Shari Lane’s novel, Two Over Easy All Day Long (Golden Antelope Press), came out in May, 2024. Her stories have been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Evening Street Review, Antithesis (forthcoming), Cape Magazine, and others literary journals. Jaysus, MooMoo, and the Immortal Woos, another novel, was longlisted in the 2024 international Stockholm Writers Festival First […]
Continue reading… "Meet the Editors"I was hunting deer with my dad through the woods of my youth when he asked me if I was writing anything lately. We were sitting for a while on the side of a ridge, overlooking a gully of ferns. Somewhere in the bottom a creek burbled.
“Not really,” I said.
Since before I was an adult, I have been writing. I went to graduate school for it. I was a journalist. I published essays and poems. I became a teacher of writing. Then I mostly quit.
Continue reading… "Bramble & Din"Came to sit with us at the Thursday afternoon wine tasting on the patio in the small town where we live in the PNW. Little buildings with white shutters and red doors, and right in back of that… the sea. It’s a Melville novel kind of place that might make you feel special at first glance or on your first couple of visits. Shops with sea glass and beachy type art made of driftwood and seashells and the kinds of things you think you’ll want in Waltham, Massachusetts, but you’ll schlepp it all home on the plane and realize you don’t want it and it was just the ambiance that wowed you. The promise of living by the sea in a faraway place on an island accessible only by ferry, and where – you think to yourself – things will be kinder and easier. You think that, but you’ll turn out to be wrong. It’s a very white people place with practical REI sandals and no makeup and cargo shorts and windbreakers, where you say hello to people on the street and they look away and zip up their parkas.
Continue reading… "The Beautiful Pilot"I think of lilies, flowers of the earth,
still fragrant, winsome,
each sight a bead in the chain of my belief,
though often times I toil
and spin and ponder, prune,
prevaricate in want and greed and guilt.
In rough gravel
beneath a maple drape
beside a chance thistle
between the fallen
cones of pine
an orange poppy
its stem so fragile
barely wider
than a thread
drowses, sways.
We’re spooled to unwind, like fishing line,
eager for a bite, the whirl of thread on spindle
rattling, measuring the length of life.
We race past the market’s crowd,
delighted in its hustle, though what we need
is a calm moment, to find a better stance.
In the predawn darkness, dreams still swirling in my mind, all the world quiet except, perhaps, for a lone owl calling from the rain-soaked greenwood, I get up to write.
Continue reading… "Muse"When I embarked on writing about threats to the Salish Sea off the northwest coast of Washington state, I read at least as much as I wrote. One author I studied hungrily was Rachel Carson—marine scientist, writer, and editor. Perhaps best known for Silent Spring (1962), she also wrote two earlier books about the ocean. The first one, Under the Sea-Wind (1941) is an account of the interactions of a sea bird (a sanderling), a mackerel, and an eel off the Atlantic coast. The Sea Around Us (1951), serves as a biography of the sea and is noted for both its science and its poetic prose.
Continue reading… "A Posthumous Conversation with Rachel Carson"It was way past lunch time.
The husband pulled everyone
to the hospital cafeteria.“Cheap. Fast.”
“No!” stated the daughter.
So they went to a dim restaurant
and drank pomegranate martinis,
perhaps in celebration,
perhaps, despair.
When we stop for gas in Bakersfield
I order a biscuit with sugar
but really, it’s a donut. Once a year
I allow myself this treat
and while it’s not the same as dancing,
I can recycle memories of youth
there amidst the glass case of crullers.
