My involvement with art began early. My father was a freelance artist in upstate New York and I started showing pen and ink drawings with him at the age of twelve. From there, I took art in high school and received a BA in fine art from the New York State University at Oswego. Since then, I have been creating art, exhibiting in art shows, exhibitions and galleries and my own studio. I have always been inspired by the Impressionist painters and also by Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. … Continue reading The Art of Susan Egbert→
When tracked down, Aaron Farrington was on a camping trip in the woods of Grayson Highlands State Park. We met soon afterwards in his basement studio in the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville. A photographer of many talents and technologies, his subjects include newts, frogs and mushrooms, smoke stacks spewing pollution, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Dave Matthews music videos, documentaries, and vintage wet plate portraits. Farrington remembers growing up in Harrisonburg, Va. where, at fifteen, he was given his mother’s Pentax 35 mm camera and he started taking pictures. Around the same time, … Continue reading Photographer Aaron Farrington→
It is our pleasure to announce the Winners and Honorable Mentions of the annual Streetlight Magazine Poetry Contest. How did we arrive at our choices? We read a lot of poetry. We are both writers/poets. We have, no doubt, the same aspirations for our work as those submitting to this contest. We are sensitive to every entrant’s intention and effort. Sharon and I do not use screeners so we separately read every anonymous entry independently. We then present each other with our preferred dozen or so and begin the back-and-forth process of willowing. In this … Continue reading 2023 Poetry Contest Winners by Fred Wilbur→
Suddenly Emery stopped walking. He just stood there, a still-life in the afternoon, on a busy sidewalk. The crowd parted around him—one businessman swore into his cellphone as he sidestepped past. The sun burned between buildings, a theater and a bank. Broken glass, trodden into pebbles on the concrete sidewalk, reflected brightly. Someone tossed a coin Emery lost in the sunlight. The ring when it hit the ground revealed it to be a bottle cap. Emery touched his mostly gray swirl of beard and sat down on the sidewalk, his back against the brick facade. … Continue reading A Map Of Her Mind By Benjamin Roque→
Mary Alice Hostetter has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2023 Essay/Memoir Contest There was no real reason for volcanoes and pandemics to become associated in my imagination, but they did. The only actual link was on the first post-pandemic travel my wife and I did to visit family on the West Coast. While there, we went to the Palace of the Legion of Honor to see the exhibit with the less-than-upbeat title, “Last Supper in Pompeii.” It was a celebration of food and drink, with frescoes and kitchen utensils, crockery and furniture, delicate … Continue reading Considering Volcanoes: What Lies Beneath by Mary Alice Hostetter→
In the pulsing heat, in the black cathedral of war, the amber-tinted silver of infra-red illuminates a man. Nimble in the moment between the squeeze of the trigger and the crack of the rifle, he crouches and fires: stalker and stalked at one in the fluttering night. Quickly, the breath still held, a song arises, unbidden and sweet, and the pulsing heat and the heart conspire to draw from the murmuring air an echo, smiling, of a fond face. Drawn on the rim of this well of resonance in the foul, sweltering dark, other forms … Continue reading Elegy for a Soldier by Will Hemmer→
For most writers, writing is a strong inner calling. It feels like a passion that they can’t ignore, a destiny they must fulfill. And for writers who feel blocked, or are cut off from the act of writing for some other reason, the lack of writing in their life results in a state of low-grade misery. A writer who isn’t writing feels unfulfilled, listless, and can easily fall into creative despair. Writer’s block is extremely common among writers. Most people assume that the most typical form of writer’s block stems from a lack of ideas, … Continue reading The Best Piece of Writing Advice Most Writers Don’t Listen To by Lauren Sapala→
1. Regardless of the year, it’s the first flower seen on my daily hikes, pushing through every November’s abandoned duvet of tan and umber—a patchwork of ash, oak, maple, and hickory. I pause, eyelids unspooled, like a tired window blind, and inhale the forest’s green anticipation. 2. Willingly, this could be my last breath— absorbing the effortless geometry of these eight ivory petals, rising from leaves mimicking round Japanese fans from the 1840s. 3. How is it that small perfections can both both break, and reassemble us— as if we were Adam or Eve on … Continue reading Bloodroot in March by Gary D. Grossman→
Lots of people have gotten credit for the literary adage advising writers to kill their darlings. In fact it was Arthur Quiller-Couch. I think. Anyway, the exhortation is important because it acknowledges how scribes sometimes become overly attached to “ornaments” of their own creation. As your piece evolves, plot twists and descriptions may no longer serve you. Characters, too, may overstay their welcome. Even really, really good ones. (Move along. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?) The positive news is that when you cut something from your current work, you don’t have to actually vaporize … Continue reading The Closet Full of Darlings by Erika Raskin→
If you could sit totally still for long enough on the big rock by the sycamore, the catfish would peek out tentatively from the hollow underneath and then would move out, browsing along the bottom. A few minutes later, the ribbon snakes would slither down the honeysuckle, gliding back and forth across the pool with their heads raised barely above the surface. This time a gray watersnake had joined them, below the kingfisher’s perch, half in the water and half in the patch of jewelweed, near where the lone trout lurked in the … Continue reading Joshua Number Eight by E. Hume Covey→
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