Articles

After my husband’s grandfather dies, I buy our three-year-old daughter “Frida Kahlo’s Frocks & Smocks,” a magnetic dress-up paper doll with clothing and accessories: monkeys and parrots, a paintbrush along with skeleton shirt and pants, onerous scarves and bracelets. Our daughter drapes these accessories in the wrong places: a bracelet on Frida’s head, her monkey gripping the paintbrush and standing by Frida’s easel, which also sports the disembodied head of Diego Rivera.

Green as Ohio’s Tea Hills, named for sassafras, a root boiled and steeped for tea; green as panes of window glass on end, green as deep basins of river water that slow but do not stop, green as shamrocks and great good fortune, green as fiddleheads, fields and falls, green, like the fuse that burns beneath the dun watercolor stain of winter.

If there was something to mention in the first sentence, to set a scene, it would be the backstreets: how they shaped the rows of houses, their geometry performed in straight lines as if you could cut them with scissors and collage them into another map. You could make a different city.

When I hear marriage mentioned, the muscle around or the muscle that is my heart stiffens. I meet couples engaged to marry, newly wed or newly coupled, and think how slender the chance for their success. I am inflexible toward remarriage, cannot think why I would ever marry again. Once upon a time I was married, then winter arrived and I moved across town, back to base level in a downstairs apartment alone, looking for the nearest grocery store, watching the weather, hoping to be surprised by how the story unfolded.

I’ve finished my shopping at the farmers’ market. My bags are filled with carrots and cucumbers, eggs and tortillas. At my last stop, the boy handed me my change for the olives and hummus, then presented me with a gift, a napkin heavy with baklava. “A sweet for the sweet,” he said, assuming his uncle’s broad stance. The baklava was my excuse to find a bench, but I’ve already eaten the whole piece and scraped its syrup from my napkin. I’m still here, sitting and savoring the market. It’s Friday evening, and this is the most beautiful spot in Los Angeles.

We were the art girls. We had charcoal under our fingernails, flecks of dried clay on our jeans, acrylic paint in our hair. The artsy seniors always lived on the second floor of McAllister Hall; it was tradition. Although our boarding school, Florence Summer Academy for Girls, was beautiful—the dorms looked like magnificent stone castles—McAllister Hall was so run-down inside that they let whoever lived on the second floor paint the walls of their rooms.

Ringing the doorbell, he arrived on a rainy night four months ago. I knew immediately who he was, for he had made a name for himself publishing scholarly papers in his country. Then he had been ejected from his land, as they all had been, and now here he was, on my doorstep.

Photographer David Scherrer arrived in the Northwest from the east coast in the early 1970’s. Drawn initially by Huxley College’s Environmental Studies program (at Western Washington University), he soon realized the potential for the integration of media production and environmental education, two areas of study he was passionate about.

An Interview with Kim Lincoln and Amy Woodward  Jocelyn Marshall, creative nonfiction editor and a Bellingham Roller Betty, continues our interest in collaborative artwork by interviewing Kim Lincoln and Amy Woodward, two local artists who specialize in photographing roller derby. Here, they discuss their collaborative process and their development as artists.   Jocelyn Marshall, Bellingham Review: …

An interview with Katrina Hays and Steven McBurnett Just as a topographical map offers contour lines and shading to convey the land’s relief, the alliance of poet Katrina Hays and photographer Steven McBurnett conjures the experience of place. Their independent creations of word and image respond to a single physical location, but then come together …