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A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
By Wayne KlawJuly 2024July 2024Food has powers. It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together. It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block. At the same time, it draws us inward. Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people.
Jessica Fechtor
The dog weighs twelve pounds / and uses them as she pleases. / The king-size bed is not big enough. / Sleep enabler, stretch-monger, / when she wants to be touched, / she offers up the narrow white arc / of her belly. When a loud face / crowds her, she growls. Or, depending / on the weather, the time, the face, /she doesn’t.
By Catherine PierceJuly 2024Since I had no one else to ask, I asked the hunger where it wanted to go. It said, West, like that was a point on the map called Freedom. So I drove west. I stopped at a Walmart somewhere in Kansas and bought a propane camp stove and a tent, because hotels were not in the budget.
By Kate OsterlohJuly 2024A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face
By Our ReadersJuly 2024“To the Bone” is an ongoing photography project documenting life and work on a small family farm in the Hudson Valley. Emily, a single mother of nine, manages their small farm with the help of her young daughters. I am drawn to tell Emily’s story and her efforts to keep her home and family together after unexpected loss and hardship. I am inspired by their strength and perseverance and how dignity, beauty, and love survive amidst it all.
By Maureen BeitlerJuly 2024We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.
By Doug CrandellJuly 2024My mother’s disease wants / to know my name. // My mother’s disease takes / me in // with my mother’s eyes.
By Michael MarkJune 2024I just read The Diary of Anne Frank, about a girl who hid from the Nazis. There are many similarities but also differences between us: When she started the diary, she was thirteen, and I will be thirteen in August. We are both girls, and, like her, I have many secrets and depressed emotions. I never hated my mom the way Anne hated hers, but last spring I came close.
By Marian CrottyJune 2024The Paradise Inn sits at 5,400 feet on the south slope of Mount Rainier, the highest peak in Washington State. Up here the air is thin and crisp, the colors are saturated, and every breeze carries an aroma of pine and the trill of birdsong. Even immersed in such concentrated beauty, my heart aches. For the hundredth time today I think of Jack, a fellow writer in the graduate program I recently completed. We bonded over our love of books and our homesickness for the Midwest.
By Becky MandelbaumJune 2024Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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