[frame align=”right”][/frame]Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was a serious student of Platonic idealism, in addition to being a highly successful novelist. Her exploits as scholar and philosopher – she was fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford – add a resonance to her work that gives critics plenty to speculate about, but the most interesting thing for me, about Murdoch, is her cool-headed skill as a storyteller. Over the course of a long writing career, she produced more than twenty engrossing tales. Her novel, The Sea, The Sea is a prime example – and a good place … Continue reading The Sea, The Sea→
[frame align=”right”][/frame]This morning I sit on my porch and gaze across the bottom lands and pastures of the James River valley. I open up my journal, swipe my fingers across its soft green leather cover, the embossed Celtic design like a brail pattern slides beneath my fingertips. A green satin ribbon curls in the journal’s crease. The pages measure five and a half inches wide from the seam of the spine to the paper’s edge. No more, no less. Lined. For a long time I would not write in journals with lines. Lines forced me … Continue reading On Keeping a Journal→
In contrast to my subject matter, I will try to be brief: I don’t have any long range studies to back this up, but I think communication is getting, in general, faster and briefer. I have anecdotal evidence galore; the text message has replaced email which replaced phone conversation which replaced the handwritten letter. Newspaper articles have been overtaken by blurbs on a blog (which may be soon sunsetted by tweets). I have a bit of empirical evidence too, like how in nightly news stories, sound bites from U.S. Presidential candidates have gone from an average of … Continue reading Ode to the Long Form→
A couple of weeks ago I discovered the original “Twilight Zone” series was available on Netflix Instant. Needless to say I have (happily) surrendered hours of my life re-watching this classic series, which I still believe is one of the very few truly great things to have aired on television. (“The Muppet Show” is probably a close second.) The far-reaching influence of the show is undeniable. The twists and bitter ironies for which the show was famous have informed dozens of tropes in film and popular culture (including fiction). A quick survey of the first season, … Continue reading “Whose Boundaries Are That of Imagination”→
[frame align=”right”][/frame]In my twenties I thought of language as a bridge, not from one place to another, but above an abyss. The damnation waiting below was ordinary chaos, the dissonant march of hours, the rush of unsorted, simultaneous emotions – terror, desire, depression, exultation – swirling together without structure or purpose. Raw consciousness, natural and unimpeded. I needed some artifact of the patterning mind to survive nothing more terrible than my daily life, and I found in words the material for these necessary shapings. I had always loved words, found them concrete, caressable. Never a … Continue reading Poetry as Reprieve→
[frame align=”right”][/frame]In 2006, Farrar Straus and Giroux published Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, a medley of previously uncollected work by Elizabeth Bishop (edited by Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker and executive director of the Poetry Society of America). Running to over three hundred pages, it’s a bigger book than any book of poetry Bishop published in her lifetime and includes all sorts of things: juvenilia, scraps of unfinished poetry, and prose pieces of many kinds, in varying degrees of completion. “For those who love Elizabeth Bishop, “ said John Ashbery (perhaps … Continue reading What You Don’t See→
Maybe it’s the Blue Ridge Mountains. Maybe it’s the red clay, rolling pastures, horse farms, holsteins and herefords. Of course, it could be Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village. Whatever the lure, Charlottesville and Albemarle County have an abundance of talented and varied visual artists. Streetlight looks forward to highlighting many of their works in the months ahead. Our first issue features the black and white photographs of Bill Emory and the paintings and mixed media of Rosamond Casey, both Charlottesville residents. Emory’s fine photographs document the past and present, candid and mysterious images confronting family, cows … Continue reading Art in Albemarle and Beyond…{issue no.1}→
[frame align=”right”][/frame]Sometime after Streetlight published the 5th issue, I met Browning Porter. The staff of SL had just heard bad news. Our printer Lexis Nexis was pulling the plug. It was during the financial crash of ’08 and we were a bit stunned. What to do to keep the magazine alive? None of us had the stomach for knocking on doors with our tin cups. Someone thought to call Browning. (He had not been active on the magazine since I had joined the staff). After more than a few meetings, plotting and paper, he helped … Continue reading How To Start A Magazine→
[frame align=”right”] [/frame]Taken at face value, writing is a bit of an odd enterprise: Writers work alone, spending inordinate amounts of time and energy on something with absolutely no guarantee of success. In fact, the whole endeavor seems insane. And yet. Anyone who writes, and is brave enough to say it publicly, has probably been confronted by the question, Why do you write? There are sophisticated answers involving “the human condition” or “art” or the like. But, after the terrified pause, the moment to gather one’s thoughts at the brink of the abyss, the answer, I think, is … Continue reading Wanted: Delusions of Grandeur→
I Revise I revise because images, like moth wings, grow, hidden in secret shrouds, because the sun never stops seeking an oak in every acorn, because milkweed, beautiful in bloom offers wind-borne gifts to the earth in autumn. I revise because the sky molds and re-forms clouds the way a sculptor works wet clay. I revise because the Muse is a shape-shifter who lifts me up on eagle wings at dawn. By dusk, we crawl the ground as ants. I revise because I like surprises, poems that turn themselves inside-out like tee-shirts ready for … Continue reading I Revise; Critic; Happiness by Jean Sampson→
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