VA lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. When not writing, she enjoys ice skating, reading, and working on her photography and her art projects. Her work has appeared in Literary Heist, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Lumina Journal, Panoplyzine Magazine, The Basilisk Tree, Remington Review, Figwort, and Homimum Journal. She also recently published a poetry collection through Kelsay Books.
Wilson is a designer and photographer. His deeply personal view of this quintessentially Midwestern region, central Illinois, highlights and celebrates its visual textures and curiosities. He was a medical and generalist photographer and executive writer in the healthcare field for 33 years. He cut steel in a foundry for a decade and drove a truck for a time. Wilson is a graduate of the University of Illinois and a juried Illinois Artisan for Photography.
Since visiting Hiroshima, Smith has been reflecting on power: what overpowers, what empowers us to rebuild, and the ruptures that continue across generations following cruelty. What remains in the wake of disaster? How do we reconfigure a world that is constantly fractured? These pieces were made using transparent adhesives, mica, sea glass, and a beam of light. Light ignites the mineral. Waves and time smooth the edges of the glass. We ask for transparency, but we rarely get it.
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in nine years, he has published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and plays in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Photo publications include Alchemy Spoon, Barnstorm, Burningword, Camas, Feral, Invisible City, Orion, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include DASH, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Paperbark, Pilgrimage, Sweet, and Typehouse. Recently nominated for Best of the Net in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.
Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is the founder of an ecological educational nonprofit fostering bioregionalism, ecological literacy, and stewardship across the biosphere, an outsider scholar following dynamic inquiry to defy disciplines, practicing systems wisdom. Trained in narrative, photography, filmmaking, and new media production at UNC-Asheville (BA) and Emerson College (MA), he captures multimodal narrative traces in defiance of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. He was an NSF IGERT Fellow in Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University. Recent juried exhibitions of his work include Spanish Peaks Arts Council, Photocentric Gallery, R Gallery, Valdosta State University, Spiva Center for the Arts, Hilliard Gallery, San Fernando Valley Arts & Cultural Center, Yeiser Art Center, Wilson Arts Center, Turchin Center, and Roger Tory Peterson Institute. In 2025, he was a multidisciplinary artist-scholar in residence at Pine Meadow Ranch in Sisters, Oregon. He is a volunteer photographer for the National Park Service on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Featuring:
Issue 116, published October 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Paula Burke, Wes Civilz, Eileen Vorbach Collins, Deron Eckert, Benjamin Erlandson, Don Farrell, MFC Feeley, Pete Follansbee, Nicholas Haines, Karen Kilcup, Alice Lowe, Mary Ann McGuigan, Miranda Morgan, Michelle Morouse, Kaitlyn Owens, Jim Ross, Sayantani Roy, Meggie Royer, Shyla Shehan, JL Smith, Sarp Sozdinler, Carlin Steere, P. J. Szemanczky, Jim Tilley, Hannah Voteur, Frederick Wilbur, Myfanwy Williams, Stephen Wilson, and VA Wiswell.
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