Last month, a Zanzibari teenage girl jumped from the second floor of her school building to her death. It happened on a Thursday in the Hurumzi neighbourhood of Stone Town, Zanzibar. Some say she was the victim of mashetani — spirits – who had descended upon the school building, sparking mass hysteria on Tuesday and Wednesday, [...]

Dusty Lee is fixated on the lawn, her head tilting and untilting, gun metal ears receiving sounds her eyes and nose can’t quite track down. It is barely night, so the light is artificial in our front yard and the blades lie between green and gleam. I stoop beside her and listen. There is a [...]

It’s the season of planting, and “Need Somebody to Love,” by our Spring 2012 featured poet, Ronda Broatch, begins under the skin: I’ve picked each fruit under strawberry leaves planted my Queen of the Night and now this sliver of bark won’t budge for love, nor money, nor squeeze of tweezers, like the stinger left [...]

London’s Alternatives is the city’s most popular venue for New Age workshops, teaching classes in areas surrounding spirituality, creativity, wellbeing and self-development. “All our events”, their website boasts, “are offered in the spirit of love, joy and service.” With that in mind, I chose “Master the Law of Attraction” as my first dip of the [...]

About ten years ago, during the keynote lunch at the San Diego State Writers’ Conference, we were supposed to sit at the table whose center placard best described what we wrote. The choices were Memoir, Sci-Fi, Thrillers, Mysteries, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women’s Fiction, and more. But not Men’s Fiction. I didn’t know whether to sit at [...]

It was with nervous anticipation that I first approached London’s Spiritualist Mission on that cold Wednesday evening. Perhaps I might receive a message from beyond? The church, built in 1912, was beautiful and warm. Music played softly. I relaxed. It’s not often one hears show-tunes in church. It was a decent sized crowd for a [...]

It’s been 70 years since Henry Miller wrote his scathing critique of American life, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. After more than a decade in Paris, Miller returned home to the United States and traveled across the American south towards California. He was largely appalled by what he saw. But you could argue that Miller’s life as an [...]

Sometime around 1998, when I was making my first tentative steps toward writing fiction, I began mentally formulating a novel named Sense of Place. The story was set on the northwest side of Chicago, around the intersection of Belmont Avenue and Elston Avenue, just west of the Chicago River. I lived just east of the [...]

The Religious Society of Friends (RSOF), aka “Quakers,” was founded in England in 1652. Though there are still about 300,000 Quakers in the world today, when I mention the religion in polite company I often get puzzled looks, “Quakers? Aren’t they mythical, like fairies?” and “How do they get by without using electricity or driving [...]

I first learned about Adrienne Rich, who died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, CA, at the age of 82, in college almost 20 years ago. I was 18, and many of my professors adored Rich. They taught entire courses about her, or at least included her poems on their syllabi, and by [...]

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Photo by Crista Cloutier Because I am weird this way, I crashed the Annual Conference of the Church of England Guild of Vergers at the All Saints Pastoral Centre in the English town of London Colnay. The Guild is not a trade union, not a club, nor is it some sort of sect, instead it [...]

“The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response.” – Jhumpa Lahiri, “My Life’s Sentences,” NYT 3.18.12 Perhaps it is presumptuous to agree with the eloquent words [...]