Creative Nonfiction

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Dragonfly Out in the Sun

Tracey Dean Widelitz

Hold On To Me,
Sunlit Beauty,
and Rose Petals and Golden Wings

Refugees DRC

Despair Paintings

Owen Brown

The world seems to carry on as if there aren’t a million reasons to be shocked. But because I don’t want to go numb, I try to paint them, at least a few. For these, I paint figuratively, as I was trained, even though now, often, my desires, and my output, is abstract. Still, how can we ignore the drought in Afghanistan, the strife in Sudan, the war in Gaza, the invasion of Ukraine? Or even what goes on in our own lives?

Finding a Pathway

Finding a Pathway

Mark Rosalbo

As an emerging artist, the art form I work with is primarily abstract painting and large-scale installations. My artistic process involves using various mediums and techniques to create physical manifestations of internal dialogues and personal judgments. In my abstract paintings, I use house paint, various tools, and textured canvases. The technique involves creating overconfident brushstrokes that mask my imposter syndrome, with multiple layers of paint partially hidden under the surface. The inner turmoil arising from self-doubt is expressed as geometric shapes woven together with texture.

In Between

Wholeness Through Fracture: Sculpting the Human Condition

Aleksandra Scepanovic

Three works in clay by Aleksandra Scepanovic.
Each of these works tells a story of the complexity and beauty found in life’s fractures, embracing the wholeness that emerges through resilience.

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Coastal Grey

Miki Simic

This series of photographs, titled “Coastal Grey,” depicts elements of summer themes. My goal was to capture a vibrant setting and allow the viewer to realize it remains vibrant even though color is lacking.

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Symphony in Green

Patrice Sullivan

I paint landscapes, interiors, exteriors, still life’s with figures interacting and posing for the camera displaying memorable moments with families, friends, and neighbors.

friends

Friends, Triplets, and Family Narrative

Tianyagenv Yan

Tianyagenv uses light clay to make miniature figures and wishes to capture the characteristics of femininity, vulnerability, and resilience in potential.

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Green Canyon Bridge 1993, Thrive, and Tarot Deck: The Moon

Robb Kunz

My paintings explore the abstract simplicity of ordinary life and the deductive impulse to see ourselves reflected back in art.

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Metamorphosis

Marianne Dalton

The photographs are from the series, Metamorphosis. Each painterly creation constructed from dozens of layered photographs is driven by my reaction to nature’s extreme seasonal change.

La Huasteca

La Huasteca, Roots in Nuevo Leon, and Frames

Tee Pace

La Huasteca, Roots in Nuevo Leon, and Frames

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Cherry Blossoms

Annika Connor

Cherry Blossom Forest

Les Femmes Mondiales Black and White

Les Femmes Mondiales Black and White

Janet Brugos

Les Femmes Mondiales Black and White
Hurricane
Chicago Ice

Sunset over the Pacific

Three Photographs

Lawrence Bridges

UNDER THE PIER, MALIBU CA
SUNSET OVER THE PACIFIC
and POOL, POST RANCH INN, BIG SUR

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Joshua Tree Project

Holly Willis

The images are part of a larger series created in the Mojave Desert around Joshua Tree in the fall of 2023 that explore the shifting state of the desert.

October Still Life

Chasing Paradise

Marianne Dalton

This series, Chasing Paradise, draws upon my work as a fine artist in painting, as I create stylized photographs of flowers and plants found in my rural environment.

Turtle Light

Ocean Sleep and Turtle Light

Maite Russell

Turtle Light and Ocean Sleep are works of multimedia and sculpture mediums, respectively, depicting the natural world with fantastical elements.

Creative Nonfiction

Featured image for “Empty Black Circle”
Mohini Dasari

Empty Black Circle

I feel as hollow as the empty black circle staring at me from the screen. The nurse practitioner is quiet as she scans my uterus. A push to the left, a push to the right. Left, right, left, right. I gaze at the monitor, searching for what I’ve waited seven weeks to see: a white blob floating in a black ovoid sea, outlined by a bright white line.
Left, right, left, right. Back and forth, the cold probe pushes against my insides. The empty black circle keeps coming in and out of view. Nothing else.

February 2025
Featured image for “Beyond the Frame”
Timothy Loftus

Beyond the Frame

Sometime around 1912, twenty-two-year-old Great Aunt Annie took a photo of Mayme and Beth, two of her younger sisters, standing on opposite sides of an unnamed friend. They were all eating apples at the same time. Annie framed the scene with her camera then snapped the photo, capturing their impish goofiness on black-and-white film. The smiles hidden by the apples show in their eyes.
Ninety years later, in February 2002, I was hiking with my three daughters,

February 2025
Featured image for “Whispers of the Beloved”
Toni Palombi

Whispers of the Beloved

Nestled in the Adelaide Hills, Father John’s home is warm and inviting. Outside, the trees are dampened by the winter rains. The sky is dark although it is only midday. John sits in a blue armchair by the heater. Green plants surround us in the living room where we sit.

January 2025
Featured image for “Go Now”
M. Betsy Smith

Go Now

“We have no Rick Smith.” “What do you mean? I was told they brought him here.” “I’m sorry.” The [triage nurse’s] annoyance was unmistakable. I had no recourse but to wait. I’d received a call about fifteen minutes ago. My husband was found by the maintenance man outside, face down on the ground.

January 2025
Featured image for “Anything But Ordinary”
Marianne Dalton

Anything But Ordinary

My car twists and curves as the city lights disappear behind me and my headlights spool deep into the dark abyss toward my rural home. I feel relieved I don’t have to face Dad tonight. I’m waiting until morning to break the news of Mom’s death to him.

January 2025
Featured image for “The Nicotine Solution”
Carsten ten Brink

The Nicotine Solution

We were already deep in the Amazonian rainforest, in the borderland between Peru and Brazil, based in a camp somewhere along an unnamed tributary of another tributary of the Rio Javari that marks the border, and that morning we rose early to travel by canoe yet deeper into the forest. Local hunter Alejandro had encountered a large adult anaconda and was willing to take us there.

December 2024
Featured image for “Convents, cults and longing”
Toni Palombi

Convents, cults and longing

After 24 years of being a nun, Juliette (name changed) left the convent. It was 1986. Juliette’s spiritual longing – unsatiated by the convent – was as strong as ever. So three years later, when she met Brendan, a charming, charismatic, striking man who ran spiritual workshops drawing on the wisdom of the world’s greatest traditions, she took notice.

December 2024
Featured image for “Pen Sketch”
Grace Halden

Pen Sketch

It took me three years to read your letter. Back in 2018, when I didn’t really understand the process, I thought ‘pen sketch’ meant an artist’s drawing of the sperm donor. I didn’t look at it as I didn’t want to see you. Not then. I didn’t want to choose a donor based on looks and I didn’t want to identify a stranger on the faces of my prospective children. Later, when I joined groups for donor assisted families, I discovered – by chance when reading a Facebook post – that the so called ‘pen sketch’ was not a picture, it was a letter.

December 2024
Featured image for “Pandemic Dog”
Mark Hall

Pandemic Dog

When Tibby arrived on her first night with us, we let her out into the fenced backyard. On the steps, she paused for an instant, ears up, nose twitching, poised like an Olympic sprinter in the starting blocks. In the twilight, something caught her eye. Slowly, she stalked, like a panther, into the grass. Then she dashed, disappearing under the arborvitae. In a moment, Tibby emerged, triumphant, shaking a small rabbit between her jaws.

November 2024
Featured image for “The Last Hustle”
Steve Bernstein

The Last Hustle

August, and the PS.104 schoolyard was empty. A good thing. Gave me a chance to develop my pitching arm. And avoid trouble. As a white kid in the South Bronx in 1967, trouble had a way of finding me.

November 2024
Featured image for “With the Time Left”
Heidi Lasher

With the Time Left

The reader fanned the deck of cards on the table and invited me to touch them. With my right hand, I moved them in a circle, counterclockwise and confessed that I was considering abandoning my career.

October 2024
Featured image for “The Peacock’s Meow”
K. Amber Johnson

The Peacock’s Meow

In my earliest memory, I am falling. The last of the afternoon light is nothing but a whisper as dusk makes her provocative entrance—a lingering tease before the dark comes all at once.

October 2024
Featured image for “Intersection:  (Breast Cancer, Puccini and Me)”
Jeanne Hall

Intersection: (Breast Cancer, Puccini and Me)

I am lying alone on an operating table. Bright lights are shimmering above my head. I cannot speak. I am surrounded by strangers. People who have met me only moments before. And yet, I am held hostage to their intellect, their experience, their wisdom and their compassion.

October 2024
Featured image for “The Black Chrysler PT Cruiser”
Molly Stites

The Black Chrysler PT Cruiser

You’re driving through the beginning of a snowfall that will probably bring at least a foot, the road already white with salt, slippery with cold in some places. The black Chrysler PT Cruiser is a shape a car probably shouldn’t be.

October 2024
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Alicia McGill

Eileen

I loved my babysitter, Eileen. She ran cross-country track and strutted around bare legged in a varsity warm-up jacket. Her name was emblazoned in gold letters on the back, and there was a sneaker with wings on the sleeve.

September 2024
Featured image for “What Happens?”
Jeff Hennelly

What Happens?

“What happens after we die?” is a question that has intrigued humanity for millenniums and is perhaps the greatest enigma of all time. Of the estimated 118 billion humans that have died, zero returned with conclusive proof of an afterlife.

September 2024
Featured image for “Death and Surviving”
Andrew Sarewitz

Death and Surviving

When I was in my late teens, seven of my father’s male friends died within a year and a half. Not husbands of my mother’s women friends. These were men my father knew independent of Mom. I don’t remember him outwardly showing emotion though I’m sure he was, at the very least, sad.

September 2024
Featured image for “Coming Into the Country”
Kirk Astroth

Coming Into the Country

Well before dawn at 4:30 a.m., Chrysti and I met at the Humane Borders truck yard, loaded our gear for the day into the water truck, checked the tires, gas gauge and water tank levels, climbed into the truck and headed out to US 286 toward the border. We had the roads pretty much to ourselves.

August 2024
Featured image for “The Visiting Committee”
Maggie McCombs

The Visiting Committee

The first day, early morning

I wake up to lights in my face again. Right in my eyes, beaming back through a crack in my head. This is at least the eighteenth time they’ve come by in one night. I’m counting them like sheep to pass the time as they cycle in, their voices changing every couple hours.

August 2024
Featured image for “Facing Mortality with the Discipline of Healing and Along the Healing Arc”
Michael McQuillan

Facing Mortality with the Discipline of Healing and Along the Healing Arc

Windshield shatters as a spider web rendition that augurs worse to come. A transforming moment, mind informs, a new normal launches now. “Damage report, Mr. Spock,” fills ears from St. Louis freshman memories of Star Trek when a ten-inch TV box peeked through dorm desk detritus to instill space flight fantasies beside what lectures handed down of conniving bishops and their kings.

August 2024
Featured image for “What My Mother Left Me”
Molly Seale

What My Mother Left Me

He gazes at me large-eyed as I flip through the album pages of the tinged-with-age black-and-white photographs. I hoist him over my shoulder, pat his back gently for a burp and continue to peruse images of myself—baby me cradled in my father’s arms as I now cradle my son, three-year old me uncomfortably groomed and garbed for a birthday party…

August 2024
Featured image for “On the Edge of My Mother Tongue”
Dominique Margolis

On the Edge of My Mother Tongue

There is space on the edge of language where it is quiet but far from empty. It is the space where life is at it should be. I happened upon it by chance one summer between my first and second year of legal existence while scratching at the wall next to my crib on the first floor of the Au Style Modern’ tailoring shop in the village of Tauves in the Auvergne region of France.

July 2024
Featured image for “The Merriest Widow”
David Kennedy

The Merriest Widow

A rider was drawing closer, through the light fog rising from the forested hills around Stockton. The ladies had initially considered the pursuer as merely another gallivant taking some exercise, but the man on the horse was taking no leisurely route, rather a direct line toward their carriage.
“Have no fear,” said the coachman. “I am a tolerable shot at a hundred feet.”

July 2024
Featured image for “Texting with a Ghost”
Trelaine Ito

Texting with a Ghost

“Can we talk?”
He sounds almost too forceful in his delivery, the tone of his voice transforming his question into an attack, so he selects his next set of words deliberately, knowing he’d only have one shot at his opening.

July 2024