M. Leary

Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003)

(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Matthew’s House Project.) Bob: Can you keep a secret? I’m trying to organize a prison break. We have to first get out of this bar, then the city, and then the country. Are you in or you out?  Charlotte: I’m in. One of the first shots in Sophia Coppola’s […]

Dan Jacobson

Painted Houses

I painted houses this summer. They belonged to one of my church’s deacons, and were not actually houses, but rotten cabins, with wooden siding that should have been replaced, not painted. They were once part of a camp for boy scouts, and were the only structures remaining. My Dad always told me to do a […]

Seth Rash

I Love Your Leather

I remember the first time I heard the f-word. Bass Hilton had said it in reference to something I had allegedly done. I was riding my bike around the neighborhood, dodging tree roots and cracks in the sidewalks when I noticed him. He had dark brown hair, dull brown eyes, and a gap between his […]

Philip Hussong

Real Writers (to be read at a violent pace)

Real writers don’t write in coffee shops, scrawling with pencils, drinking iced tea with lemon, while pirating styles and imagination from Pulitzer-prize-getting-fiction writers. They don’t steal characters straight out of reality by leering at every new java shop patron and then tracing their physicality with the words they substitute for line…Do they? Say a designer […]

Jon Stanley

Steelhead

Among fly-fisherman, that rare breed that fish for steelhead are thought to be a little mad. And if asked why they travel to the river in the coldest months of the year in search of the most elusive and tight lipped fish, a true steelhead fisherman would just grin and say, “exactly”. They are known […]