• Fiction - History

    To Save a Country, a Culture,
    a World : Steven Galloway’s
    “The Cellist of Sarajevo”

    Is it possible to kill a city, just wipe out its entire identity and reason for existence, to so decimate its population and dampen its spirit that its surviving inhabitants no longer know who they are, whom to trust and what they care about—or whether they care about anything at all? To render it, through relentless bombardment, disrupted supplies of food, water and electricity, and concentrated but unpredictable sniper fire from the hills high above, a mere ghost of its once living self, starved of the essential human nutrients of care, security, and community that make a city not just…

  • Music

    Brilliant Cover Songs #1: Josh Turner & Carson McKee’s “Under the Boardwalk”

    Borrowed a friend’s car last week and the Sirius radio channel was on a classic rock station. I liked classic rock plenty back when it wasn’t classic yet, and can still feel that warm pulsing of nostalgia when a Millennial or Gen X wedding DJ finally sees fit to placate the Grayhairs in attendance by playing something dance-able from that era. (I make a habit of imploring them to play Motown; they always nod agreeably but then don’t…) So I listened along a while as the heavily algorithmed playlist churned out standard ’60s-’70s fare from the likes of the Bee…

  • Poetry by Andrew Hidas

    “Mommy!” A Poetic Homage to the Most Important Person in the Emergency Room

                         “MOMMY!”                By Andrew Hidas The tiniest shortfall of a tiny hand, merrily reaching for safety poolside— and missing. Fateful collision of lip and cement, the gash gushing precious blood staining red the waterwings designed to forestall catastrophe. Flurry of activity, lifeguards rushing, the ice they bring serving as balm for body and soul, halfway to the ER his babble already resuming the incessant joyful grrrrr of trucks and dinosaurs. Five hours later, exhausted and asleep on his mother’s chest, darkness abiding, the team…

  • Poetry

    Letting the Turmoil Be: Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things”

    The world will be what it will be for human beings—never static, always a hot churning mixture of hope and despair, beauty and carnage, good works and evil deeds. Some eras, though, seem perched on a particularly thin knife’s edge, the odds of falling into a hellish pit rather than a featherbed being higher than normal. Signs seem pretty strong we are in such an era today. Given the deep and angry divisions currently confronting not only our country but the larger world,, we’d be fools not to worry for its future. We’d also, of course, be fools to worry…