What Remains by Maggie Stetler
“What Remains” by Maggie Stetler — Remembering Virginia Woolf I. As a woman, I guarded my body too, longed for a mother, not a man, married for love and art but not sex. As a child in Pennsylvania, I dodged imaginary Cold-War bombs, pre-divorce barrages. In London, yours, a real war. No matter,...
Virginia Woolf’s Hollyhocks by Deborah Doolittle
“Virginia Woolf’s Hollyhocks” by Deborah Doolittle Country born, they are still the village gossips at the garden pump, watching the neighbor’s cat, the doorman’s dog, the grocer’s delivery boy. Some say there is always something new to look at. It is a commonplace they cannot help repeating: how the days come to them in exaggerated quantity and the hours slide past like slugs and snails. How they don their...
To the Lighthouse by Kim Hamilton
“To the Lighthouse” by Kim Hamilton I saw her lighthouse once, off St. Ives’ shore, a whitewash slip to sunrays sideways glint, a dozen canvases like sails raised on sand— Sunday painters working with the wind. But we ate pilchers from a rolled back tin, salty oils running through our hands like the turn of light, the flash that never will be caught, and never quite repeats. ____________________ Share...
Her Poem, the Oak Tree by Tammi Truax
“Her Poem, the Oak Tree” by Tammi Truax I have carried this poem for centuries. In the end I shall bury it under an oak tree still in the prime of life, assuming life shall attend that symbolic celebration, and that I remember to bring a trowel. Incarnation I The many oak trees in my childhood yard were my playmates. I had no grandfathers, but those big daddies stood sentinel over me daily. I played in their...
What Woolf Dares Us to Write by Lauren Rusk
“What Woolf Dares Us to Write” by Lauren Rusk The Inspiration of Orlando(1) When in her diary Virginia Woolf describes herself as “writing against the current,”(2) she refers to the force of expectations, those of writers and critics—many of them her friends—who belong to the masculine literary establishment. Woolf braved this current because she wanted her work to be valued and widely read. But then if so,...