I imagine I would get along famously with Chitoka Webb. The author’s smiling face graces the cover of Something Inside of Me: How to Hang on to Heaven When You Are Going Through Hell (Emerald Book Company, July 2011), and she radiates the kind of warmth that tells me I would probably love to go shoe-shopping with her.
When I began teaching, none of my students ever asked about publishing their work. They were content, it seemed, to learn the craft, hone particular pieces, and perhaps, someday, begin the process of submitting to literary journals or editors or agents. That has changed.
The hallway connecting the bedroom I shared with my brother to the bedroom my parents shared. I wrote on the walls in this hallway with crayon, then with pencil, and once with blank ink.
Lake Eola Park, in the center of Orlando – a world away from cartoon Disney – makes me wish that I could draw. Some places demand the bold strokes of acrylic, the definitives of ink, the texturized weight of Bristol paper. Nothing but a painter’s hand, a drafter’s arm will do. The precise skills I am lacking.
mensah demary’s piece, “Depressive Episodes”, was featured in Hippocampus in July. I liked it when I read it because I, too, have suffered depressive episodes (though it’s never occurred to me to call them that or even think of them that way). But, I wanted to know: what the heck?
What terrifies you? I mean, really frightens you to the point where you triple-check that closet door and, perhaps, force yourself to stay awake in fear of slipping into a horrifying nightmare? For a young Ben Jolivet, it was the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown commercials.
The Colombian night air dances as the pool at the far end of the Termales de Coconuco slowly fills with tepid, sulfuric water. This is my first return visit to my birthplace, my first introduction to my father, a man who has been absent nearly all my life.
There’s not much about my father that I actually know. What I think I know now is that he’s getting skinnier by the year and old enough to stop doing things as he used to. Until the last few years or so, my father, in his sixties, passed for forty to strangers.
I live less than a mile away from my childhood home. It would take me about three minutes to get in my car and drive to my old street. On a nice day, I can walk there in less than fifteen.
The autumn season had yet to morph the colors of the summer leaves. A beautiful contrast of gold and green made for a serene scene on this Pennsylvania hillside… Were it not for the scar on the complexion of this vista, it would have been the quintessential postcard.
