Novel Excerpts

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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.

Novel Excerpts

Featured image for “Lowlands”
Patti Witten

Lowlands

Cynthia had withdrawn, wrapped in a shroud of bedsheets, exhausted by weeping. In the darkened room, sounds were somehow louder — the rain, a car swishing by on the street, the faint barking of a neighbor’s dog. Water dripping from the eaves and mumbling in the downspout beside the open window. Six days since Maylin drowned. Tomorrow they would bury her.

December 2022
Featured image for “Autobiography of the Bomb: Chapter Eight”
Jim Shankman

Autobiography of the Bomb: Chapter Eight

He was at a gathering in Berkeley at the spartan home of a man named Peters. The cigarette smoke was mixed with alcohol and the hot breath of conversation. Peters was a physician who had escaped from Dachau. He had seen things. He chose not to speak of it unless someone was being particularly pigheaded or willfully ignorant or smugly uncaring, and then he spoke in such detail that he commanded the room with the authority of a Greek messenger. “I am come from Thebes with news I dare not speak.” “Speak, man, and you shall not be harmed, I vow.”

December 2022
Featured image for “A Cypress Tree Has No Shadow: Chapter Two”
Kevin Gerard Neill

A Cypress Tree Has No Shadow: Chapter Two

ALLENBY had originally been designed by an Ottoman Empire army engineer to impress the future. At first glance, the barracks looked magnificent: a pile of chiseled stone comprising two tall upper stories stacked above a main floor, each of the wings spreading at least two city blocks to form a massive, four-sided citadel. Justina knew from old photographs seen in Vienna that the wings enclosed a vast courtyard, a setting for military parades or a bloody last stand.

November 2022
Featured image for “The Poison Hill”
Laura Canon

The Poison Hill

The photograph was square, with white edges, taken with their father’s camera last summer at the lake. Gertrude remembered it well: Louis had posed in his swimsuit, one hand on his hip.
But since then, someone had scribbled all over the picture. Large, crude loops of rough blue ink elaborated her brother’s swimsuit, flaring his trunks into a skirt and blotted his head with frizzy curls, flapper-short.

November 2022
Featured image for “The Snitch”
M.D. Semel

The Snitch

When Javan was around ten years old, his parents took him and his brother to Orchard Beach. It was Javan’s first trip to the beach. The night before the trip, he couldn’t fall asleep. He crawled into bed with his parents and asked them questions. He asked his parents to explain how the beach was made and if it was safe to go there. He asked them why people said the sand at the beach was white when it was really tan.

November 2022
Featured image for “Autobiography of the Bomb: Chapter One”
Jim Shankman

Autobiography of the Bomb: Chapter One

You may think you know me but you don’t. Our acquaintance only goes so far. You see how I act, but you do not know my thoughts and feelings. You do not know me from the inside. And so I often feel misunderstood and unfairly judged. You can infer a great deal about people from their actions. But literature confers one great advantage over life. It allows you to see a person as if from within. Perhaps this is only illusion.

November 2022
Featured image for “Time Has Come”
Julie May

Time Has Come

Jessie woke up from a dead slumber and reached for the alarm clock — 10:30. She would be late for class again. She sat up and looked at the empty space beside her in the queen-sized bed. She lay back, relieved to be alone. Before she could gather her thoughts about anything, the pungent smell of hashish invaded her nostrils.
She rolled over and buried her head in the pillow. The idea of going into the kitchen sickened her. Eating breakfast shrouded by another cloud of smoke revolted her. The idea of a conversation with Gary was even less appetizing.

September 2022
Featured image for “What Can Never Be Known”
Katherine Joshi

What Can Never Be Known

My mother insisted she left the necklace by accident. In a rush, while packing. She left it sitting on the dresser in her hotel room and it must have still been sitting there when she left. She must have been in such a hurry to leave, so fearful of missing her flight, that she forgot to put it back on, that it remained in India while she returned to the United States.
“I thought I was going to miss my flight,” she told us, breathless, as we all sat around my parents’ kitchen table. It was late May, one month before her death.

September 2022
Featured image for “A Cypress Tree Has No Shadow: Chapter One”
Kevin Gerard Neill

A Cypress Tree Has No Shadow: Chapter One

IN a still, dark room smelling of disinfectant that stung his nose, the dazed, terrified boy lay silently crying. He was on his back atop a thin mattress, in a bed or trolley, his wrists and ankles secured with straps so tight he could barely move. His mouth was taped shut. He knew nothing about where he was or how he had gotten here. The last thing he recalled, the last normal thing, was going to the market with his father to buy grapes. After that, father and son walked to an apartment not far from the market to visit a man the boy did not know. They had tea and sweet biscuits, a treat for the child, who did not see his father often. He felt sleepy after drinking his tea. And then the boy awakened here, alone.

September 2022
Featured image for “The Price of Sunshine: “Mahmi and Me””
Susan Wan Dolling

The Price of Sunshine: “Mahmi and Me”

Mahmi has always felt to me part tame and part wild, part mother, part child. There is something vague about her I have yet to pin down. When people outside the family were about, she appeared like a grown woman, observing social etiquette, behaving as she was expected to behave, but she was somehow more fluid, more vulnerable, more changeable when we were by ourselves, just the two of us.

July 2022
Featured image for “Gone To Ground”
Morgan Hatch

Gone To Ground

The sun had just appeared over the rim of the mountains. The air was crisp and smelled of mesquite. Carlos got out of his truck and rode the boom lift thirty feet up to the viaduct. Six lengths of rail had been craned in yesterday, now neatly stacked on a set of four-by-fours. A final course of rebar had been laid lattice fashion on top of the first pour, and Carlos worked his way through the iron grid to check the ties that secured each rod.

July 2022
Featured image for “All That is Under the Sun”
Joaquin Bernal

All That is Under the Sun

“Mr Seixas, as you are well aware, you are charged on an indictment containing nine counts. These charges allege you are everything from a brutal slaver to a terrorist. What do you say in your defence?” The accused did not stir and in his sunken eyes caressed by the deep unflinching creases in his darkened skin, one could see the dying flames wrought within him…

July 2022
Featured image for “Tempestad”
Miguel Guerrero Becerra

Tempestad

The first time I took someone’s life I did so with a whisper.
I was just a child back then. Mamma owned a small pocket-size revolver that she had bought at a discount from a gypsy who was passing through one rainy afternoon, but I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it; therefore, all I had at my disposal to rid the world from the man who had tormented me to the very core of my bones…

May 2022
Featured image for “The Healer’s Stone”
Mary Paliescheskey

The Healer’s Stone

Nadia Kowalski snuggles closer to her husband, Josef, wrapping the wool blanket tight around them as her breath fogs the cold air. Traveling with all their possessions piled high on their cart has gotten harder as fall moves to winter, but now that a few months have passed with no pursuit from the authorities, they can use the better roads. Nadia watches the mules pull them through the puddles left by the rain. The slow movement and rhythmic clanking of the pots and pans lulls her to sleep.

May 2022
Featured image for “The Price of Sunshine: “Returning””
Susan Wan Dolling

The Price of Sunshine: “Returning”

In 1990, I was invited to participate in a delegation of “U.S. writers and publishers” to visit China. Ever since I left Hong Kong all those years ago, I have often felt half in and half out of every place I have lived, not entirely belonging anywhere. On this trip, my role was particularly tricky, as the Chinese treated me as one of the visiting Americans, while the Americans saw me as Chinese.

April 2022
Featured image for “City of Colour”
C. H. Weihmann

City of Colour

Standing centre stage, I look out at the faces of farmers with straw-coloured hair and bland bovine eyes, eyes that have never seen the ocean. Only the yellow wheat fields that stretch horizon-wide and whispering. That’s the closest thing they have: the dry, dull wheat fields pretending at ocean depth, and the vast, unending sky. There is no underwater here. There is no freedom. There is no escape.

April 2022
Featured image for “Sheila On Earth: What Happened”
Dan Yonah Johnson

Sheila On Earth: What Happened

Welsh Cemetery, Radnor Ohio, Thursday, May 7, 1970
It was a bad week in Ohio. First, there was the massacre at Kent State. And then another local boy came home dead from ‘Nam. It was too much. It was now very difficult for fifteen-year-old Sheila Lloyd and Julia Watkins to remember their happier grade-school days…when they would get in trouble together for silly pranks along with their buddy Jake Jones—younger brother of the dead soldier.

March 2022
Featured image for “In Their Ruin: Inquisitor”
Joyce Goldenstern

In Their Ruin: Inquisitor

The first evil thing that Samuel Stone remembered doing in his life happened when he was nine years old. He burned a martyr at the stake.
Of Gladys’s three sons, Samuel was the one who listened most intently to Gladys’s stories and asked the most questions. He was a practical child who carefully counted his allowance coins, but also a child who appreciated metaphors.

March 2022
Featured image for “The Year Coffee Was Illegal: Bad Brew”
Susan Hudson

The Year Coffee Was Illegal: Bad Brew

June 1992
Scottsdale, Arizona
“So glad you could make it, Bill.” Al Church greeted his old friend, Surgeon General Dr. Bill Johnston.
“Well, under the circumstances, I think it’s better that I come to see you than the other way around. Can’t be too careful in D.C.”
“True. We both have enemies there.”

March 2022
Featured image for “Her Own Devices: Chapter 9”
Geoffrey Dutton

Her Own Devices: Chapter 9

For fifteen minutes Anna sat on the concrete wall, fingers interlocked, rhythmically rubbing her thumbs, until the curly headed man emerged onto the taverna’s patio. He was as thin as she had remembered, but taller, with that stooped bearing tall men fall into from peering down at the world. After briefly stabbing and stroking his phone, he put it in a back pocket, glanced in her direction, and sauntered down the sidewalk. Sensing he still hadn’t recognized her emboldened Anna to get up and warily trail after him.

March 2022
Featured image for “Indigo Lace”
Noelle Nori

Indigo Lace

The rest of March was not kind. The wind screamed off the harbor and whipped Nell’s hair from under its pinned hat as she walked to work each day. It seemed an endless series of gray days. She wrote to Mrs. Reilly, but with each day that passed without a reply, her hopes of a response grew dimmer.

February 2022
Featured image for “The Hunter Was Late for the Circus”
Orleans Saltos

The Hunter Was Late for the Circus

The Hunter avoided public venues, well-traveled roads, and any place where officers might be present. He didn’t want any more incarcerations, DNA tests, or looks of disgust from self-entitled bureaucrats. Running into anyone who would detain him, even if only temporarily, would delay his intended mission. His immediate goal was to track down the circus that had recently entertained the residents of a small Peacelands town near the border.

February 2022
Featured image for “Out Stealing Water”
Roxanne Doty

Out Stealing Water

A dozen empty paint buckets rattle in the truck bed as Emily and her two uncles, Dwight and Jay, head west on Van Buren to the ragged edges of downtown Phoenix. Dwight drives, and Jay dangles his arm out the passenger window, his palm spread wide to catch the wind, his feet tapping on the floorboard.

February 2022
Featured image for “Blood Harmony”
MoAde M. J.

Blood Harmony

Under low light, Zilla’s fingerpads brushed the floor feeling for that telltale groove. When she found it, she took hold firmly and cracked the floorboard away. It had been done many times. It would look the same after.
Here, in a shallow dug hole underneath the cabin floorboards, the wooden box came delicately as if it were made of the dirt around it, as if it crumbled.

February 2022