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The first major loss I felt as a child happened in the town of Dinosaur, Colorado in a KOA overlooked by a billboard for McDonald’s that my parents tried desperately to hide from all 3 of their children. I had a small figurine of a coelophysis, a souvenir from a paleontology museum in Fruita. I…
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I never met my great grandmother Velma, she died some years before I was even born. Based on photos and my mom’s recollections of her to me, she was a short woman with a big personality and an uncanny knack for fiber arts. 20 years after her death, my mom drove our minivan three days…
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Campi Flegrei, also known as the Phlegrean fields, is a series of 24 volcanic calderas in the ocean outside of Naples, Italy. One of these, the Solfatara crater, was considered the home of the Roman God of Fire Vulcan due to the amount of volcanic activity evident in the area. The caldera itself underlies the…
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In 2013, the city of Melbourne assigned ID numbers to trees and gave them an email address, allowing the public to report downed branches or disease. Instead, people wrote love letters to their favorite trees. Everyone can write a love letter to a tree in their past. I can. Dear maple tree in my backyard,…
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In 2022, I was forced to leave the best job I’d ever had for a number of reasons — not the least of which being that I technically was not allowed to have it past graduation in the first place. The pandemic let a lot of things slide. I found an adult job at a…
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The French Dispatch feels like a lot of the Wes Anderson movies I’ve watched (regrettably, not all of them, namely Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr. Fox) in that the colors are warm, the cinematography acutely aware of shifting moods and personalities of the characters, and filled with a certain kind of cozy charm that…
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In religious history, folk magic, and occultism the dichotomy between “masculine” and “feminine” energies often play a large part in mythological and therefore ritual construction. I propose that the use of “masculine” and “feminine” encompass multiple different aspects of magic and ought to be deconstructed for more potent spell development. In less academic terms, since…
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Hidden among the rolling fields of corn and soy in Antelope county, Nebraska sit the Ashfall Fossil Beds. This unique death assemblage tells the story of a massive volcanic event that covered the American midwest in ash some 10 million years ago. The animals interred here represent the fauna that flocked to a savannah watering…
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Fiction
from the pen of icarus blake 