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January 08, 2024Shawna Lemay Uses the Still Life Form to Explore Marriage, Beauty, and Time in Her New Essays
The still life is one of visual art's most enduring forms. From Picasso's revolutionary relief constructions to Van Gogh's iconic sunflowers, it is an artistic experiment that has been embraced, reimagined, ...
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October 26, 2020"I Didn’t Realize How Damaged I Had Become" Firefighter Bryan Ratushniak's Memoir is Powerful, Honest, & Moving
The image of a firefighter is an emotionally charged one: a person who literally exists to save us from one of the most inherently terrifying forces in the world. It's a heavy mantle both figuratively ...
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February 03, 2022Robert Earl Stewart on the Power of Nonfiction to Turn Our Most Broken Parts into Connection and Comfort
Blaise Pascal once wrote that humans were born with an "infinite abyss" that can only be filled by "God himself", originating a theory that spawned the idea of "a God-shaped hole" in the human psyche. With ...
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October 02, 2023October 2023 Writer in Residence Peter Counter on Writing After the Unthinkable
Peter Counter was on a perfectly normal family vacation when the unthinkable happened: a stranger shot Counter's father, leaving Counter to drag him, wounded and bleeding, to safety. It was a moment ...
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October 02, 2018The Story of My Face Author Leanne Baugh on Teenaged Self-Consciousness & Crafting Memorable Characters
Every teen feels awkward and self-conscious sometimes, but 17-year old Abby Hughes, the resilient young protagonist in Leanne Baugh's The Story of My Face (Second Story Press), has a serious reason ...
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October 18, 2018
My friend Richard
In my last post I talked about some of the influential writers and books that inspired me to seriously pursue my own creative writing. My list is much longer than that, and there are many more storytellers ...
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September 06, 2018Anatomy of a Short Story, or Where I Get (Some of) My Ideas
I’m not one of those writers who makes everything up completely from scratch. And seriously, do those writers even exist? (If they do, I am jealous of them.)In my fiction, almost everything comes from ...
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September 16, 2019
My Teenaged Reading Secret
When I was six my mom started to take me with her on her weekly visits to the public library. Mom was a fan of Dorothy L. Sayers; I was a fan of Raggedy Ann and Andy books. Around the age of thirteen ...
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September 21, 2023"Memory is a Slippery and Selective Thing" Paige Maylott on Gaming, Writing, & Finding Herself
What is a body in a virtual world? As we move more and more of our socializing, working, and identities online, where does that leave our understanding of our physical selves, in terms of gender, sexuality, ...
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August 29, 2022"I Learned Something Every Day" Sheridan Rondeau Shares Her Journey of Caring for Her Husband Through Alzheimer’s
Caring for a loved one suffering with dementia is an incredibly complex journey both both the carer and the loved one – emotionally, socially, and logistically. Navigating both an irreversibly changed ...
