By Rochelle Spencer
“As African Americans, when we play, we play hard,” says Johnnie Davis, Director of Serenity House, a program that provides services for women who have been raped or molested, and experience homelessness, and/or mental health or emotional issues, tells me inside Serenity House’s ocean-colored walls.
By Marilyn McCabe
I took a class to learn how to meditate. It didn’t go well. At least I didn’t keep falling asleep, like one guy did. I was always thinking about food. (This kind of stuff seems to have that effect on me — I took a yoga class some years ago, and all I could think about was: Is this over soon so I can go have a beer? And I don’t even really drink beer.)
By Shilpi Suneja
Two days after Srinivas Kuchibhotlas was shot dead at a bar in Kansas, his wife Sunayana Dumala spoke at a press conference about her concern for staying on in America. “I often asked my husband,” she revealed, her voice breaking, “are we doing the right thing (by) staying.” Sunayana’s fears hint at the awkward moral burden immigrants from the Indian subcontinent place upon themselves.
By Jill Johnson
Sorting through files in my parent’s office after they’d moved into assisted living, I found an old newspaper clipping–an editorial Mom had written. I paused at her bio: activist, teacher, homemaker. The description evoked a woman with defined lines, neat and contained.
By Lisa McKenzie
I was sitting with my husband outside an ice cream shop on the east side of Cincinnati, watching our son caper around a park with his buddies from Shakespeare Camp, when my husband observed, “I don’t feel white here.”
My husband is white. Half white. He is also half Chinese.
By Jessie L. Benjamin
Meditation creates the space, writing fills the void. I’m called to both.
For twenty years, my daily sitting meditation practice has nourished me. It’s essential, like oxygen keeping me sane and, hopefully, kinder and more compassionate.
By Kevin Holton
A book of poetry, more than a book in any other genre, has the unique power to switch from topic to topic, spanning continents and eons if the writer wishes, to capture a wide array of experiences. Skin Music, by Dennis Hinrichsen, does this well.
By Richard Cambridge
How to chart the landscape of desire? A pencil is a good start, a draft, a poem. But soon you’ll be dipping a pen in blood, your own blood, and the blood of your ancestors and your enemies. You’ll have crossed the border and entered the landscape. You’ll need something stronger than poems. You will need to make spells.
By Elaine Fletcher Chapman
The year my mother died, I claimed a desk for myself in the family room. I placed my notebook and the books that were my touchstones at the time on the desk. I bought a beautiful fountain pen from pennies saved, ink made from roses.
By Lyndsey Ellis
Like many people, I’m still in post-election recovery mode. I’m shocked, confused, angry, sad, numb, yet somehow relieved that one of the vilest presidential campaigns in U.S. history is finally over.
By Joyce Peseroff
Reviewer—Joyce Peseroff ASK ANYONE by Ruth Lepson, Pressed Wafer, 2016, 68pp., $12.50 Managing Editor’s Note: Some reviews of poetry collections are not only insightful, but a pleasure to read. Reviewing poetry is a challenging task, given the art form’s sometimes slippery use of language and the subjective quality of interpretation. Peseroff manages it beautifully.… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
he powerful grassroots movement, #BlackLivesMatter, is sometimes countered with the slogan “all lives matter.” Well, of course they do. That’s the point of #BlackLivesMatter—to demand we acknowledge the importance of lives, Black lives, too often treated as if they mattered not at all, with tragic results.
By Eileen O'Connor
Canadian author Kelly Oxford’s tweet from the evening of October 7 was brave. Her call to women, “tweet me your first assaults,” was significant. It was the right tweet at the right time. By the next evening, Oxford was receiving up to fifty responses per minute. Millions of stories have since been shared at #notokay, and many of these tweets represent the first time someone has shared her story. Many note that, like me, they kept quiet for so long because of shame. It took me fourteen years.
By Rebecca Hart Olander
Wendy Mnookin’s fifth collection, Dinner with Emerson, is organized according to the four seasons. It begins with spring and runs through the year, followed by a fifth section, “Another Spring,” that features poems in a season that stretch beyond “Winter.” There is a sense of the ongoing about these poems, that life marches on, that we learn to turn the page, and that despite whatever we are slogging through, there will be another season.
By J.A. Grier
You know a writer with mental illness, even if you don’t realize it or know that person by name. Maybe the writer is a friend, or someone in your critique group, or someone you met at a writer’s convention. Maybe it’s someone you are working with on a publication.
Or maybe that writer is you.
By Jennifer Jean
This past May, I drove Professor Gwendolyn Rosemond home after she attended one of the bi-annual artist retreats I co-direct with my husband—we traveled along scenic route 127, from Gloucester at the tip of Cape Ann in Massachusetts, to Salem which is further South, at the Northshore’s midpoint. We drove for about forty five minutes and in that span we solved both the adjunct problem and the diversity problem at universities. Well, we solved a key portion of these problems. “Grow your own!” Gwen said. And, she was absolutely right.
By Amy Grier
Hello! You have, for the first time, the tenth, or the hundredth, happened upon SolsticeLitBlog. We are the official blog of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. Welcome!
By Rebecca Hart Olander
Last spring’s release of Martha Collins’s Admit One: An American Scrapbook, is the third in a series that includes the volumes Blue Front and White Papers. The trilogy as a whole wrestles with race and racism in America from the perspective of a white woman and the history of family and country that precedes and includes her. In her work overall, Collins goes past the paralyzing silence of white guilt and into the active language of implication.
By Lee Hope
I was honored to interview the internationally known photographer, Lou Jones. Lou also quietly serves on many boards to further photography and mentors multiple young photographers. He is an artist who gives back, in his art and in his service.
By Amy Yelin
Bookfox, a literary blog run by John Matthew Fox, included Solstice in his annual list of Literary Non-Fiction Markets! Thanks for including us, John!
By Lee Hope
Solstice editor-in-chief, Lee Hope, was interviewed on The Jordan Rich Show about her novel, Horsefever. You can hear the full interview here. Also, Horsefever has been listed as the Small Press Distribution #2 fiction bestseller in Jan/Feb. Due out on March 16th, you can order Horsefever today at Amazon and Barnes & Noble! LIKE: https://www.facebook.com/Lee-Hope-507320366097313/ • MORE INFO: leehopeauthor.com
By Richard Hoffman
Due out on March 16th, you can order Horsefever today at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Like Lee Hope on Facebook. • MORE INFO: leehopeauthor.com Who Sinks? Who Rises Up Again? An Interview with Lee Hope (originally published at Fiction Writers Review) I have been an admirer of Lee Hope’s fiction for many years. Her widely published short stories are… Read more »
By Lee Hope
The reading period for our Annual Literary Contest opens this Saturday (Feb 20th), and we couldn’t be more excited about this year’s judges! Richard Blanco will be the judge for the Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, Celeste Ng will be the judge for our Fiction Prize, and Michael Steinberg will be the judge for our… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
Skin Music by Dennis Hinrichsen Winner of the 2014 Michael Weaver Poetry Prize Southern Indiana Review Press, 2015 74 pp., $14.95 One of the great pleasures of Dennis Hinrichsen’s award winning poetry collection, Skin Music, is watching the poet consider large questions and concepts while paying careful attention to the specific details of… Read more »
By Lee Hope
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the… Read more »
By Danielle Legros Georges
Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music. She is the author of the poetry volumes I Went Looking for You (BlazeVOX, 2009), Morphology with photographer Rusty Crump (BlazeVOX, 2008), Dreaming in Color (Alice James Books, 1980), and editor of Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (University of Illinois Press, 2004). A… Read more »
By Mary Buchinger
Irene Koronas is a multi-media artist, painter, poet and editor of Wilderness House Literary Review. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, self portrait drawn from many (Ibbettson Street Press, 2007), Pentakomo Cyprus (Cervena Barva Press, 2009), turtle grass (Muddy River Books, 2014) and many chapbooks. Her visual art has been shown in… Read more »
By Danielle Legros Georges
Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, librettist, and a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts MFA in Creative Writing. He is the author of three volumes of poetry, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014), The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), Fear, Some (Red Hen Press, 2006) and several chapbooks. He was interviewed by Danielle… Read more »
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