You know what time is it, right? Time for the burning bowl. Time to let go of what needs loosening, what’s used up, what’s outlasted its usefullness. Time to embrace the new, be aspirational, make a date with the Divine Wow. If you need some help getting started, maybe you can begin with this vid. So long 2014, it was an amazing year!
fundraising has turned into something of an art in the last decade. Along with the art has come plenty of competition. Why wouldn’t you do all you can to get your grant funded? It’s more than just luck, according to the Fundraising Strategist. Yep.
When the world you know spins out of control and you’re the adult in the house and therefore supposed to know what to do and nothing makes sense anymore and by the way love is never easy; then the wife you so love dies before the marriage counseling ends? Yeah, she might have wanted to opt out. But other than that? It’s your ordinary midlife crisis. Dearest literary friend you will want to read this one.
It may be August but it’s still summer and there’s plenty of good vacation reading left to do. Start with Rosecrans Baldwin’s debut novel. It’s a bright shiny star in the firmament of new fiction.
Spring Equinox is on the way, and we’re dedicating a week our delicious deity.
The sap is rising and Persephone is itching to make her escape from the underworld. As a husband, Hades has his faults but he lives in style and there isn’t a reservation that can’t be had as Mrs. Hades. Still, spring beckons. The daffodils are rising, and the bleeding hearts. Asparagus is in season and ewes are lambing. Besides, Hades is hot, but he is no George Stephanopolis. In the end, she reminds the poor old dear that a weekend away at Spa Equinox was part of the deal. Goddess bless separate vacations.
We’re all for diversity, including the natural and supernatural alike. Because sometimes, you know, a girl just feels like a golem, and that’s all there is to it.
“It is New York in 1899, and two strange immigrants have found one another. One is a Jinni, trapped in physical form by an evil wizard in ancient Syria and locked in a bottle for a thousand years. The Jinni is released by a hapless tinsmith as he attempts to repair the bottle in the slums of New York. The Golem is a made to order bride, a woman created of clay and sparked to life with an incantation known only by her creator and by the husband who, minutes after bringing her to life in the hold of the ship bound for New York from Danzig, dies of a burst appendix.
Now we have: two super-humans, lost and made vulnerable by their “otherness.” We also have two strangers longing for connection to something not-human, and yet forced by circumstance to rely on humans and their strange customs. Finally, we have two beings, perhaps the last of their kind, who want more than anything, to live.”
we are pleased to announce that the third Six Sisters novella,
Quality of Light, is now available. So, what are you waiting for?
buy the book::support the arts!
. . .click here to read our love story of the year. xxoo
sometimes valentines are prose. sometimes they’re 80s music videos.
come a little bit closer.
Love. It’s everywhere. Some would even venture to say that if you haven’t found it, you’re not looking.We don’t know if that’s true. We do know that sometimes fictional love is better than no love at all.
Excerpted from “Jesus, Mary, Buddha”
Over warm olives and crusty sourdough, Helen learns that Nick’s third wife parked her Range Rover at the edge of town on the banks of the Snohomish River and washed down a handful of pentobarbital with a bottle of flinty Oregon pinot gris.
It was his first year of mourning and he still hated her and loved her in ways he hadn’t yet explored. “I don’t know how I can do better than that,” he told Helen one night. “I mean fucking look at her.” He gestured toward a framed photo of them on his living room mantle. “She’s gorgeous.”
On Earth Day they up-cycle a pair of antique windows and build a table out of them. Later, they eat salmon with their fingers, straight out of his backyard smoker. After dark, they sit in deck chairs in the garden and watch shooting stars. Eight weeks into their affair, she drives home through the city streets late at night with the windows down, with air warm as a lover’s breath sliding up her arms, through her hair. The rhododendrons are in bloom. The azalea, lavender, chives, strawberries, raspberries, pear, five kinds of apple, chestnuts. Even at 11 pm, there are couples walking, cyclists peddling down the quiet evening streets in thin cotton dresses, short sleeves. It is evident that even in the dark, they are sucking the juice out of the first days of summer, taking shy steps toward the grilling season.Through the car windows, Helen Okabe breathes in the perfume of lilac.
For his birthday she gives Nick an anatomically correct chocolate heart spiced with habanero pepper. He makes his signature clams and beer. Afterward, he builds a fire in the backyard firepit and they recline on deck chairs, watching the sky. He talks about his men’s group, about getting in touch with his feelings.
“I’ve been wondering,” he begins. “What if I’ve been sabotaging relationships my whole life?” Unlike so many middle aged men, Nick is messed up on love and he knows it. To his credit, he is actually trying to unpack that baggage.
Helen sucks an ice cube and lets the water slide down her throat. “I was just wondering that myself,” she says. She has. She has been doing her spiritual inventory and counting up the number of times that, when the going got tough, she got gone. She was up to four. It wasn’t pretty.
“I think I have intimacy issues,” he says.
“Wait,” she replies. “You said you and Reina were simpatico. You were married ten years. You renewed your vows every spring for God sake. That sounds awfully intimate to me.”
“Nah,” Nick waves the idea away. “That was only appearances. I checked out after two years, if I’m honest about it.”
Appearances, her Zen master said, not only fool, you they aren’t even real. Helen still hasn’t wrapped her head around that one.
She offers the only solace she has, something from a piece of research she is working on. “The top five fears of most people are public speaking, followed by flying, heights, fear of the dark, and intimacy.” She counts them off on the fingers of her hand and refrains from adding that following this list, the fears continue with death, failure, rejection, spiders, commitment.
“That can’t be right,” Nick says.
“It’s from a university study,” she replies.
“I would say fear of intimacy is number one,” he continues.
“People are scared to death of intimacy. Just think what it means if you are right.”
“I am right.”
“If you are right, and I’m not saying you are, it means people would rather sleep with strangers than speak in front of a crowd of them.”
“It doesn’t mean that at all.”
“People are more afraid of emotional honesty than talking,” he says. “Look,” he says, pointing to a light moving across the night sky, “a satellite.”
It is a clear spring night and the sky is shy of clouds and the moon is new so they have space to shine. “Anyway. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.”
(c)
Cynthia Gregory
persephone's step-sisters 