Contributors

Poe Ballantine recently learned that his house in Chadron, Nebraska, has hornets, not termites. “The pest man said termites wouldn’t leave the big piles of sawdust; they’d eat them,” Ballantine explains. “But you’d still have the same crunch crunch noise in your walls. That is disconcerting: the sound of your house being eaten.” His novel Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire will be published by Hawthorne Books in spring 2006.

Diane Lefer is an author and playwright whose novel California Transit won the Mary McCarthy Prize and will be published next year by Sarabande Books. She lives in Los Angeles.

Lou Lipsitz lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he’s waiting for the shadows to lengthen and the leaves to fall.

Alison Luterman is a writer who lives in Oakland, California. This month she will swim a mile to benefit the Women’s Cancer Resource Center.

Leslie Pietrzyk lives in Virginia and is the author of two novels: A Year and a Day (William Morrow/HarperCollins) and Pears on a Willow Tree (HarperPerennial).

Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found Magazine, a contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life, and the author of the short-story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas (Touchstone). He is currently at work on a documentary film about love, and is training to fly hot-air balloons. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Sy Safransky is editor of The Sun.

Sybil Smith quit smoking three months ago and is still eating nothing but ice cream. She lives and writes in Norwich, Vermont.

Thea Sullivan and her husband live in San Francisco and are the proud parents of a twelve-year-old terrier mix named Sam. Sullivan’s work has appeared in Barrow Street, Calyx, and Water-Stone. She teaches writing workshops and coaches writers in person and online.

Jeff Walt lives and writes in Tacoma, Washington, where he is also studying to become a massage therapist. His work is forthcoming in the “Queer Writers” issue of the Cream City Review.

Marie Sheppard Williams is a retired social worker who has won two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Minnesota with a very large cat named Albert Einstein.

Peggy Sue Amison has been a photographer for more than twenty years. Five years ago she moved from California to Cobh, County Cork, Ireland, where she is the director of the Sirius Arts Centre.

Al Barna is a photographer who lives and works in San Francisco.

Tom Becker lives in Iowa and is currently taking photographs of county fairs.

Cary Clifford lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and has exhibited her photographs most recently in New York, Pittsburgh, and Berlin.

Duncan Green lives in Olympia, Washington, and is the staff photographer for the Washington State House of Representatives.

Roy Gumpel lives in High Falls, New York, and is a firefighter, mountain biker, and teacher of photography.

Joel Jensen holds to his belief that in the not-so-distant future, phone calls and handwritten letters will eliminate e-mail, and film will preside over digital images. He lives and takes photographs in Summerland, California.

Clemens Kalischer signed up for his first photography course in 1947 and has been taking photographs ever since. He lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he has run the Image Gallery for more than thirty years.

Anna Kaufman Moon traveled around the U.S. in 1957 on a Vespa motor scooter. Now she wants to take the trip again, this time with a camera. She lives in Cobleskill, New York, and has self-published a book of photographs titled Reflections of NYC, 1963–1972.

Steve Patterson lives in Portland, Oregon, and his photographs are published regularly in the Oregonian, Willamette Week, and the Portland Mercury. The CoHo Theater in Portland will exhibit his work this month.

Marvin W. Schwartz is a photographer who lives in New York City.

Gregory Thorp lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and takes photographs commercially for several barge lines on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. His personal subject of choice, however, is corn, in all its forms.

Julia Tuchman is a photographer, an intuitive healer, and an advocate for people who have developed illnesses due to chemical exposure. She lives in Scarsdale, New York.

Harry Wilson lives in Bakersfield, California. He has retired from teaching photography after thirty-four years and now plans to wander the world, taking photographs.