Lofty Mid-year Bonus-goals

Have you revisited your New Year’s Resolutions lately (or ever)?? In case you somehow missed it, we have arrived in the second trimester of 2024. Mid-May is running our schedules into manic chaos, and the weather (at least in the Midwest) is propelling us outside every moment of the day, tempting us to shirk responsibilities….

Change

If you sit still as daylight wakes and pause,expand your lungs with air sweet, full of peace—moments, time stands still you almost forgetwhat it was to you, the meaning of life.And yet in a breath suddenly it’s clear:a life lived well gives forth life abundantSuch shame to waste a minute. Time’s no thief. The sun…

Book Review: Seven Days in the Art World

One must not be an art aficionado to know that making art is only one stroke of the intricately complicated masterpiece of the modern art world. Art has inherent value from the moment a piece is started; even if that work is never shown to the public. However, when the oeuvre of an artist does…

Open call – closed to your submissions

“Open call for poetry,”the zines and mags announce emphatically.“We want you, we need you,trust us with your words.”They aren’t lying, they aren’t false,but the actual requirements tell a skewed story;dry prose in small print which dulls your dreamsand drags you back into the realitythat it is unlikely that you,the writer of poetry,will likely be a…

Post Scripts

Today, my first solo art show opens. That is crazy to me considering that I wasn’t consciously trying to make art a core part of my career until last fall. One year ago, I was transitioning out of full-time employment into an adventure of full-time creative work. That change came from an intentional shift to…

Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

I am certain I had looked at All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr on the shelves at Barnes & Noble for years without really considering purchasing a copy. Last fall, I when I saw promotional videos for the forthcoming Netflix mini-series of the same name, I was intrigued to find out more…

Book Review: A Season of Second Chances

When a friend loaned me her copy of A Season of Second Chances by Jenny Bayliss, I was skeptical at best. Despite the saccharine description of a chef hosting a book club in a coastal British town (all things that are near & dear to my heart) and a promise that there wouldn’t be too…

Book Review: The Complete Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde

The Complete Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde is a lovely collection of nine children’s stories which were originally published in two volumes. This version, enhanced with intricate illustrations by Philippe Jullian, stood out on a shelf the Winding Stair Bookstore, in Dublin (where I also picked up Virginia Woolf’s “How One Should Read a Book”)….

Coming Home

There’s an understandable mix—a collection of feelings: a burst of joy, a sigh of relief,a pang of regret, a whisper of trepidation. We go away, but then come to:A return journey or a fresh start—perhaps both. We may venture to a familiar place,but that doesn’t mean we’re traveling in reverse. The sands of time continue…

Dubai | 2023

We entered Dubai somewhat unconventionally by driving across the Al Hajar mountain range that separates Oman from the United Arab Emirates. The drive was long—16 of us in a 17-passenger van plus some of our luggage that didn’t fit in the trailer that we were pulling for six hours—and included an inconveniently-long delay in passport…