FEATURED | ESSAY
Childhood’s End: 10 Assumptions for a Secular Humanist Life
by Gene Wilburn
As a secular humanist with no religious inclinations, I frequently ask myself: where do I fit in with the cosmos? What are my bedrock, fundamental assumptions? As a freshly minted 75-year-old, I’ve come up with the 10 following assumptions that have guided my journey through life.
FEATURED | CREATIVE NONFICTION
Diamonds in the Light
by Eddie P. Gomez
Florence, Italy • Summer 2013
Somewhere over Spain, I’m sitting between two fascinating young people on a plane ride home from Italy. I'd call them kids, but they’re both adults living in the real world. The three of us struck up a conversation spontaneously as soon as the plane taxied toward the runway. We were laughing comfortably within minutes of meeting each other, sharing quick versions of our personal stories in that uninhibited way strangers do when they know they’ll never see each other again.
Boogaloo Too
by Matthew James Babcock
In the high school cafeteria, I body-locked and sugar-popped to the gap Band’s “Party Train,” whipping up a whooping hullabaloo…
Robert J. Sawyer
Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer Shares His Process and Writerly Wisdom Interviewed by Gene Wilburn
“…the tiny, character-driven bits,
the quieter scenes, the epiphanies,
are often what the reader remembers most;
they’re the heart and soul of your writing…”
—Robert J. Sawyer
Creative Catalyst:
NaNoWriMo founder
Chris Baty talks to SPM
...the impulse to create...waits, patiently, for us to find a way back...For me, it was through NaNoWriMo. However you get back there, it just feels pretty incredible when you arrive.
—Chris Baty
A Wee Bit Supernatural:
Scottish Novelist Regi Claire
Interviewed by Ann Cefola
I tend not to analyze my work because I am a bit superstitious: too much awareness might interfere with my imagination, kill it stone-dead.
—Regi Claire
FEATURED | FICTION
Chesterton
by Timothy Boudreau
Chesterton was my aunt Lucy’s gentleman friend. “Well, Nicky, I just call him my gentleman friend”—that’s what she used to say to me, with a certain special emphasis that made him sound like a rare creature imported from old-world Europe, the kind of person you might order from the same catalog where you ordered a porcelain English tea set, or a tin of butter cookies baked in Denmark or Holland.
—SIX SMALL POEMS—
After Alexej Jawlensky
by Karen Holden
Young Girl, 1915 by Karen Holden There are eyes upside down behind my mouth, another brow beneath my chin. We are all like this: who we are painted over who we were Speech silenced, dead to smell they could not take away our eyes those reflecting pools in our faces: dark mud, red blood, blue sky Or those curtained, but open still, inside
FIVE POEMS
by June Kino Cullen NEW
I Can Say Now That Things
Are Not What They Seem
by Marie Kane
Permission
by Marie Kane
