I hate the savanna. That’s somewhat of a strange statement, since the savanna provides me with a very good living, and anyone I know turns green with envy when I tell them that I’m a wildlife cameraman, but for me the savanna has become the place that I’m stuck in. I cannot move ahead, and I cannot get out of it. I just lie down in ambush with my cameras and their huge lenses and get bitten by mosquitos.
Last week I got a contract for documenting the lives of two lion cubs which were born here. They don’t really have names, but the director of the film, who never actually bothers to travel all the way to Africa, calls them Roarago and Roaragi.…
Jendi Reiter, vice president of Winning Writers (named one of the “101 Best Websites for Writers” by Writer’s Digest, 2015-2018), oversees the Winning Writers literary contests. The website, founded in 2001 to help poets and writers, is located in Western Massachusetts. Jendi is also an award-winning author with a new book of short stories, An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press/New Millennium Writings, 2018).
How long did it take to organize the help so many poets and writers depend upon in Winning Writers? What was the spark that started it?
WW is always evolving and refining our features, which include a monthly e-newsletter, four writing awards, and a database of the Best Free Literary Contests.
Few people
understand passion, either their own or that of others. This incomprehension
occurs even between two people who care for each other, indeed, who may care
for each other very much. I did not understand Ariela’s passion when I should
have. Enlightenment came to me on a bus ride from Beersheba to Jerusalem, over
five thousand miles from home, and forty-five years too late to do anything
about it. It arrived as a gestalt does, not changing the details of what is
seen but rather how one sees them.
#
Last
summer I visited my granddaughter who was attending a religious school in the
Old City of Jerusalem. Friday evening we ate at the home of one of her
classmates. During dinner there was the usual conversation, where are you from,
where did you go to school, do you happen to know so-and-so.…
The sirens scream, and I am drowned by Los Angeles memories— a flood of people hunters, prowling rapists, drive-by babies bleeding in cradles, kids hop-scotching Hollywood stars, barbed-wire high schools with penitentiary views, mothers sleeping under overpasses, drinking freeway smog while the night halo rises. I sink down below into the pass, the canyon, the valley, as tumbleweeds snag on marooned car hulls and bonfire piers are whipped by Devil Winds. There is no river here, I remind myself, no reason to fear cavitation, no crossing boatman, only a cemented trickle tattooed by graffiti bridges, turbines stealing snowmelt, pushing it over snared bodies. Only time locks dribbling out showers, dams anchoring drinking fountains. The Queen of the Angels may mourn the Tujunga watershed and Santa Ana sucker, but I fear a storm on the mountain, drowning in a shimmering current backwater that screams my name.…
To me, this is the single greatest fear that every
musician, singer and songwriter must confront over the course of their creative
lives. How should one respond when one’s audience no longer cares, or worse,
when it disappears entirely?
It’s a question I’ve been asking for more
than 20 years. During that time countless artistic empires have risen and
fallen, the music industry has transformed beyond belief and I’ve experienced
my own zenith and nadir as one of the architects of obscure indie-pop outfit
Silent Alliance.
Many claim that the creative process, the
pursuit and fulfilment of artistic vision is the higher calling – a pure,
uncompromising objective for any that wants to lay claim to true authenticity
as a musical creator.…
The gathering of flesh tightly against itself, the beginning of a seam. When I was a child I went for a walk in the woods— the mountain laurel blossoms lit up the bushes like the kitschy lights of a 1970’s Christmas tree. I cut my arm open falling off that old wooden zipline there, the one with the red painted seat and the wooden handlebars, the one that severed the mountains in half. The branches cut my skin to lace. There was not a single binding stitch on my skull after the surgeon mended my brain, threads seal the inside from the out, and instead the surgery was done through my thigh. During a rupture, blood seeps through the mind like ink across a wet page. …
