The first thing Sam Abell entreats his workshop students to do is imagine their photographs without a primary subject. “I cover up the subject with my hand and ask, is there still a photograph under here?” says the celebrated National Geographic photographer, who has lived just west of Charlottesville for going on fifty years. “The answer, almost always, is no.” That can be a tough lesson for eager photographers, but it’s easier to swallow coming from such a calm and sympathetic teacher. It makes a difference, too, that Abell has always practiced what he … Continue reading For Albemarle’s Sam Abell, Photographs Come from Within. By Russell Hart→
Tim Suermondt has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest It’s Done, Beautifully Again My wife, Pui Ying, shows me her latest poem “I hope I did what I wanted to do here.” What she did do is stark and lush, an abandoned castle, and a boulevard teeming with revelers opening the reserve of morning, a welcoming— how difficult it is to merge a heartache with a gratitude and make it work, on the page as well as in life. I tell her I may be stealing some of her images—the old dynasty … Continue reading It’s Done, Beautifully Again by Tim Suermondt→
OK. Here’s the back story. A couple of years ago, I walked into the living room one Sunday morning, and noticed one of the big pillows my wife and I use to sit on the floor while we watch TV, was out of its usual storage place under the sofa. I turned to kick it back under the sofa, and as I did, I twisted my knee. I have very bad knees. A twist usually means the immediate loss of the use of my leg. This was the case, and I fell backward, landing on … Continue reading The world’s ugliest coffee table. Probably made by Martha Stewart in prison by Wayne Bowman→
Plop A Rorschach inkblot appears on the cement before me. I veer to avoid the disgusting mess. Weirdly white for a germ filled poop, I fail to find any meaning or truth in its shape. ………….Plop Another shape appears before me. Soon I will have trouble making it across the parking lot without soiling my shoes and smearing whatever truth the shape reveals. ………………..Plop Holy shit. This is no longer a test of my psychological health but a challenge to my agility and endurance. Can I see my future in this new shape? ………………………Plop The … Continue reading Plop by Mary Walsh→
I should have turned on the porch light, but the bulb is dead, I said, I had to leave her alone in the bathroom so I could stand outside and watch for the ambulance because the porch light is out, I wasn’t certain the EMTs would find the house, but she’s in the bathroom, on the toilet and can’t stand, while I was teaching a class tonight, she phoned the evening coordinator who stood at the classroom door and softly told me she needed me, but I don’t understand why a firetruck is at the … Continue reading Last Words by Caroline Malone→
By the time I reached my teens, I was taken with the idea of writing a fictionalized autobiography, but as my college roommate, Barry, observed, no one will want to read my autobiography if I have led a dull life. He was right, of course, but I had already considered that problem and thought I had solved it with the novel—if overly precious—notion of setting my autobiographical account in the nineteenth century even though I lived in the twentieth. This would have required historical research to figure out what would be the same and what … Continue reading The Thinly Disguised Autobiography by Miles Fowler→
Sandra Hopkins is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest How did my grandpa, Papa Hop, know that it would be impossible for me not to put my tongue in the space where my first baby tooth had come out? How could he predict that all on its own my untamed tongue would find my soft, raw gum and seek to massage it? I wanted a gold tooth just like his. His teeth gleamed as he spoke. A piece of Timothy hay he was chewing on moved up and down as he … Continue reading Tongues of Fire by Sandra Hopkins→
for Alfred Kern,1924-2009 Search Amazon for his novel, The Width of Waters, and you get No Image Available and No Customer Reviews. Instead, you see suggestions for dry texts on hydro resource management. Yet, as if the red ink is still wet between the lines of my fictions typewritered onto now yellowing pages, his words manifest in my mind’s margins. I wonder if the storyisn’t or can’t be deeper.Press harder. Once, as a curious student, I visited his classic Victorian facing Diamond Park, watched as he released, … Continue reading Mentor by Jeanne Julian→
Once again, we had the opportunity to read a (virtual) stack of flash fiction pieces that have enlarged our worlds—and we are grateful. As usual, we employed the Venn Diagram method of settling on the winners, each listing our own top choices and then selecting from those that overlapped. It’s an interesting way of judging because deeply held favorites may not even ‘medal’. But that pretty much underscores the subjective nature of contests (or, you know, anything.) What speaks to one person might not, another. Which is all to say—that, contests aside, the truly … Continue reading 2024 Flash Fiction Contest by Erika Raskin→
An 800-year-old cathedral is burning to the ground. The world is in horror that things, too, can die, though we thought them immune or immortal. We thought beauty could save, or fondness, or all the photos we took and took. But the spire is collapsing, and the roof. A black skeleton against the metal-bright flames. Nothing can save you or any other thing. The mitochondria in my cells are burning their last. Powerhouse trinkets from my mother and the mothers before her. I’m the end of them. Even if I’d had children, it would have … Continue reading For Notre Dame by Sian M. Jones→
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