia’s MFA program when Wright was on its faculty. Both poets attended the Iowa Writers Workshop. Both have a distinctly Judeo-Christian flavor to their work. The 79-year-old Wright read from his 24th book of poems, Caribou, Szybist from her prize-winning second volume, Incarnadine. Although the full house at UVA’s Culbreth Theater was clearly entranced by … Continue reading Of Darkness and Angels →
Thomas Michael Gillaspy, a state legal affairs analyst and photographer based in Sacramento California, focuses on color in urban minimalism. “Architecture interests me because of its relationship to the urban environment. I think it is our attempt to bring order to the natural world,” says Gillaspy. “Color evokes emotion for me. And in architecture, I like to find patterns, the repetition of geometries, the way we attempt to make order in the urban environment. It is exhilarating to find form and pattern in unexpected places.” Gillaspy creates order from urban overload photographing surprising subjects up … Continue reading Urban Minimalism Comes in Many Colors→
The 21st annual Virginia Festival of the Book opens in Charlottesville this coming Wednesday, March 18. I do recommend it. An amazing assortment of programs will be offered. Find the whole wonderful schedule at https://vabook.org/ I’m not touting for any particular one of them (there are so many and they are so excellent) but I do find myself thinking about what it means to go to a festival — a very old habit of the human race. It happens today that I’m thinking about Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, because they’re such a nice frame for thinking … Continue reading Are You Going To the Fair?→
In 1995 Kay Redfield Jamison published her ground-breaking memoir, An Unquiet Mind, A Memoir of Moods and Madness. For my husband who was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in 1987, and myself living through his manic breakdown, Redfield’s memoir was the revelatory longed-for message in a bottle of bi-polar disorder. Jamision’s personal narrative changed my perspective on manic behavior and her insights altered forever the way I understand and react to those diagnosed as bi-polar. I pick up my copy of Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind heavily underlined and re-read a passage: “People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. … Continue reading Kay Redfield Jamison Festival of the Book→
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