By Cheryl Moore I had been looking forward to the beginning of 2021; 2020 had been such a sad year, then January 6th happened. Chaos and uncertainty filled me. Since the trouble at the nation’s capital, I’ve made an abrupt change in my paintings. Instead of the landscapes and fanciful trees from a nearby park, my usual work, I’ve been painting abstracts to capture the oddity life has taken. I start by drawing straight lines across a canvas then I add curves. I step back and study these charcoal marks and try to find some pattern, some way of organizing the geometric spaces I have created. It may take a day of looking. My color palette is usually blue, blue-violet, and purple with accents of peachy orange and pink. The contrast of light and dark pattern is important. I am not interested in making great art; I don’t expect to…
A Painter’s Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life
A Painter’s Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life, by Christine Walker is one of my all-time favorite books. But don’t just take my word on it. Here are what other readers think. ***** The parallels between lessons in the garden, the studio, and life in A Painter’s Garden ring true. Christine Walker’s writing is intelligent, evocative, elegant, and articulate. She addresses universal truths about the creative process in an accessible and fresh way. And she renders very complex emotions in beautifully simple terms—weaving her experience of motherhood into an examination of her working methods in the studio, “feeling a cadence as measured as the breathing of a sleeping child.” —Eleanor Coppola is an American documentary filmmaker, artist and writer. She is the director of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse and other documentaries. Eleanor is the writer and director of the romantic comedies Paris Can Wait and Love is Love is…
An Appropriate House
By Kristin Cikowski I suppose that if you are going to have a house, it should be a small enough house so that you can hear everyone at the same time. This is why I love my house My bedroom sits just across the hall from the kitchen, which, at night, is a passageway for the light that comes from the lamp that sits on the table next to my dad’s arm chair in the family room. The family room is where the TV is located, and is not to be confused with the living room, which does not have a TV, and instead, has the teapot with the crane that is flying over the blue water and creamer that goes with it. They sit next to the wooden fisherman with his delicate fishing pole and line, and the sofas that we cannot jump on even though they have an…
Sycamore Review
Sycamore Review is Purdue University’s internationally acclaimed literary journal, affiliated with Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts and the Department of English. Sycamore Review is looking for original poetry, fiction, non-fiction and art. POETRY manuscripts should be typed single-spaced, one poem to a page, up to five poems. FICTION & NONFICTION should be typed double-spaced, with numbered pages and the author’s name and title of the work easily visible on each page. There is not have a specific word count limit, suggest less than 6,000 words. NONFICTION should be literary memoir or creative personal essay, interested in originality, brevity, significance, strong dialogue, and vivid detail. There is no maximum page count, the longer the piece is, the more compelling each page must be. ART Sycamore Review is currently seeking artists for both the magazine’s cover and features artwork inside the issue. Interested artists should follow the instructions under the Art category on Submittable. You may attach 10-15 images or simply…
Healing. Prompt #565
Write about a time you experienced a healing—physically, spiritually, or emotionally. Or, if you are in the process of pursuing healing . . . write about what you are doing. Or, what healing methods do you want to pursue? Let me count the ways . . . Aromatherapy, autogenic relaxation, art, biofeedback, deep breathing, exercise, Feldenkrais, guided imagery, hydrotherapy massage, meditation, music, prayer, progressive muscle relaxation, qi gong, tai chi, tapping, visualization, yoga. There are a number of resources listed in The Write Spot: Writing as a Path to Healing, especially ideas about how to write about difficult events without adding trauma. Available at Amazon, print ($15) and ebook ($3.49).
Student’s Epiphany In a Pandemic Year
By Luci Hagen Finding triumphs through tribulations in the past school year: When I began this project, I found it nearly impossible to try and describe in 650 words how drastically COVID has affected every part of my life. I hope that by focusing on the unique positives these unprecedented circumstances have presented for young folks like me, rather than the obvious negatives, I can help the community understand our perspective just a little bit more. At the beginning of quarantine and as distance learning first began, I was already struggling to keep up in school. I was at a loss for motivation to do anything, and any semblance of order in my life was out the window. The only constant in my schedule was that every night in the first few months, starting at 11 pm until around two or three am, I would practice writing on my computer….
A place you have visited. Prompt #564
Sit back. Get comfortable and relaxed in your chair. Think about a place you have visited. It doesn’t matter where. It could be the downtown area in your city. It could be the city where you were born. Could be a vacation. Take a few minutes to scroll through your mind and choose a place you have visited. Let your mind drift back to your visit or time you spent at this location. If you are working on fiction, how would one of your characters respond to the prompts below. Prompt #1: What is the first picture, or scene, that appears? Prompt #2: I can still hear . . . Prompt #3: I can smell . . . Prompt #4: This place is important to me because . . . Prompt #5: I wish I could . . .
Increscent Moon
Increscent Moon By Su Shafer Starless, Starless Night I gaze up, surprised to see The moon looking down Not at me, she is watching Something far over the horizon, Her face radiant with golden pleasure. Maybe she is looking at tomorrow, The baby day, still pink and new, Gently urging it forward as it crawls along dragging its giant blanket of light behind it. Her smile is serene and comforts me, Standing alone in the night, The quiet space between today and tomorrow. I feel oddly hopeful as I go back inside. If the moon is beaming, Tomorrow must be a better day. Su Shafer is a creative writer and fledgling poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest, where flannel shirts are acceptable as formal wear and strong coffee is a way of life. There, in a small Baba Yaga house perched near the entrance to The Hidden Forest, odd characters are…
I think I’ll stay . . .
By Amie Windsor A girlfriend and I recently fell in love with a song titled, “Golden G String.” “I legit never thought I could fall in love with a song called that, but I totally have,” she texted me. I knew exactly what she meant. The title of the Miley Cyrus track makes me want to cringe. But that’s kind of the beauty of it, because Cyrus’ lyrics are all about understanding femininity and how to harness our female power amid a world dominated by men. Read a few of the lyrics: “Yes, I’ve worn the golden G-string Put my hand into hellfireI did it all to make you love me and to feel alive Oh, that’s just the world that we’re livin’ inThe old boys hold all the cards and they ain’t playin’ ginYou dare to call me crazy, have you looked around this place?I should walk awayOh, I should walk…
Just Write
By Ken Delpit “Just write.” It sounds so simple. It seems so wrong, and yet is so right. Planning and preconception have their places, certainly. But it really is OK, and better, to just write. Leave behind the pressures, the impediments, the anxieties. Put aside your doubts, your fears, your insecurities. Just write. Let it go. Let it flow. Write without knowing what comes next. Let yourself be surprised by yourself. Don’t peek beyond the current thought. Deal with the moments in front of you, around you, within you. Don’t make it happen. Let it happen. Just write. It sounds so easy. And it can be. When the shackles are discarded, one’s pace can go from stumbling to walking, and from walking to running. The bottleneck can move from its usual place, the mind, to the fingers, which are suddenly unable to keep up. But “Just write” as a guiding…