Announcing New Substack Community
Suzan Erem, author and owner of Lastdraft Writing for Impact, announced in early 2024 that she has created a new Substack Community under the name Postcards from an Iowa Transplant. Readers and clients are encouraged to subscribe paid or free to receive quick but poignant insights and amazing photos...
Leaving Okoboji
The instructor in my last workshop at the Okoboji Writers Retreat said think small but I’m living large as I drive out of town in a bright yellow Mustang convertible with the top down and Pink Floyd’s The Machine blasting out of 8 speakers because this is the first...
What Couldn’t Be
How did those massive hands, those long fingers, those large well-groomed fingernails handle such precise instruments? How did they fit into the little mouths of modest, soft-spoken townspeople, people whose mouths never spoke above their inside voices and never utter an offensive word?...
When You Put Strong Women Down
This is what remains
When you’ve pulled
every
living
thread from us
so each one lay ragged
and disconnected
in a field, let’s say,
waiting
for weather
to wear it thin......
He Taught Us to Use “Joy” Wisely
The sun melts in a dark,
dry sky. The prairie
stretches deep to drink.
Trees breathe in a wicked
heat. Cicadas buzz. Redwings
chit. At last, a night breeze
cools my sweat......
The Sandwich Generation
Jim was just going to have to wait for Cliff to die, but his dad looked awful good for 90. Jim had learned everything about farming from his dad, and he’d learned how to do it right or else. Before he could walk, Cliff was showing him how to...
On the Global Waterfront: Fight to Free the Charleston 5
January 2000 was a precarious time in South Carolina. The state was perched on the edge of change while clutching tenaciously to history and tradition. It was a canary in the coalmine of our national political life. In spite of its reputation for backwardness, South Carolina pointed the way...