Best of the Net 2024 Art Winner!

Hurrah! Let’s congratulate Artist Carolyn Schlam, whose oil-on-canvas artwork, Little Sister, was chosen as an Art Winner by the Sundress art judge for this year’s Best of the Net publication. See Little Sister below and also at the BOTN page here. This makes three consecutive years that Club Plum contributors’ work has been chosen by…

Read more Best of the Net 2024 Art Winner!

Tend Our Memories

Mid-May, my husband and I flew across the country from Western Washington to Western New York to visit our parents: one father and one mother. They are eighty years old. A day will come, not so far from today–one year? Two? Tomorrow?–when I will not have the opportunity to hear another word from my mother’s…

Read more Tend Our Memories

The Meeting Place

I’ve been buying tablecloths. We have one table only in our small home, and it is a new table, purchased after twenty years of using a secondhand table, a crack in the base zip-tied ten years into the using. Our new table extends to fit family on days when we all come together, and we…

Read more The Meeting Place

Crave Like Water

I go for walks these days. I walk with intentionality, cracking the day’s time, suspending the tasks I absolutely must do with the insertion of departures–out the door I go. I heighten my awareness during these thirty-to-sixty-minute outings. Here, to the right, rounding the bend, roots of thick-trunked evergreens buckle the narrow path, and up…

Read more Crave Like Water

To Dangle Death

Friday, October 13th: the perfect day to launch our annual literary horror issue. Something wonderful happens–a switch, a one eighty, a backwards drive on a roundabout–when I give myself over to the season of horror. To throw a party in spite of the darkness. To claim and reclaim. To lay it out: Here is the…

Read more To Dangle Death

The Keepers

Every early summer, I start to pine for the Dungeness Spit. For those who aren’t familiar, this narrow band of rocky sand is the longest spit in the United States, about five miles long, stretching into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, part of the Salish Sea. I reside one scenic-hour drive from this special…

Read more The Keepers

Just Out of Reach

Greetings, Spring. Here in name and date, yet you still hunker, hail dropping like small, felled birds from my blue sky. But I will greet you anyway, because I love you, and I want you to be here. In Volume 4, Issue 2 of Club Plum, the ones we love are often out of reach.…

Read more Just Out of Reach