This year’s Art Search Contest drew from a pool of talented artists far and wide. Their works included handsome photographs and landscapes to mixed mediums, fine drawings and surreal collages. The choice of winners took some back and forth between us. Our final two selections were based primarily on the artist’s skill and facility with their materials, and principally, their personal vision regarding their subject. For First Place, we have chosen the work of Emma Knight of Richmond, Va. Emma Knight’s unique and playful landscape scenes provide a lush view into an imaginary … Continue reading Winners of 2023 Art Search Contest→
The best ones are the small ones, those you need to hold in your hand two or three at a time, those you need to feel for size, and shape, and heft, the blunt, the sharp, the smooth, the rough, the square, the round, the firm, the soft, the ones like rocks, like bricks or stones in streams, the ones like clods of soil or clumps of clay, the ones you pile to build the whole world with, and then the ones you hurl to bring it down. Nominated for the National Book Award and … Continue reading Monosyllabic by J. R. Solonche→
My dad’s family bible and watch finally arrived in the mail to me nearly twenty years after his death. How it happened is a circuitous story, worthy of a southern novel. Of note, I did in the getting, offer to pay my nephew a sum of money to steal the bible off my sister’s coffee table. It didn’t come to that but hopefully gave my nephew and niece a tale to tell. Novelist Pat Conroy once contended there are no crimes in families beyond forgiveness. Well, that rings true. The presence of these items in … Continue reading Southbound by Sharon Ackerman→
It’s working all of us, and all the time. Not just as obvious obsessions with diagnostic names, the car-horn ones you notice corralling someone else as you avert your eyes. Don’t be coy. Punding hums to you and me. Collect. Arrange. My mother took up figurines, blaming the Depression for her want. Myself, I go by color, size, or function for my stuff. The superego interrupts: “In this implicit way, are you not sorting people with a glance?” Eric Forsbergh’s poetry has appeared in Streetlight, Artemis, JAMA, The Northern Virginia Review, The Journal of Neurology, … Continue reading Punding by Eric Forsbergh→
The instant we walk into the next room, which is all photographs—black-and-white rocks casting shadows in a desert, dirty-faced Depression kids and haggard mothers; borrrrring—Van seizes my arm. “Oh. My. God.” She doesn’t have to say anything else; she doesn’t even have to point. The high, silly voice springs from my mouth to her ear without conscious intervention. “Ohh, the Met? Awesome! Let me put on my club shoes!” Van growls through gritted teeth: “Oh—God—my—fucking—feet—hurt—but—I’m—trying—to—hide—it!” “He doesn’t even give a shit, man. Great boyfriend.” “I don’t even think he’s her boyfriend.” I squint, tilt … Continue reading Hot Guy From Photography Class by Alice Archer→
My dog sits right next to me. He’s a fourteen-almost-fifteen year old soft-coated wheaton terrier. He’s recovering from another bout of pneumonia, only two months since the last. Insanely cozy and sweet, mellow and always ready for a nap, he’s night-and-day different from his puppy days, when my husband and I thought we’d made a mistake for the entire first year of his life. When Animal (named because of his similarity to the drum-rocking muppet) was a puppy he was batshit insane. He’s always been so lovable, and so loved, but those first years he … Continue reading Afterglow by Emily Littlewood→
Streetlight Voices: Short Fiction & Memoir · Free Swim by Marjory Ruderman Podcast: “Free Swim” is a story about uneasy sleep. A fictional story performed by Jennifer Sims. Read the story online: “Free Swim” by Marjory Ruderman Jennifer Sims is an actor and voice over artist who has voiced hundreds of projects across all genres. After attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts she wandered into a career in advertising. She worked as an ad agency producer for ten years before she found her way back to her creative path as an actor/improvisor and … Continue reading Free Swim by Marjory Ruderman→
A day of forgetting has its price, but a price that can’t be reckoned, because the receipt itself was shoved into a pocket, soaked in the laundry, tumbled in the dryer into a hard pebble of paper, a symbol of nothing specific enough to reconstruct a story. And what was purchased is like candle scent settling throughout the house, seeping into fabrics— curtains and couches, lampshades, sinking through the thin space between floorboards, until finally it’s so diffused there’s no trace of its floral ribbons. Which is why a day of forgetting also has its … Continue reading Handout by Michael T. Young→
Seems like every morning I find myself weeding my inbox: delete, delete, delete, like a gardener tending a hopeless patch. I’m wary of accidentally opening something I might regret. Every afternoon, I weed again. Impossible. This morning, for example, I had ninety-three messages in my inbox. After weeding: twenty-one. Once, when I glanced away at something else, eighteen new messages suddenly appeared. “Have you heard of Unsubscribe?” friends say to me. Everybody knows about Unsubscribe, our one weapon against the onrushing glut. How’s it working out for you? As well as that spam filter you … Continue reading Male Enhancement Or, You Think I Need a New Email Address? by Susan Shafarzek→
Margo Hamilton and Ron Evans share a studio and a passion for photography. At their studio at the McGuffey Arts Center in Charlottesville, Va. a variety of some twenty-five cameras are strung decoratively on one wall. Their work includes fine photography as well as portraits of family, children and silhouettes. The two photographers met in 2009, Evans having moved to Charlottesville from Dallas, Texas where he had lived for thirty-five years. Hamilton had been living in Charlottesville for close to a decade. A native of Little Rock, Ark., Evans remembers playing with his … Continue reading The Photography of Margo Hamilton and Ron Evans→
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