Six of my paintings were chosen to be featured in this year's Small Works Art Show at Gallery North. To celebrate, I'm hosting a sale for 15% off select fine art prints in my Etsy shop all month long!
Author: Alison Leigh Lilly
Black & White & Red All Over: The Mysterious Power of Three Common Colors
"Red as blood, white as snow, black as a raven's wing…." These three colors appear again and again in folklore the world over, but why? What is it about this triad that exerts such power on our collective imaginations?
#themetafor: The Bodies Buried In The “American Heartland”
Responses to a recent tweet by Pete Buttigieg rightly called out the presidential candidate for his use of the phrase "American Heartland" as "code for white." The incident raises interesting linguistic questions about how we unpack complex cultural metaphors.
“Cowbird/Changeling”: New Column in SageWoman Magazine
What kind of bird are you? (And how do you know?) My penultimate column, "Cowbird/Changeling," is out now in the latest issue of SageWoman Magazine.
How To Think In Public
There's so much I want to tell you — but how?
Snow Globe Starscape: Holiday Cards For Sale!
This series began with childhood memories of chilly winter nights. As a kid, I remember how the cold seemed to contract around you, drawing you closer to loved ones, making your world seem small enough to hold in the palm of your hand... There was a comfort in having nowhere to go and nothing to do, but also a restlessness and excitement to know that outside, a winter storm was raging.
Birches at Sunrise: Cards For Sale!
Birches have long been a symbol of new beginnings -- they're a pioneer species, one of the first to regrow in an area after a natural disaster, and their bark contains oils that make it especially good for kindling life-giving fires in the hearth (and heart) during the coldest, darkest months of the year.
Can Christians Be Animists?
Mark Wallace's new book, When God Was A Bird, represents a well-intentioned first step along the path towards Christian animism. Unfortunately, it is the same first step that Christians have been taking for hundreds of years. Can they do better? ...maybe.
Twice As Much Of Whatever We’ve Become
In light of the more serious challenges to free speech Twitter faces, and their inaction in rising to them effectively, bumping up the character limit from 140 to 280 seems largely irrelevant. What will we say in 280 characters that we haven't been able to say in 140?
Five New Poems: Evolving Gender and the Mask of Social Media
Masks are everywhere these days... and not just because Halloween is just around the corner. Sometimes we don't even realize the masks that we've been wearing -- the patterns and themes and synchronicities that have been lurking behind the mask of random chance in our lives -- until someone else points them out to us. That's sort of what happened to me when, by sheer coincidence (or was it?), a curiously thematic bunch of my poems all were accepted for publication during the month of October.
