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 “A Traveling Cloud”
Begonya Plaza-Rosenbluth

A Traveling Cloud

After spending a year in Northern Spain with my father’s sister’s family, I reunited with my parents and siblings in Bogotá, Colombia, instead of our home in Los Angeles, California. My parents were starting over again from scratch and setting up shop to establish themselves. Mom, who was a perpetual optimist, had recently hit the jackpot, and with an endless display of excitement she was paying-off debts, shopping for new home furniture, and preparing for my milestone birthday celebration.

July 2024
Featured image for “Tai Po”
Priscilla Chan

Tai Po

I lose myself in Taiwan. That’s why I hate going there, feeling like a deer in the headlights; perhaps this time the buzzing crowds, alien sounds of chitter-chatter, and layered characters on never-ending menus will feel more like home. It doesn’t.

June 2024
Featured image for “I Don’t Care If I’m Real”
Andrew Park

I Don’t Care If I’m Real

Sitting in front of the murky Han River, I don’t even see my own reflections. I hear remnants of life here and there: a group of senior joggers, a street saxophonist whose confidence is admirable, and a little girl screaming at something—kids always seem to see another dimension we don’t.

June 2024
Featured image for “A Rainbow Day”
Marianne Dalton

A Rainbow Day

I could not sleep at all last night. My mind was in an unending hyper-focus mode. It’s like those songs that have the algorithm that deliberately make it so you can’t get them out of your head. Mind worms. Plus, I kept thinking about the blood.

June 2024
Featured image for “Learning to Walk”
Andrew Sarewitz

Learning to Walk

I have been told that I am visually, and stereotypically gay. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I take it without an angry or even aggravated reaction.

When I was quite a bit younger, I accepted that I was unconsciously flamboyant, which I confess, I didn’t like, being a teen student in a judgmental arena.

June 2024
Featured image for “Was That All it Was?”
Andrew Sarewitz

Was That All it Was?

To my parents’ dismay, I took full advantage of New York City’s disco era in the late 1970s till the mid-80s. I did go to NYU undergraduate, but if someone asks, “What was your major?” I answer “Night Life.”

May 2024
Featured image for “Prison Palette”
Michael McQuillan

Prison Palette

Athletic vitality invites gym walls of vivid colors, players spilling onto courts with crimson tones fitting coming contests yet pale walls circumscribe this setting, matching well-worn olive sweatshirts, khaki pants and lemon tees as men of subdued spirit shuffle in beneath torn net strands, symbols of their fall.

May 2024
Featured image for “The Call”
Nancy L. Glass

The Call

I was walking the trails through the oak forest on our property, looking for the pair of pileated woodpeckers I could hear furiously pounding their heads against a tree trunk. My phone rang with a similar rhythmic urgency in my pocket, as though in conversation with the woodpeckers.

May 2024
Featured image for “Boey’s Love Song”
Michael McQuillan

Boey’s Love Song

Solitary star’s light cleaves predawn sky. Morning’s mourning starts. Eyes fill in striking silence. Departed thumping, crunching, sipping, crackling, pouncing, yelping, woofs and wags of canine elder years seem bound within that star.

April 2024
Featured image for “Sense and Sensibility: Story of a Storyteller”
Tracie Adams

Sense and Sensibility: Story of a Storyteller

See the little girl sneaking out of her room, across the green shag carpet, down the creaking stairs to the second floor of the tri-level house. Ducking past the large bay window where a meager display of plants are cradled in macrame hangers…

April 2024
Featured image for “In Defense of John’s Intellect”
Millie Sparks

In Defense of John’s Intellect

I ran into his great-aunt at the gas station. We squealed with delight when we saw each other and embraced with the kind of bear-hug squeeze that left us both a little breathless.

April 2024
Featured image for “Answers to Questions Not Anticipated”
Ricardo José González-Rothi

Answers to Questions Not Anticipated

I slip the CD into the car audio slot and the music begins. As always, Cole tells me he likes riding in my tiny car because we can play CD’s and listen to music and we dance and get silly while driving. I hunt through Goodwill stores and garage sales, always looking for “hidden jewels,” preserved covers and discs without scratches on the tracks. Cole is very specific about his likes. He doesn’t much care for little kid tales. He likes The Four Tops, Jimmy Buffett, The Beatles and Raffi. This day I slip in Jimmy Buffet’s “Greatest Hits” into the slot. Track 7.

October 2023
Featured image for “The Voodoo Shell”
Marianne Dalton

The Voodoo Shell

I hold the tarot card in my hand and stroke the silky surface, studying the illustration. It’s a colorful drawing of a woman seated on a throne. She’s beautifully dressed in a red billowy gown with a crown of moons on her head. I rub my fingers over the image as if using a paintbrush, imagining I’m the artist creating it. Mom’s voice interrupts my dream drawing. She directs me with her sweet sing-song upbeat tone. Put the card here on the table, face up, and then take another from the stack and flip it over next to it. Mom smiles and looks me straight in the eyes. Her cobalt blue eyes glisten and sparkle. I’m mesmerized.

October 2023
Featured image for “Choosing Gratitude”
Nancy L. Glass

Choosing Gratitude

Amanda, our hospice nurse, answered the door when I rang the doorbell, showed me where to leave my shoes and escorted me into the den, where I found Faiz’s mother, Haima, sitting on the floor. Haima apologized that the air conditioner was out again, for the second time in a week. Within minutes, my slacks and blouse stuck to my skin, and the air in the den felt heavy despite a frantic fan and the open window in the breakfast room.

September 2023
Featured image for “Fear in America”
Kathleen Tighe

Fear in America

My students are working their way through The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when the superintendent’s voice crackles over the loudspeaker. “Excuse me teachers and students. We will now conduct a hard lockdown drill. Hard lockdown.” My class responds immediately, leaving their desks and joining me in the corner furthest from the room’s single entrance. Cody flicks the light switch off, and all sink to the floor.

September 2023
Featured image for “A Kitten Before the Fire”
David Kennedy

A Kitten Before the Fire

This was not how Senator William Sharon had intended to spend his retirement. Having amassed his fortune, failed to obtain re-election, and outlived his wife, Sharon had dreamed of living off the interest, tossing aside the newspapers once he tired of politics, and paying for discreet liaisons who could be trusted to dispose of themselves once they were no longer needed. It had come as an unpleasant surprise that the tides of business were ever-changing and unpredictable…

September 2023
Featured image for “A Smile, A Nod, A Reckoning”
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

A Smile, A Nod, A Reckoning

He once smiled at me with small brown eyes that had a yellow gleam. He once sat by my child’s bed and read me fairy tales, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” “The Sugar Plum Tree,” and the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. In summer he held my six-year-old hand and delighted in taking me with daddy-longlegs steps up the hill to the big lake where we sat on our haunches and watched tadpoles skitter in the shallow water at the edge of the shore. I was his treasured soul—

August 2023
Featured image for “Pop Goes the Weasel”
Paul Benkendorfer

Pop Goes the Weasel

I stood with my father on the BART platform of San Francisco, our luggage in hand and three plane tickets tucked tightly away in my pocket. We had spent the previous week with my older brother and his girlfriend to celebrate my nephew’s second birthday. The walkway was damp and covered with puddles that had formed during the rainy night. The day was humid, carrying with it the soft heat of a Bay Area July. A weird aroma of cinnamon mixed with the sewer steam of the city wafted through the breeze. Little light crept in the sunny afternoon day from above the stairwell.

August 2023
Featured image for “Love and Patience on Mount Pico”
Scott Edward Anderson

Love and Patience on Mount Pico

“Are you sure this is a road?” Samantha asked as the black basalt paving gave way to dark, red dirt, and the deep-green grass seemed to grow closer and closer to our rental car.
“It’s supposed to be the fastest way,” I answered. “According to Google Maps…”
Then I realized I’d lost the cell signal and my iPhone was navigating blind.

July 2023
Featured image for “Meditation’s Coda”
Michael McQuillan

Meditation’s Coda

The window’s tree is a friend. Its limbs pulse with rain as Sabbath meditation sifts preoccupation.
The living room corner, home within home, contents me. The sill’s cup of French Roast stimulates my molding words as poem and essay phrases on what seem urgent social concerns.

July 2023
Featured image for “Some People Say the Holocaust Never Happened”
DJ Grant

Some People Say the Holocaust Never Happened

An exhibit about the life of Anne Frank has been traveling the world for decades.1 Anne Frank was a Jewish girl in hiding from the Nazis in The Netherlands during the Holocaust, the systematic destruction of the Jewish people of Europe during WWII. The diary she kept while in hiding from 1942 to 1944 is an exemplar testimonial of the Jewish experience of persecution.

July 2023
Featured image for “Broken”
Joanne Jagoda

Broken

My husband’s triple bypass surgery had gone well, and his recovery was uneventful, but ten days later, during the night he woke me up and told me he was having trouble breathing. After a sleepless night, I drove him to the emergency room, at 5 A.M. His newly patched heart checked out, but the doctors admitted him…

June 2023
Featured image for “The Clay”
Karin Doucette

The Clay

The autumn evening in The Hague is cooling as I lean my bicycle against the steel stairway and step into the brightly lit atelier. It’s tucked in the corner of a green-colored building on Noordeinde, at the bottom of the long street leading up to the Dutch king’s palace.

June 2023
Featured image for “A Mistake in the Lady”
David Kennedy

A Mistake in the Lady

Judge Sullivan, although a young man and even more junior judge, had heard his share of difficult questions from lawyers but had never seen such a simple question prove so vexing.
“I am sorry, counsel,” he said, “but I must have misheard. Could you please repeat the question?”
“Of course, Your Honor.” David Terry cleared his throat and began again. “Mrs. Sarah Althea Sharon, where were you born?”

June 2023