Category: Wind & Root

  • Country Craft: Sometimes they die. Sometimes they come back again.

    By Stuart Phillips Two years ago, as the leaves on the sumacs began to blaze and my morning walks began calling for a sweatshirt, I dug up the dozen Chinese peonies from the shaded front of my house. They were easily ten years old, so it was a task, even with soft dirt full of…

  • Artful Academics: About Time

    By Brandy Renee McCann I found myself on the front porch of my mom’s house, watching her do laundry in a wringer washer circa 1993. We had rusty water from a bad well. So as not to stain our clothes, my mom caught rainwater in great big barrels and heated it on the stove top,…

  • My Mother, My Father, My Pen

    By Sacha Bissonnette I’m one of those writers who needs to nail down a title before moving forward with a piece. I know that there are many better writers out there who have left their masterpieces untitled until they’ve penned the last sentence. It’s a mental thing, a hang up thing, but without a title,…

  • Parental Reckonings: The Ephemera Nest

    By Amy Barnes “things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time” There’s something poetic to my writer self in the idea of ephemera. Fragile. Temporary. Parenting in a nutshell. A short time to enjoy kids, as kids. A short time of them existing in your house until they drift away…

  • The Pie Was a Final Draft: A Short Ode to Joy

    By Michaella Thornton Charlotte Brontë wrote in Jane Eyre, “I would always rather be happy than dignified.” There’s something particularly moving to me about this line spoken by the somber and thoughtful Jane, a character who wasn’t treated gently or kindly in most of her sad, constricted Victorian life. Even Jane knew “joy is not…

  • Artful Academics: Ghosted

    By Brandy Renee McCann In 7th grade I was in love with a boy named “Jimmy.” I still remember the heat of our kiss in a deserted hallway during a high school basketball game. Given that I was 12 years old, he should have been my first kiss, but he was my 2nd  or maybe…

  • The Pie Was a Final Draft: Geologic Time

    By Michaella Thornton A long time ago I dated a man whose brother described him as “moving in geologic time.” As someone who had majored in anthropology and also studied geology, I was both baffled and amused by this description because humanity is but a blip in the more enduring measures of time. What a…

  • Healthy Habits: Reckoning with Fear

    By Valerie Peralta My troubles melt away in water. Whether swimming laps in a pool, floating on my back in the Gulf of Mexico, or jumping waves in the Atlantic, I am mentally transported, simultaneously at peace and filled with joy. In fact, my love for the water is what drew me to triathlon. Little did I know…

  • Buried Nitrogen: On Sharks and Spanish Daggers—and Publishing a Novel

    By Sandra K. Barnidge Lately I’ve been feeling caught in an undertow. Too many deadlines crashed in at once this spring, while I also juggled the ever-constant code-switching between “writer” and “mother.” The most important of the writerly commitments was revising the novel that’s officially slated for release next June and sending those revisions back…

  • The Pie Was a Final Draft: Holding Up the Mirror

    By Michaella Thornton At the end of May, I traveled to Hermann, Missouri to hang out with three of my closest girlfriends, women I’ve known since I was a teenager. Somehow I’ve kept these friends for almost 30 years. One of us lives near Portland, Maine. The rest of us reside in or near Kansas…