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Haircut
by Kathy Fagan ~ The last time I touched my father I cut his coarse gray hair and trimmed his fingernails, grown ragged in lockdown. We were not permitted indoor visits, but I could take him out of the facility for a medical appointment provided I was screened for covid and we wore masks. That…
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Reflection on Writing
by Kathy Fagan ~ Almost nothing is more essential to my practice than asking questions, and, when engaging with issues of mortality and love, there are almost nothing but.
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Mother Tongue
by Ofelia Brooks ~ For weeks after my grandmother’s death, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t miss her, because I didn’t really know her. I didn’t know anything about her interests or passions, or much about her life before she was my grandmother. But I knew what she sounded like. And that’s what I missed.
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Reflection on Writing
by Ofelia Brooks ~ Writing about this topic allowed me to face my fears about mortality head-on.
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Upon Receiving The California Department of Fish and Wildlife Angler Update
by Lynn Mundell ~ Memory is like fishing. Out of the murk it swims, we pull it up, keeping even what’s too small to sustain us. In May the new motor fell into the Pacific and we floated, you and I, waiting to be towed. I carry an image of our catch hooked to the…
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Reflection on Writing
by Lynn Mundell ~ I took a break from creative writing after Dad’s death, but perhaps unsurprisingly when I returned to it he was the only topic for a while. I almost felt like he haunted my attempts at writing.
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Graffiti the Walls
by Matt Barrett ~ I want to graffiti the walls where my grandmother lives, white and sterile walls (egg-shell colored walls, as the nurses say), replace her sanitation lists with photographs, magazine spreads, and paper clippings…
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Reflection on Writing
by Matt Barrett ~ The nights we’d spent at her house, eating chicken tetrazzini and her famous coleslaw, were now a distant memory, and I felt like I needed to say something in a kind of emotional burst that became “Graffiti the Walls.”
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Father’s Day
by Chris Cottom ~ I was ten minutes early but Dad was waiting on the bench in his tiny front garden. ‘I’ve been enjoying the sunshine,’ he said, as if I’d never twigged that his true joy was punctuality. After brushing a non-existent speck from his cavalry twills, he pushed down on his walking-stick to…
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Reflection on Writing
by Chris Cottom ~ When my son asked me what themes recur in my writing, I counted more than a dozen dad stories. And I told him I’d worked on ‘Fathers Day’ for several months before realising I wasn’t writing about my relationship with an imagined, fading father. I wasn’t the son in the story…
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ONE WILD RIDE 