Flash Discourse: Nonfiction
Lyric Essay
A Collaboration
Lois Baer Barr
Kathryn Dohrmann
Cynthia T. Hahn
Collaborating as The Bluff Coast Writers
ZUIHITSU FOR A TRANSYLVANIAN NAPKIN
Begin here. Follow the brush.
Linen squares. Green floss frames the action. Our legs await a woodland world. Scenes unfold on laps. Ducks take flight. Bears climb trees. Geese migrate in a V. Lone wolves hold the middle.
Once upon a time, William Morris and his Arts and Crafts friends made beautiful, useful things: furniture, tapestries, stained glass; fabrics and wallpaper, block printed, patterns repeating like honeycombs.
Imagine the maker choosing wood. Sawing. Sanding. Finishing. Maker and chair of a piece. Imagine grandmother’s quilts. Hand stitched: Wedding Ring, Flower Garden, Bowtie, Joseph’s Coat. Hand-made chair and hand-sewn quilt; count them equal.
What do we make? Poems. Like this one. Grandmother and William watch, aghast, as machines write poems.
Do you see the wishing wells? Does wolf smell buck and doe? Limbs and branches whirl. Leaves oppose and alternate. Roots run green through a creamy world. Wild cloth squares drape our thighs.
In dappled intersections, dark birds alight. Willowy twigs scratch seasoned stitch of trunk. Wolves howl a white silence.
With Transylvanian linen, we wipe our lips, climb into an aster nest, turn three times green, enter the story.
About the writers:
Lois Baer Barr, Kathryn Dohrmann, and Cynthia T. Hahn are emerita professors (in Spanish, French, Psychology, and Environmental Studies) at Lake Forest College. They write poetry together as The Bluff Coast Writers. Barr is the author of Lope de Vega’s Daughter, The Tailor’s Daughter, and Tracks: Poems on the ‘L.’ Dohrmann recently published two poetry chapbooks in her Stark Ravine Mad series, Archaeomythology and Mskoze: Red She Is. Cynthia T. Hahn has authored three volumes of poetry: Outside-In-Side-Out, Coïncidence(s), and Haiku for the Journey.
About Zuihitsu:
Zuihitsu is a Japanese prose form that wanders by design, following perception, memory, quotation, image, and reflection wherever they lead. Rather than arguing toward conclusion, it gathers fragments into an intimate pattern, valuing association, interruption, mood, and the writer’s moment-by-moment attention as a way of thinking on the page.
About Mind the Gap:
Mind the Gap Design & Supply, manufacturer of this napkin, is located in Transylvania, where Arts and Crafts Movement ideas have long been celebrated.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its several imprints, including Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Controversies, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
HAL: HEURISTIC ALGORITHMIC LIBRARY
REVIEWS
HAL’s reviews engage with contemporary chapbooks, pamphlets, and individual collections, treating them as occasions for serious critical attention. These essays consider books not as isolated products, but as living intersections of craft, place, memory, form, and moral imagination. Across works by poets and prose writers associated with O:JA&L and its imprints, the reviews emphasize accessibility without sacrificing intellectual rigor. They attend to how small-press literature carries aesthetic risk, regional texture, and formal experiment into public conversation. Together, the reviews establish a record of attentive reading, situating each work within broader questions of literary value and artistic endurance.
Click on the links below to explore or download the free PDF pamphlets.
CORRESPONDENCE ACROSS LANDSCAPES:
Dialogic Poetics, Ecological Imagination, and Relational Masculinity in Wolf Tree and Agave,
a lyric correspondence between Larry D. Thomas and Clarence J. Wolfshohl
A HOWLING AT THE THRESHOLD:
Transformation and Wildness in Wolf by Bruce McRae
A REVIEW
OPTIMAL OR NOT and Other Poems by Heikki Huotari
A REVIEW
THE HINGE OF ATTENTION
A review of The Selborne Haibun, a collection by Gabriel Rosenstock
A STILLNESS IN MOTION
A Review of little prose by David Person
The Shape of What Remains:
Land, Memory, and Moral Weight in TOPOLOGY,
poems by Richard Stimac
A REVIEW
REMEMBERING IN FRAGMENTS: HAIBUN, HAIKU, AND ETHICAL MEMORY
A Review of DUST AND RUST by Taofeek Ayeyemi
THE OUTRUN: Poems by Julie Alden Cullinane
A REVIEW
MIRO’S WARS: Poems by John Brantingham:
A REVIEW
WHERE THE CROW BREATHES BLACK STARS:
Larry D. Thomas and his expansion of the crow archetype as established by Ted Hughes
BAD ROAD AHEAD:
Flash Discourse, Trauma, and Voice in Don Robishaw’s Just Willie Please“
A REVIEW
WOW! You ladies have been busy! Creating a new publication? So proud of you.