The Musician
whose violin haunts these rounded hills with a thread of sound? which spins through aspen lays grief in sloughs weaves through bent grass to enter my cabin like a violent sunrise
Read MoreOne of Ours
Sophia Fontaine’s final trip to England didn’t go as planned. Not to put too fine a point on it, the country was not her cup of tea, and it had nothing to do with that disastrous Tosca at Covent Garden in ’99 when she’d tripped over Scarpio’s outstretched leg and fell, face first, onto the stage, breaking her nose. She remembered all too well, while nursing her aching nose and even more severely bruised psyche, how the sun seldom came out from behind rain-soaked clouds. London was always damp and cold — the houses and hotels vastly under heated — and everything was horribly...
Read MoreThe Snare Drum is My Genesis, Part 1
in my beginning is my end before i knew the drums i felt the creek’s funky beat— heard the sublime range harp & Wild West whistle the soundtrack of wood thump wire click & real thunder in my book of music self i could not embrace the parlor piano nor my father’s proficient clarinet. i chose the way of the rebel rancher’s daughter my first drum teacher was my mother who could kick my ass on the snare—rip out whip-crack flams, five-stroke rolls, & ratamacue stagings, not unlike a fearless firm halter snap against the chaos of animal...
Read MoreWild Violet Featured Works: Week of Aug. 19 (Abuse)
Abusive relationships leave behind a complicated tangle of emotions, as this week’s contributors illustrate. In G.S. Payne’s essay, “What I Learned During My Summer at Penn State,” an alumnus ponders how group identity plays into the school’s recent sad saga of abuse and the resulting calls for justice. Telisha Moore Leigg’s fiction piece, “Ghost Story,” explores the conflicting and heartbreaking emotions surrounding a teenage girl’s sexual involvement with her teacher. In Judith Ford’s essay, “Gone,” a...
Read MoreGone
I was going to let my answering machine take the call. It was 10 at night, and I’d been just about to go to bed. The voice playing through the machine wasn’t familiar, but something about its tone — troubled and tense — made me pause and listen. “This is Trish from Tom Siddon’s office.” Trish? Oh, yeah. I kind of remembered Trish. She was a therapist, as Tom and I were. We’d met each other long ago at a family-therapy workshop. What could she possibly want from me this late at night? “Tom collapsed in his office,” Trish’s voice said through the machine. “He’s been...
Read MoreGhost Story
That same year when I was a junior in Mrs. Watson’s eleventh grade American literature class, Mr. Lenore, the sixth period senior government teacher at Carlton P. Pierce Senior High School, got shy Karly Tan pregnant, and the news was all over our school in two weeks, even though she was to graduate from that school with honors in five months. Even though Karly wouldn’t lift her eyes to say boo, talked through a curtain of long, black hair, folks said girls like that get what they deserve, messing around with old men — twenty-five years older than she and married. Didn’t she know...
Read More