Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about art. I’ve been painting large 4-foot by 4-foot canvasses covered with layers of electric, abstract colors, and each day that I can, I turn off the phone and court a kind of tingling surrender to hues, shapes and textures as they pass through me. What’s stunning is that…
by Jennifer Anthony “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.” Alfred Joyce Kilmer’s Trees has been a bit of a joke in my family ever since one of my brothers, then a shy teenager, was coerced into reciting it in front of our church’s congregation. We were young and…
by Cat Hubka I got the idea to travel long ago, on the back of my father’s motorcycle. My father was in the midst of his mid-life crisis, a spiritual and emotional breakdown that had flung our family to the winds, when he purchased a mid-sized Yamaha and began exploring the high country of Colorado…
by Avi Kramer When I arrived in Chaling on a steamy afternoon last August, I had expected rutted dirt roads sidelined by weathered telephone poles, a central meat and vegetable market, and embankments leading down to farm land and rolling hills. I was correct about the fields, acres of square plots, soggy rice paddies and…
by Jackie Sanders I am 40. You’d never know it if you looked inside my soul. You’d think I was 23, maybe 26 at the most. No, the only giveaway is my face, my body. The changes don’t happen all at once, they’re gradual, hardly noticeable, until all of a sudden, they’re very noticeable. I…
by Esperanza Elena Rodriguez Searching for Self on I-5 This was all new to me: being alone, without a husband. I was 38 years old and what I thought would last forever did not. I found myself single and felt as though I had no identity of my very own. For the past twenty years,…
Her sweet, babbling voice calls me in the morning. I long for her chill on my neck and her wet kisses on my lips. The lovely Tuolumne whispers to me memories of stargazing and river rafting. Laurence came into my life at the Fillmore Jazz Festival, it was a random encounter between two people who…