by BlogEditor | Sep 25, 2020 | Creative Nonfiction
“And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.” -Exodus 12:41 Martha 2020 Her headstone reads: Martha Hughes Cannon ♦1857—1932[1] Three...
by BlogEditor | Sep 22, 2020 | Creative Nonfiction
Today I am recalling January, thumbing through my day planner, trying to pin this down, trying to put brackets around it. On Monday, January 27, I fly from Portland, Maine to Pittsburgh to visit family. The trip requires two flights, and I wear a mask in both planes....
by BlogEditor | Sep 18, 2020 | Creative Nonfiction
My grandma’s Singer was black with a yellow and orange floral pattern on the side. It folded down like origami into a table when she wasn’t using it, but mostly I remember it upright, with her sitting hunched over her sewing, foot pumping the treadle while I stood...
by BlogEditor | Aug 7, 2020 | Creative Nonfiction, The Keeping Room
My mom forgets that she lives in China. “I live in Michigan.” she tells me during our Skype chats, the South China Sea almost visible from the window behind her. I search her face for the woman I use to know. Her eyes are sometimes harried, frenzied by imagined...
by BlogEditor | Aug 4, 2020 | Blog, Book Reviews, Poetry
The intersection of body and place dominates Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s second collection Lima::Limon, a book that makes explicit the ways in which female bodies are excavated and mined. She writes in “The Hunt,” the final poem of the collection, “I am a lucky /...
by BlogEditor | Jul 28, 2020 | Blog, Poetry2, Women and the World
My words are purple and my brain is growing green tell them about all those you found This is the time to be outta your mind. I have never been so sure of anything, she said. Or have I? I’m not sure When my kids were little, their art was everywhere. Finger...
by BlogEditor | Jul 28, 2020 | Creative Nonfiction, The Keeping Room
In the early 90s, I was hired to act in Film Directing classes for two summers at the Maine Photographic and Film Institute, now called the Maine Media Workshops and College. It still takes place in the seaside town of Rockport. It is up on a hill overlooking postcard...
by BlogEditor | Jul 24, 2020 | Poetry, The Keeping Room
Elizabeth Kuelbs writes and mothers at the edge of a Los Angeles canyon. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts....
by BlogEditor | Jul 10, 2020 | Fiction, The Keeping Room
Love Allen yearned and survived, carrying the American zeitgeist in her skin. It began just after the last day of school. Because she loved her two children beyond reason or sensibility, she let them have the first week free and clear—no chores, no bedtimes, no...
by BlogEditor | Jul 3, 2020 | Fiction, The Keeping Room
It just wasn’t the right time. Maybe that’s what people always say. Or maybe they’ve learned not to say that. Because it does sound awful, doesn’t it? It just wasn’t the right time—when there’s a vulnerable new life budding inside you. I knew I couldn’t keep it. I was...
