Nightingale & Sparrow

Category: Promos

  • Author Statement: Life Is But A Moment In Time

    Dear Reader:

    I have enjoyed writing since my early teens, but lost the habit once work and life took over. It was during a recent time of transition that I started writing again – based on a conversation of how people would react in various situations. Once I started writing I kept wondering “but what happens next?”

    I don’t think it was an accident that my main characters were also going through a time of transition, and I loved bringing their journey to life. They were with me for a couple of years while I followed them to the end, and I fondly refer to this story as my writing baby. I hope you come to love my characters as much as I do, and from them have courage to tell the ones you love that you love them.

    Learn more about Life Is But A Moment In Time by Essie Dee

  • Author Statement: River Ghosts

    Dear Reader,

    I compiled River Ghosts in the summer after my mother, Sylvia L. Schreiber, died from Covid-19. She died in April two years ago in a terrible week that began with the death of one of our two cats on a Monday and ended with hers on Saturday. We were able to be with our Mickey, but not with my mom, as the world was shuttering and shuddering, and we were closed in our bubbles of grief and mourning.

    However, River Ghosts is not a collection of sad poems about death and dying. Oh, there are some, of course, but there are also poems that celebrate life, our Earth, the stars, family, and love. I imagine that’s the way my mom would have wanted it.

    I feel like I should tell you a bit about my mom—not just howshe died, but how she lived. She was the daughter of immigrant parents who both worked in their small grocery store in Philadelphia while she was growing up. My mom and dad married during WWII, and by the end of the 1950s, they owned a large, wholesale antique store in Dallas, Texas. After they divorced, my mom worked in retail, and opened a series of stores that sold jewelry and clothing. She had wanted to go to college for art or design when she was young, and in her seventies, she began painting again. She loved color and flowers; she had a sweet tooth and loved chocolate. She loved her children and grandchildren. Perhaps its’s that love that explains how she could see a short skirt or uncombed hair even when she was nearly blind.

    I think it’s important for you to know that my mom had a laugh that made everyone around her laugh. And that though they ended up unable to live together, my father was the love of her life, and I think she was his. He died over two decades ago, but before she died, my mom thought he was there with her. I hope he was.

    Even before my mother’s death, I had enjoyed walking by the Delaware River. Afterwards, I walked there nearly every morning. I think of all the river has seen in its existence. Perhaps there are ghosts who walk along its banks, but right now, I also see flowers and nests, and the promise of new life. I hope you will see these things, too, in this collection.

    Cherish the people you love and who love you.

    Love,

    Merril

  • An excerpt from All the Shades of Grief

    On the anniversary of Van Gogh’s death

    You, who wielded yellow not like a weapon
    but like a looking glass. Did you find it?
    The ochre on the inside of starry eyes,
    in the yawning mouths of terminal flowers,
    the hay in the buttery shade of cypress trees?

    You, who forged blue into an ocean of tiny suns,
    burning Paris back to itself on the wings of crows
    scouring away their heartfelt blacknesses and cawing
    in that moment, forever. The people in your paintings
    always have such heavy shoulders.

    It must have been unbearable.

    from All the Shades of Grief

  • Author Statement: All the Shades of Grief

    Dear Reader,

    As I sit here, looking out my window at ferns and nettles dancing in the British rain, it occurs to me for the first time that the publication of my debut chapbook is a somewhat bittersweet occasion. Sweet, of course, for the obvious reasons. Bitter, because the one person I want to share it with most will never get to read it. Allow me to use this space to tell you a bit about that person, that such a person once existed.

    My mother, Victoria Sutton, was a deeply remarkable woman. She was a teacher. She read me bedtime stories. She would write down the stories I told her, long before I fully understood what an author was. Every blouse she owned was purple. The only thing she could cook was spaghetti bolognaise. She took me to see a big Van Gogh exhibition in London. She showed me a beachfront in Italy where she fell in love once. She could always win something out of those arcade claw machines. She loved Peter Andre. She wrote I love you in the front of every book she ever bought me. Above all else she was unwaveringly and profoundly kind, a kindness of sorts that very few possess. Often, when I think of her now, I think of her before I knew her – as a teenager, charming her way across the US to visit James Dean’s grave; hiding a stranger from the police in the boot of her bright pink beetle; wearing bottle after bottle of Bodyshop perfume.

    There is no way of dressing this up. She died when I was fifteen, after four years of a cancer that was supposed to have killed her within weeks of diagnosis. Death is rarely a truly peaceful process. For those left behind there is a cacophony that births a tinnitus that never completely dissipates. The poems in All the Shades of Grief give form to my own personal tinnitus. They are not all about the death of my mother but rather they are all coloured by the background noise of that grief, as everything is and always will be for me.

    The result is, I hope, not intensely depressing but honest. And kind, like her.

    All my love,
    Ellora x

  • from “Ocean,” an excerpt from Bouquet of Fears

    from “Ocean”

    I was once taught that all life on Earth began in the ocean, and that, biologically, humans are seventy percent water. That means seventy percent of us is made of what used to be home.

    I think of the ocean hidden inside me,  tucked away in my cells, mixed with my sweat. I feel the tides in my pulse and the salt in my tears. I haven’t forgotten the ocean. I haven’t forgotten its depths.

    continued in Bouquet of Fears

  • Review of Bouquet of Fears by Noa Covo

    Review by DW McKinney

    Reading Bouquet of Fears is to stand barefoot on the edge of a seaside cliff, staring down the expanse before you as the waves gnaw at the ground beneath you. It is both a plaintive declaration of self and a tacit acknowledgement of the unknown. This microchapbook by Noa Covo is a piercing progression of self, mind, and history detailed in three short stories.

    “Ocean” reflects on the unnamed narrator’s primordial origins and the monsters that followed their ancestors from the ocean’s depths. These monsters don’t become flesh and bone but terrors that make “their way up from my stomach and nestle around my heart.” The story merges with “Bouquet of Fears,” another story that beautifully unravels the narrator’s fears. It’s unclear if these fears are the manifestation of the monsters in “Ocean,” but it doesn’t matter. They carry their own urgency. There’s a delightful power in the way that each fear blooms and is named—or plucked—into existence. The last story, “There Used to be a Sea Here,” brings the collection full circle. Where once the narrator emerged from the wet dark, they long to stand on the rocky shore of what one assumes is hope or wholeness, as they proclaim, “there used to be a sea here” —the monsters receded with the tides long ago and a new history carved within themselves.

    Covo writes with a sharp elegance that ensnares the reader. Her words carry us along on a journey that ends as it began, back at the sea, where we ebb and flow. And this is why Bouquet of Fears must be read again and again. There’s so much to uncover in the brief pages. The words need to rest on the reader’s tongue so that they can divine the salt, bitterness, and sweetness in each line.

  • An Excerpt from you were supposed to be a friend

    vision

    you don’t see
    me unless you want
    heavy breathing,
    name cried out in ecstasy,
    ass to smack,
    hair to pull,
    kisses that only mean something

    to me, my velvet throat encasing
    manhood,
    cotton skin, me.
    exposed. only for you

    to examine touch pilfer pirate own
    i am nothing but your conquest
    a place you visit
    when you want to feel

    important
    i am so much more
    you claim friend but act
    otherwise, grabbing inches
    of me and leaving full

    where i shatter
    and cannot pick up what’s left.
    you molded me to want
    to please, drop to me knees
    until you place me in other positions.

    you like to push prod and beg.
    but i am scared to lose
    you so i comply. you know
    this and when you finish
    you hug me and leave a secret
    about you i already know

    from you were supposed to be a friend

  • Author Statement: you were supposed to be a friend by Ashley Elizabeth

    Dear Reader, 

    I am unsure about how to start this, to be honest, except for by saying that honesty is the best policy. And the first person you have to be honest with is yourself. Maybe you won’t find yourself in love with the wrong person. Maybe you will but will learn from it anyway. 

    I was in love with my best friend before I knew it. I was his before I knew what that meant, but I never told him. I wonder what would have happened if I did. I wonder if he loved me back and we simply missed our shot. I wonder how our stories would have played out if we were both willing to tell our truths. Now we have moved on and away and will never know. 

    Inspired by the lyrical yet haunting quality of Bluets by Maggie Nelson as she puts her heart on the page, this manuscript originally started as a book of letters of things I hadn’t said to him but wished I had; letters had always been how we communicated. Rarely did we talk on the phone verbally but our texts and AIM messages spoke for themselves. I saved them and looked at them often, responding to myself and the time in short snippets across time. 

    The book in the final format explores that love and asks the questions I was too scared to ask him but in poetry format. I also bring you through the end of our relationship by asking myself the hard questions. I break myself from my comfort and quiet, both in writing and sharing, and I hope this inspires you to do the same, to be your truest selves. 

    Thank you to everyone who reads this book. I hope you continue to find yourselves a little in love, a little lost, and a little loved. 

    Yours,

    Ashley Elizabeth 

    Learn more about you were supposed to be a friend

  • Interview with Megan Russo, author of A Daughter for Mr. Spider

    Interviewed by Marie A Bailey

    I’m fascinated by the format of your memoir, A Daughter for Mr. Spider. You combine flash narrative, poetry, photos and collage. How did you decide on this format?

    I started with everything fragmented and slowly wove it all together. I was working on poetry and really trying to find my footing with that medium when I came across some old photos of my grandfather and me. I had been put in charge of making a photo montage for my grandfather’s funeral, and I sort of took all of the physical copies of the two of us once the event was done. My family was one of those 90’s families that documented EVERYTHING. So, I’m very lucky to have those memories captured in a way that I can preserve. As I looked through the photos, I began to get so emotional as I thought about the people in my life who never really got to meet him, and I  think that was what kicked off the idea of bringing my memories together into a chapbook. I studied printmaking in college and had done a lot of work with artist books. So, I knew I wanted to do something out of the box and blend all the media that I’m passionate about into a single work of art.

    When I read memoirs, I often look for connections, commonalities between the author’s life and my own. Some parts of your memoir were painful to read so I imagine they must have been painful to write about. How was it for you to write about this pain?

    It was honestly pretty difficult to explore. I’ve always carried around a lot of guilt when it comes to my mother. I have felt for so long that I robbed her of a future and people will say, “No, it’s not your fault” or things of that nature, but I keep some very negative thoughts inside of me and just let them haunt me. I have let this phantom crime eat away at me for years. I’ve always been very aloof on the subject, but when I was younger, and I lived with her as well as my grandparents, I had so much anxiety from just being worried that I was a burden. I just have always been afraid and kept myself guarded. I would spend as much time as I could working and struggling to be outgoing, because I was running away from my family. As I was writing, I would just stare at the page and think, “Wow, why did I let myself be so unhappy? Why didn’t I say anything?” but I don’t think I could have. I just wanted my mom to be happy, and I had no way of knowing if she truly was, but I wanted her to be even if that meant I was unhappy.

    I had been very lucky in life to have never lost someone very close to me, until I lost my grandfather. He was someone who was very charismatic and witty in the public eye, but like me was very reserved with his own issues and thoughts. There was a kinship that I felt with him that I’ve never felt with another person, and when he passed, I almost felt betrayed at first. During his final hospital stay everything had been so secretive, his doctors weren’t sharing information, and I was just getting enraged, because I thought he would never keep something from me. And in this moment he was, but I didn’t know how to address it. However, now I knew he just didn’t want to be a burden to me. The one thing I had always feared, was his fear as well. And then I found it hard to be mad anymore. We were quite the pair. Writing about the whole situation gave me time to reflect on that and realize that my anger and betrayal were rooted in something so like the baggage I’ve chosen to carry. We shared a pain that we couldn’t share with each other.

    In relatively few pages, your memoir spans three generations—your father and mother, yourself, and your grandfather—and a bounty of emotions—confusion, fear, anger, love and grief. How did you distill the years and emotions covered in your memoir to less than fifty pages? How did you decide what to include and what to leave out?

    This was hard for me. I struggle so much with editing in many aspects of my life. I am one of those people that wants to throw everything out there and really make sure that I don’t miss an opportunity to inject another detail to help my readers fully visualize. I actually spent a lot of time talking with my husband about it and he helped me to streamline and finesse pieces to fit in the proper places so that there would be a smooth flow to the collection. I explained to him what I was hoping people would feel or get out of it, and he was the one who really encouraged me to blend more of the images in, which I feel helped give moments of breathing room between the poetry and prose. He also was very encouraging when it came time to submit the collection and I almost didn’t. I was nervous in a way that I had never really felt before, but I’m glad I took the leap and sent the chapbook in for review [Editor’s Note: we’re glad you did, too, Megan!].

    I really wanted to include a section about my grandmother or my great-grandmother, because my great-grandmother, especially, is a foil to my grandfather. But I wanted to keep the section of my family tree tighter and trimmer so that the characters included could be more defined and there wouldn’t be confusion about who was who. Also, there honestly wasn’t a good spot to inject another person into the narrative in my opinion. We have two explorations of relationships between four different people and adding a fifth person would throw everything off balance. But if I was going to add more, it would have been grandma content.

    Your memoir reads like a path to self-healing. You write, “Learn to forgive and then dress the wounds of self-harm.” Learning to forgive is possibly one of the hardest things to do. Could you elaborate on how or what methods you used to heal, to “learn to forgive”?

    I’ve done a lot of things to start my healing process. I’ve written, which has been a wonderful way of getting my thoughts out and letting the negativity leave me. Putting words on a page can be so liberating and I get a rush of energy when I finish a piece of poetry or prose. Like, “Yes! This thing is out of me!” But the biggest thing I’ve done is seeking professional help. I recognized that there are some things that you cannot tackle alone or expect your loved ones to solve for you, and that is why counselors and therapists exist! Having a neutral party to help you navigate your thoughts can be life
    changing and I have learned skills that work to help me with combating my wavering emotions. But I still think I have a long way to go. I make time each day to be thankful for myself, taking a few moments to reflect on something positive that happened or just something funny that might have come out of a bad situation. Taking a step back from the world around you, and just giving your body a chance to breathe can make a huge difference in your mental health.

    Did you have an audience in mind while you worked on your memoir?

    I didn’t have an audience in mind, but I did have an emotion. I wanted the collection to be relatable in some way to the reader. Loss is something that many people struggle to navigate, and it is something that most people have felt at some point in their lives. So, I started with the concept of loss, but wanted to go beyond that and come out on the other side in a beyond the darkness resolution. I wanted the reader to see that they are not alone and that finding their way through their emotions is a process we create ourselves.

    If you were invited to read from A Daughter for Mr. Spider, what part of your memoir would you read from, and why?

    I would read from the Mr. Spider section. I wrote this chapbook to primarily capture the relationship I had with my grandfather. I also feel like the beginning of that section embodies the joy I want people to feel. My grandfather is a cherished memory, and I’d love to share any bit of happiness that I can with those around me as it relates to  him.

    I struggle with titles. How did you come up with A Daughter for Mr. Spider?

    I used to say that, “I was the fifth daughter that my grandfather never wanted”, and it would make him so mad that I would say things like that, because he wanted me in his life. He wanted to keep me close to him and devoted a lot of time into making sure I knew that he cared for me. I was a daughter to him more than a granddaughter. The one time I really noticed the difference in the way I was stationed within the family was when we were planning my grandfather’s funeral. I was included in all the meetings with the funeral director and voiced my opinions about how things should be done. I was the one who wrote his obituary, even. I was the only person out of my generation of the family to be part of this circle, and it really made me think about my position within the family.

    I chose the spider as my creature focus in this collection, because they are very aloof and reserved creatures. Yet, they make such elegant webs and sort of put on a display for those around them. My grandfather and I were like that as well, very cautious yet always trying to keep those around us impressed. Spiders are often portrayed as tricksters in literature and that imagery suits my grandfather well. He was very quick with his wit and always ready with some sort of practical joke or prank. There are so many stories I could have added that would have injected humor into the collection, but those are maybe for another time.

    What are you working on now? Do you have any more publications planned or hoped for?

    I am currently working on a second collection called, The one who makes all the sacrifices, exploring the different jobs I’ve had over the years and some of the interesting people I’ve had a chance to work with. I hope to have it done by the end of this year; fingers crossed!

    A Daughter for Mr. Spider

  • An Excerpt from A Daughter from Mr. Spider

    [one_half]

    I’ve been cursed,
    stricken with a malady.
    I have his eyes.
    A reflection that cackles at me
    each time I have the misfortune of meeting the gaze of a mirror.
    Endlessness that calls me back to him.
    When I see myself,
    I am consumed by the depths,
    the memories attached to immovable orbs.
    The infinite holes draw me in.
    We shared this darkness,
    until—
    then it was just me.
    The one left burning bright.
    Doomed to repetition.
    Bound to keep him close and swirling within me.

    [/one_half]

    [one_half_last]

    [/one_half_last]

    from A Daughter for Mr. Spider