Riddled with Arrows Issue 4.1: Contributors

Cover Art: uncontained, Amanda Yskamp 


Pamela Ahlen
‘s work has appeared in Cider Press ReviewThe Adirondack Review, Birch Song Anthology among others. She is the program coordinator for Bookstock Literary Festival held in Woodstock, Vermont.  Pamela organizes literary events for Osher (Lifelong Education at Dartmouth) and has compiled and edited the Anthology of Poets and Writers: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years at Dartmouth. She received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of the chapbook Gather Every Little Thing (Finishing Line Press).

Pamela once played circus screamers on a calliope—on a party boat up the Intercoastal Waterway in South Florida.  And the sea gulls squawked and the people were happy. Her poem in this issue, “Getting It Down On Paper”, is forthcoming in a chapbook from Orchard Street Press in late 2021.

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David Barber lives in the UK. His ambition is to continue doing these things.

David writes faster than he’s published and may have to bequeath a lot to posterity.

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Born in the Chihuahuan desert and raised on a stingray in Ventura, Guy Biederman learned to write in the peace corps during a civil war in Guatemala, and later received an MA from San Francisco State where his writing midwife career began. Guy’s the author of five collections of short work, including Nova Nights: poetry, (Nomadic Press, 2021) and Edible Grace: lyrical micro prose (KYSO FLASH, 2019). His work’s been nominated for Best of The Net and has appeared in many journals such as MacQueen’s Quinterly, great weather for Media, Carve, and Peeking Cat Literary. It’s all true, especially the fiction. guybiederman.com

Guy lives on a houseboat 4 nautical miles north by northwest of San Francisco with his wife and salty cat and writes and walks the planks daily.

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Micki Blenkush is the author of Now We Will Speak in Flowers published by Blue Light Press.  She was selected as a 2017-2018 fellow in poetry for the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program and is a 2015 & 2019 recipient of grants awarded through the Central MN Arts Board, funded through the McKnight Foundation. Micki’s writing has  appeared in numerous journals including: The Fourth River, Cagibi, Typishly, and Crab Creek Review. She lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota and works as a social worker.  More can be found here:  mickiblenkush.com 

Micki has thirty years of notebooks in which she records her dreams. She’s moved them place to place, perhaps hoping these illegibly scrawled images may someday cohere in a helpful way. Last night’s entry featured an albino snake, “a rattler with a contorted shape, looking like it had bunched around a branch too long.”    

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Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier is an Indigenous writer and photographer. Most recently she’s been a cover artist for Arachne Press, Pretty Owl Poetry, Wild Musette, Existere Journal, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Gigantic Sequins, Ottawa Arts Journal and more. When she’s not walking her two huskies, she’s also designing with Art of Where. Karen now uses some of her artwork on non-medical face masks, hoping to be a better global citizen. See kcbgphoto.com to find out more.

Karen enjoys skating, nagging her children, talking to her Siberian Huskies and taking photos of stuff with her cellphone. These days she worries if anyone is brave enough to speak to managers who happen to be named Karen and whether or not anyone will ever name a child Karen in the future. She takes comfort in knowing her huskies still love her and that cellphone cameras do take some decent quality images that sometimes get published. 

[“Karen”, “Jane”, and “John” are tied for second-most common given names among Riddled with Arrows contributors, after “Michael”. For… whatever that’s worth.-RwA].

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Susan G. Duncan is presently an independent consultant with a performing and visual arts clientele, capping a long career in arts administration. She served as executive director for San Francisco’s long-running Beach Blanket Babylon, the al fresco California Shakespeare Theater, and Grammy-winning ensemble Chanticleer. Her poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, The London Reader, The MacGuffin, Soundings East, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Yalobusha Review, among others, as well as in anthologies by Sixteen Rivers Press and Red Claw Press.

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Rhonda Eikamp is originally from Texas and lives in Germany, where she works as a translator. In addition to a previous appearance in Riddled with Arrows, her stories have been published in Lackington’s, Neon, and Apparition Lit, with others forthcoming in Dark Lane and Nightcript. A list of her stories available online can be found at writinginthestrangeloop.wordpress.com.

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Glen Engel-Cox grew up in Texas and left it as quickly as he could. Since then, he’s lived in California, Malaysia, Ohio, Saudi Arabia, and Washington (both state and District of Columbia). Glen writes alternate history and near-future SF and has published stories in Today, Tomorrow, Always; Alternate PresidentsEmpyreome Weekly Flash Fiction; and New Pathways. His novel, Darwin’s Daughter, is available on Amazon. Glen lives in Golden, Colorado with his wife and two cats and is self-employed, mainly writing full-time for an international development non-profit in Denver.

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Kari Flickinger is the author of The Gull and the Bell Tower (Femme Salvé Books, 2020). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the SFPA Rhysling Award. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley and the Community of Writers.

In the middle of the night, Kari occasionally finds the worst movies on streaming services and paints pictures of egg-shaped objects while watching them. She then immediately forgets she has watched them.

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Daniel Galef is a graduate instructor of English at Florida State Univeristy and Associate Poetry Editor of Able Muse. He lives just on the edge of the swampland in Tallahassee, Florida, where he collects counterfeit coins and hasn’t cut his hair in three years. His flash fiction “Break Blow Burn” was recently awarded a spot in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology, and he is also listed in Webster’s dictionary under the entry for “interfaculty,” which means “brilliant and handsome.”

A variant of Daniel’s story “Prestonia” first appeared in The Plumber’s Faucet

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Gordon Gilbert resides in the west village in NYC. He writes, often performing his pieces in venues in lower Manhattan. Besides poetry, he writes short stories, monologues, short fiction, and also one play, Monologues from the Old Folks Home, produced and directed many times at various lower Manhattan venues. He has hosted over a dozen programs celebrating the beat generation and other writers. A member of the Irish American Writers and Artists, he occasionally hosts their salons. During the pandemic, Gordon has sent out updates with photos about his walks along the Hudson River and elsewhere in NYC as well as upstate NY and Maine. Gordon’s photo in this issue was taken in New York City’s Union Square.

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Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired psychologist, former German major and reviewer of restaurants, and, two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, is currently incapable of thinking about Art. Her first full sentence was, “Look at the moon!” Poems have appeared in  B O D Y, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Riddled with Arrows, Comstock Poetry Review, Heron Tree, Waccamaw, Spillway, and, Rappahannock Poetry Review. Kattywompus Press publishes her three chapbooks, Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and, Kafka’s Cat. Kelsay Books publishes The Book of Knots and their Untying. She co-curates Fourth Sundays, a poetry series in Claremont, California. Find links to her work at: cloudslikemountains.blogspot.com/.

Karen’s beloved husband of 35 years, Walter Maya, died of lung cancer in 2018.

A variant of Karen’s poem “Robocall / Remains” first appeared in Riverbabble

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Goddfrey Hammit was born and raised in Utah, and lives in Utah still, in a small town outside of Salt Lake City. Hammit is the author of Nimrod, UT.  goddfreyhammit.com

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Randall Hayes, PhD, “your friendly neighborhood neuroscientist,” is equally interested in fact and fiction.  For four years he wrote the PlotBot column for The Intergalactic Medicine Show.  Now he is sharing his observations through a weekly newsletter called Doctor Eclectic at randallhayes.subtack.com.

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Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Mobius, The Lyric, Dreams and Nightmares, Capsule Stories, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (Great Weather for Media), Five Minutes at Hotel Stormcove (Atthis Arts),and other places…including Riddled with Arrows. Nominations include Best of the Net, Rhysling, and Pushcart. Her latest book is the Elgin nominated Our Otherworld (Red Salon).

To date, Juleigh has been in the company of 5 ghosts. None of them were particularly well disposed toward the living. Yet, she continues to seek a friendly one.

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Becky Nicole James earned her MFA from Queens University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in many journals including Moon City Review, Echo Ink Review, and A Cappella Zoo. She blogs at sparklescribbles.blogspot.com.

Becky Nicole James was an award-winning Irish Step dancer.

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Hailing from the beautiful South Indian coastal state of Kerala seeped in green and poetry, Feby Joseph describes himself as a spiritual vagabond still trying to figure it out. He is currently working as a Piano teacher in Mumbai and learns the cello in his spare time. He is the winner of Reuel International Prize for Poetry, 2020. Some of his works have appeared on Café Dissensun, Wild Word and Bold+Italic to name a few. silvercowcreamer.wordpress.com/blog

Feby is putting Kaira and Sameer (Dr. ******’s children) through college with aggravation and stress-related funding. Topic of 2020: Chai-Tea is redundant! Chai is TEA, people!  2021: Modi is our Trump with a mute button! 

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A nature photographer and photo editor by occupation, John Kaprielian brings his keen eye for natural history to his poems, which are often inspired by his observations. He studied creative writing at Cornell with the poet A.R. Ammons while getting his degree in Russian Linguistics, and is now pursuing a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science. His work has been published in The Blue Nib, Minute Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Crêpe & Penn, and other journals. He lives in Putnam County, NY, with his wife, teen son, and assorted pets. facebook.com/366poems

In 2012 John made the ridiculous New Year’s resolution to write one poem a day for a year. It is the only resolution he EVER kept in his entire life, and he ultimately self-published the 366 poems (it was a leap year), not knowing at the time it would take them out of contention for publication in most journals! But the book is still available on Amazon, and he is amused when it occasionally sells. 

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In the unrelenting battle against doggerel and sloth, J.I. Kleinberg wields recycle-bin magazines, x-acto knife, and glue. Her visual poems, which explore the accidental syntax of unintentional phrases, have been published in print and online journals worldwide. An artist, poet, freelance writer, and three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg.

J.I. Kleinberg was once commissioned to crochet a bunch of grapes (complete with stems and leaves) to adorn an elaborately needlepointed jock strap that was gifted to an artist on his 40th birthday.

J.I.’s visual poem “when the self” first appeared on her personal blog, chocolateisaverb.wordpress.com.

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Lita Kurth  MFA, has published in three genres. “Are We Not Ladies,” was nominated by Watershed Review for Best of the Net, 2017 and “Fish Genesis” was nominated by Rabid Oak for Best of the Net, 2019. “This is the Way We Wash the Clothes,” (CNF) won the 2014 Diana Woods Memorial Award (Lunch Ticket). Her creative nonfiction “Pivot,” and short story, “Gardener’s Delight” (Dragonfly Press DNA) were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is co-founder of San Jose’s literary reading series, Flash Fiction Forum and teaches creative writing workshops. facebook.com/Lita-Kurth-Writing-Workshops-201900896677647

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, Lita’s novel, The Rosa Luxemburg Socialist Strip Club was a semi-finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom contest.

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Richard LeDue was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada, but currently lives in Norway House, Manitoba with his wife and son. His poems have appeared in various publications throughout 2020, and more work is forthcoming throughout 2021. His chapbook, The Loneliest Age, was released in autumn 2020 from Kelsay Books.

Richard gave up on writing poetry around 2009ish but returned to it in 2017 through a workshop called “Pig Pen Poetry.” In 2018 he made a New Year’s resolution to send out at least one poetry submission a month. He now sends out at least one submission a week.

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Laurinda Lind quarantines in New York’s North Country. Some publications are in Blue Earth Review, New American Writing, and Spillway; also in anthologies What I Hear When Not Listening: Best of The Poetry Shack & Fiction, Vol. I (Sonic Boom), and Civilization in Crisis (FootHills Publishing). She is a Keats-Shelley Prize winner, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and finalist in Patricia Dobler Award, Please See Me Mental Health Awareness, and Poetry Super Highway contests.

Some anagrams of Laurinda’s name are India Ran Dull, Iran All Undid, Anal Id Lid Run, Dad All In Ruin, and Laid Lad In Urn.

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Lisa Lutwyche received her MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in 2013. Poet, author, artist, produced playwright, and actor, she has had her poetry, fiction, and short plays published in literary magazines across the US and in the UK. Her full-length poetry collection, A Difficult Animal, came out in 2016 (Saddle Road Press). Lisa was nominated for a Pushcart (poetry) in 2000, and again in 2015. She and her husband try to write poetry in their house in the woods with three rescued felines looking on.

Lisa was raised by classical musicians. She went to art school for painting and art history. She designed hospitals for a while, then rich people’s homes. In a post-cancer career shift, she went to graduate school–for the other art she’d always practiced–this alchemy we call writing, which she tries to teach to college students.

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Jennie MacDonald, PhD, is an award-winning author and playwright. Her edited collection, Schabraco and other Gothic tales from The Lady’s Monthly Museum, 1798-1828, debuted in 2020 from Valancourt Books. Other publications include short stories, fine art photos, and articles concerning 18th and 19th century Gothic literature, theatre, and visual and material culture. She shares a birthdate with Gothic master Edgar Allan Poe and children’s literacy advocate Dolly Parton. jenniemacdonaldwriter.com

While searching for sea glass on a Massachusetts shore, Jennie once found a message in a tiny bottle. Obviously written by a child just a day or two earlier, the anonymous sender remains a mystery.

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Michael Magee‘s latest book How We Move Toward Light: New and Selected Poems was published by MoonPath Press in 2018.  He has just contributed three poems to Limbo, an anthology about COVID.  He is a volunteer Ombudsman with Long Term Care Facilities in Tacoma, Washington.  His work has appeared on Writer’s Almanac and in VerseDaily.Org

Michael’s poem “Still Life” was inspired by the photograph “Union Square, NYC” by Gordon Gilbert (featured together in this issue).  Magee and Gilbert first connected as co-contributors to The Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems and credit editor Charles Portolano with the inspiration for the project. 

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John C. Mannone has poems in North Dakota Quarterly, Foreign Literary Journal, Le Menteur, Blue Fifth Review, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. He won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest in poetry (2020), the Carol Oen Memorial Fiction Prize (2020), and the Joy Margrave Award (2015, 2017) for creative nonfiction. He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. A retired physics professor, John lives between Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee. jcmannone.wordpress.com

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Casey McCarty carries a pocketful of notecards and a fancy pencil at all times. At the end of the day he enjoys puzzling together short stories from the words that survive a trip through the laundry. Casey lives in Key West with his wife, son, and a cat that loves the water. This is his first published work of fiction.

Casey tends to separate his writing into two piles: short fiction submissions and possible side quest in an RPG. Sometimes both.

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Jane C. Miller’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals. She received first prize in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review’s narrative poetry contest and this year, her second fellowship grant in poetry from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Miller is co-author of the poetry collection Walking the Sunken Boards (Pond Road Press, 2019) and co-editor of the online poetry journal, uartet.

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Sandra Morris resides in Portland, Oregon, where she continues to perfect the art of turning coffee into words, mostly fiction. Two of her short works have appeared in Storied Stuff, an online publication featuring objects and the memories they evoke. Her current work is a novel in-progress, set in the suburbs of central Pennsylvania, where she spent her childhood. She uses the printed drafts of her first novel as seating in her office. Sandra is an MFA candidate at Pacific University.

Sandra’s work outside of writing has included technology, teaching and consulting. She is hoping she will get a chance at Broadway sometime.

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From Scotland, S P Mount travelled the far-flung corners of the world through a career in tourism before settling in Canada where he lives with his rescue dog ‘Quentin’–the senior party of the small business they own together. amzn.to/36Vf63m

Stephan considers himself ‘against the grain’–a disposition that undeniably bemuses lifelong friends. Generally, he roots for the underdog and has a predilection for writing bad guys likeable. Darker aspects of his writing occasionally arise to take him by surprise until he realises his more audacious inner selves have been collaborating without him again. I might have ‘multiple personality disorder’, but still, I know we only ever need a table for one.

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Arpa Mukhopadhyay is a versatile emerging artist based in Pune, India. She believes that art is the greatest therapy known to mankind and has been painting since the age of six. She is drawn to themes of simplicity, love, and hope. All her artworks are based on vivid memories and experiences that she has had at various junctures of her life. Arpa enjoys working with acrylics and mixed media. Her paintings can be found in many private collections in India and abroad. Arpa’s work has also been a part of numerous art exhibitions and festivals the world over.

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Ashley Naftule is a writer & performer from Phoenix, AZ. They’re a resident playwright & Associate Artistic Director at Space55 Theatre. They’ve been published in The AV Club, Pitchfork, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Longreads, Daily Bandcamp, Coffin Bell Journal, Ghost City Press, Bone & Ink Press, Planet Scumm, Rinky Dink Press, March Vladness, The Hard Times, Grasslimb, Little Something Press, Nice Cage, Ellipsis, The Molotov Cocktail, and Cabinet of Heed. More of their work can be found at ashleynaftule.contently.com.

The author bears an unlikely resemblance to country singer Vince Gill. The author also wishes to stress that they are not Vince Gill, and this isn’t some elaborate Chris Gaines/Garth Brooks type situation.

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Samara Powers is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in Bird’s Thumb, The Christian Century, Inflectionist Review, SWWIM Every Day and others. She has two children, works in marketing and design, and returned to University in her 40s, completing her BA in Poetry in the summer of 2018. More at samarawords.com.

Among a plethora of other ongoing non-literary creative projects, Samara recently began an anybody’s fitness & mindfulness channel on YouTube based on absurd motion and silliness called “Wiggle-Fitness”.

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Brian Rihlmann was born and raised in New Jersey and now lives in Reno, Nevada. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The Rye Whiskey Review, Fearless, Heroin Love Songs, Chiron Review and The Main Street Rag. His latest poetry collection, Night At My Throat, (2020) was published by Pony One Dog Press. He can be reached at facebook.com/brian.rihlmann 

A variant of Brian’s poem “So I Howl” first appeared at AllPoetry.com

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Lois Roma-Deeley‘s fourth poetry collection The Short List of Certainties won the Jacopone da Todi Book Prize (2017). Her previous collections are: Rules of Hunger (2004), northSight (2006and High Notes (2010)—a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Her work is featured in—or forthcoming from—numerous anthologies and journals including Without a Doubt, Odes and Elegies, Slipstream, Post Road, Bosque, Zone 3Spillway, Water~Stone, Artemis, Juked (online) and many more. Currently, Roma-Deeley is the Associate Editor of the international poetry journal Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry. loisroma-deeley.com

Lois grew up on Long Island, New York, however, she’s lived in Arizona for a few decades.  She retains her NY accent which comes in handy as her students and colleagues think she’s tough.  She recently returned to baking, primarily because she’s watched too much TV news these past few years and is in desperate need of some peace.

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Buffy Shutt lives in Los Angeles. A former marketing executive for movies and documentaries, Buffy writes poetry and short fiction and collaborates full time. A two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in Lumina, River Heron Review, Dodging the Rain, Split Lip Magazine, Wales Haiku, Reflex Press, Anthropocene, What Rough Beast. She was awarded the Cobalt Review’s prize for their baseball issue. Buffy@shuttjones.com

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Christina Sng is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Collection of Nightmares, Elgin Award runner-up Astropoetry, and A Collection of Dreamscapes. Her first novelette Fury appeared in 2020’s Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women and her next collection The Gravity of Existence is forthcoming in 2022. Visit her online at christinasng.com and connect on social media @christinasng.

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Gretchen Tessmer is a writer based in the U.S./Canadian borderlands. She writes both poetry and short fiction, with work appearing in over forty publications including (most recently) NatureCast of WondersDaily Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Gretchen is always in the market for one of Hermione Granger’s time-turner thingys or just a spare hour or two, if anyone’s selling?

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Amanda Yskamp’s work has appeared in such magazines as Threepenny Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Georgia Review, Boxcar Review, Rattapallax, and Caketrain. She lives on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River, where she teaches writing from her online classroom. timelapsed.weebly.com


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