I have been trying to find morels for a long time. For years. Last year, I found my first morel on Sauvie Island, but it was my only one. Just one modest mushroom. While I was in North Wales at the cusp of March and April, I kept in touch a forager from South Wales. […]
Read more "Burn Morels"This guest contribution comes from Melissa Parietti. Melissa is a writer and finance professional from Long Island. This is her first work published online by an independent journal, with more to come! When she’s not educating herself about investments, she enjoys learning about economics, and everything else too. Gold melts in the July heat gold sizzles on […]
Read more "The Haze"Please enjoy a sneak preview of my work in progress, Something Good. Prologue Marydale Rae sat on a hard, plastic chair in a sun-swept room that managed to look almost cheerful. She had never been in this part of the Eastern Oregon State Penitentiary, with its high, tall windows, the bars painted the same […]
Read more "For Good: A Contemporary Romance (sneak preview)"I heard that the first place I’d worked in Oregon shuttered today the same way we hear everything now: a Facebook post. A friend was tagged in a dim cell phone shot snapped in the dying Lloyd Center Mall in Portland. Lloyd Center has been dying since I first moved to Portland in 2003. A […]
Read more "The Corset’s Last Breath: Frederick’s of Hollywood is Dead"I gave up refined sugar for Lent. Fat Tuesday was coincidentally a particularly indulgent day; I had large fry bread as part of my lunch and an ice cream cone as a snack. Guilty and concerned, I gave up refined sugar, not for religious reasons—I’m an atheist—but because I was curious to see how abstinence […]
Read more "Giving Up Sugar for Lent"Hugo and I will say we’re teaching you to write like us: he’ll tell you to lock up your chorus girls in a silo. He’ll say don’t listen if you don’t want to. I’ll tell you this: Maybe hell isn’t so hot. Maybe Sappho meant for us to find her fragments—all that desire too much […]
Read more "To My Poetry Students"Would you be happier paying $1,500 for a closet and eating dried beans in a stranger’s city? This is what I’m asking these days. Why are all these graphic designers moving to 35th Street, 32nd Street, 30th Street in my city? The last bartender I met said my neighborhood of origin is a bad one. […]
Read more "Every City with a Side"
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