Winter 2019 – Issue 23
Theme: Endings.
We asked our contributors: Tell The Sigh Press what you’d do over.
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BOB BLESSE was director of the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada, Reno, for thirty-three years. He taught books arts courses, designed and produced books and broadsides. He was also director of the library’s rare books and manuscript department. He has an M.A. degree in English literature from California State University, Chico, and a Master of Library and Information Science from UCLA. He and his wife have lived in Florence, Italy, since 2014.
I AM FASCINATED BY OUR WORLD and try to show this through my photographic images. I view my photography as creative interpretation rather than the recreation of static visual elements. I present the world as seen through my eyes, offering my vision as a creative composition, which I hope will elicit an emotional response from the viewer. One thing I’d like to do over? Almost every serious photograph I take could be better and I wish it could be taken again. I’ve never had an image I thought was perfect, but then life just isn’t—is it?
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LUKE WHITINGTON spent 25 years in Italy and Ireland restoring old buildings, some of historical importance. His poetry is published widely in Irish and Australian media, anthologies and journals. His latest collection, Only Fig & Prosciutto, is published by Ginninderra Press, Adelaide, South Australia. He lives between his farm in southern New South Wales, Co Westmeath in Ireland and Florence, Italy.
DO OVER? Not yet time to think about that.
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BARI LYNN HEIN’S stories are published or forthcoming in Adelaide, The Saturday Evening Post, The Ilanot Review, HCE Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Verdad, The Santa Fe Literary Review and elsewhere. Recent awards include placement in The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest, Jerry Jazz Musician 48th Short Fiction Contest, OWT Short Fiction Prize, WOW Spring Contest and daCunha Short Story Contest (1st place). Her debut novel is on submission.
I’VE RECENTLY TRIED TO REIMAGINE my grandmother’s upbringing in a Russian shtetl, her escape from persecution and adjustment to life in the United States. I wish I’d asked more questions. Given an opportunity for a do-over, I would say to her, “I love you and I’d love to hear your story.”
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LISA FLECK DONDIEGO’S poems have appeared in The Westchester Review, Haibun Today, and in several anthologies, including Red Moon Press’ yearly anthology and in the Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley’s A Slant of Light. Her work is forthcoming in The Writers Circle 2, The Writers’ Café and Memoir Mixtapes. Her chapbook, A Sea Change, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. She lives in Ossining, NY, with
her husband.
I HAVE BEEN, MOST OF MY LIFE a generalist, the exception being my MLS (library) degree. I regret not having become a specialist. For instance, I would have loved being a Dickinson scholar. Of course, all one’s life one is concerned with putting food on the table, and I had 2 children—one disabled. It’s too late in my life to realize that goal, but I’ve recently applied
for a grant to enable me at least to pursue my writing more exclusively.
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ALICIA OSTRIKER has published 16 collections of poetry, most recently Waiting for the Light (2017) and the forthcoming The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019. She has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has received the William Carlos Williams Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and awards from The Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among other honors. Her poetry has been translated into many languages including Hebrew and Arabic. As a critic she is the author of the classic feminist study Stealing the Language; the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. She lives in New York City and is currently the New York State Poet Laureate.
I WISH I HAD STUDIED LATIN.
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WALLIS WILDE-MENOZZI has lived in Italy for forty years. Mother Tongue, An American Life in Italy is being reissued by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, with a new introduction by Patricia Hampl and foreword by the author in March 2020. Her book Silence and Silences is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2021.
I HAVE ALWAYS GOTTEN UP EARLY. I love the hour before the light. Stirring has become easier because our marble floors in Parma, unlike wooden floors in America, don’t creak. I can tiptoe across the house rousing no one from their other worlds. I would do it all again, every single day of rising early, for those few minutes that wrap me like robes outside of time that clatters, rushes and demands.