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 →
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 →
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 Grossman →
I first met Aaron Hamburger at a cocktail party during grad school. I was a writing student focusing on nonfiction and poetry and Hamburger was part of the fiction faculty (I don’t mean he was fictitious . . . he existed, but taught that kind of prose where one makes stuff up.) Hamburger had already published two books and had won awards for them. I knew when I saw him that I had to introduce myself for one extremely important and pressing reason: his shoes. Hamburger sported these amazing purple suede Adidas Gazelles, and my … Continue reading Interview by J Brooke of Hotel Cuba’s author Aaron Hamburger →
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