In February 2018, Popshot Magazine published my flash fiction story, "Hanging Onto a Moving Home." It's a piece I'm very proud of, and I'm so ecstatic the editors commissioned an artist to illustrate it. In it, I explore what it's like to be mobile with someone you love -- and how it often feels like you're … Continue reading Read “Hanging Onto a Moving Home” in Popshot Magazine #19
While waiting in a Baltimore hotel lobby, I thumbed through one of its meant-to-be-seen-and-not-read bookshelves. There among old, leather-bound editions of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Roosevelt's Naval War of 1812, I found the collected works of William Cullen Bryant. A romantic, Bryant is known primarily for his poetic naturalism (see, e.g., "Thanatopsis") but he was also a prodigious translator, deciding at the age of 77 to translate Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. But as this was my first introduction to the poet, I knew none of this. Skimming the volume, I was not very impressed, but then I came across a poem that I stopped to read three times in a row. Its title: "The Murdered Traveller."
I was saddened to read about the death of Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish Nobel Prize-winning poet. Perhaps like so many others, I'd discovered Tranströmer late, and in fact, when he'd won the prize in 2011, it was my first exposure to him. Unfortunately, as this was around the time I'd decided to to become a Serious Writer, my … Continue reading The Death of Tomas Tranströmer
Recently on Fiverr, I was asked to write a letter, which being a (militant) advocate for written-correspondence I was glad to comply. The only problem, though, was that I was asked to talk about "Hope." Where does one even begin? Deciding not to focus on my own experiences, I wanted to investigate what Hope actually is -- and I wanted be more practical and philosophical than merely (and often unfulfillingly) poetic. You'll find here no allusions to spring or sunrise. For such a nebulous but necessary emotion, I think it requires more seriousness than that.
Joshua Panduro Preston 