Category Archives: Arts: Storytelling

EXCLUSIVE: A Leaked View of the “Afterlife” of the U. S. Institute of Peace

March  22, 2025

From confidential Washington sources, the following excerpt is drawn from an account of the aftermath of the March 17 seizure and closing of the U. S. Institute of Peace, by armed agents of the DOGE administration. The account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Brief Encounter at 2301

Mid-March, 2025, on the edge of the National Mall, not far from the Vietnam War Memorials.

It was almost break time, the leftover dinner pizza was hours cold, and Hennigan thought he heard something.

Standing up from the desk chair, he closed the Security Inc. employee handbook, which was making him drowsy anyway, and peered across the open atrium: first left, then right, following the protocol.

Everything seemed in order: several tiers of closed offices rose or each side. Lights were dim. Nothing moving.

Continue reading EXCLUSIVE: A Leaked View of the “Afterlife” of the U. S. Institute of Peace

New Issue of “Types & Shadows” – Quaker Arts Journal-Online NOW (Free)

You can read and browse it here free:  

Types & Shadows is the quarterly journal of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts. (FQA) It first appeared in 1996, and has been produced ever since by dedicated and creative volunteers.

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) were strongly against the arts for their first two centuries, regarding them as “vain” and hazardous distractions from plainness and more serious and “spiritual” things.

Their evolution away from this prohibition is traced in an FQA Booklet, Beyond Uneasy Tolerance, which is also available free on the FQA website.

Continue reading New Issue of “Types & Shadows” – Quaker Arts Journal-Online NOW (Free)

Henry Taylor: A Quaker Poet Departs — A Holiday Read

Late  one spring morning in 1986, I was creeping along the edge of Ox Road, Virginia route 123, driving with one hand, and shoving mail into the boxes on posts with the other.  I was a substitute rural mail carrier,  working a route just south of the seemingly nonexistent town of Fairfax Station.

FairfaxStation-VA-Sign

Beyond the mailboxes, prefab McMansions were going up on every side, as fast as the builders could hammer them together.

It was the second year of Ronald Reagan’s second term, and the woods along Ox Road were swarming with smalltime winners in the stampede for the billions  that the Gipper and his cronies were shoveling into a grand military buildup. The new settlers were devouring the woods along Ox Road like nuclear powered termites. Their contract profits were  pouring with the concrete under the rows of McMansions, markers of their status as suburban arrivistes.

My Malibu wagon, for postal work. (I didn’t wear a tie delivering the mail.)

Reagan’s frantic rearmament was meant to drive the Evil Empire of Communist Russia into bankruptcy and oblivion trying to match it.

The bankruptcy drive was ultimately successful, but the big plan soon capsized like the Titanic after the iceberg, sunk by the unexpected vigor of the aftermath:  who could have suspected that the Commies’ dark oblivion would turn out to be a den full of new monsters?

Continue reading Henry Taylor: A Quaker Poet Departs — A Holiday Read

New Issue of a Quaker Arts Journal — Now Online

Can art help us get through (and bear witness in) hard times? 

The Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts (aka FQA) thinks so. A new example is the just-published issue of FQA’s journal, Types & Shadows, (aka T&S) online right now, right here.

T&S was launched in 1996, the new issue is #101, for Autumn 2024. In its pages you’ll find stunning color photography, striking poetry, a historical Quaker novel excerpt and arts reporting.

For a long time, Friends shunned the arts (more on this here, in FQA‘s free online pamphlet Beyond Uneasy Tolerance ).
But today the arts seem to be thriving among us.

This is always good news. (An archive of earlier T&S issues back into the 1990s is here.)  But it could be even better in hard times. In 2017, FQA sponsored a project, “The Art of Fearlessness,”  as a response in a similarly turbulent period. Continue reading New Issue of a Quaker Arts Journal — Now Online

Saving Obama With Santa, In Selma 2015;

Durham, North Carolina, and Selma, Alabama

In the autumn of 2014, still settling into retirement in Durham, a question began nagging at me: was Barack Obama going to get shot in Selma Alabama the following March?

Now stay with me: was I just being more than normally paranoid?

The short answer is No. But what’s this got to do with Santa?

More on the latter anon. For the former, consider:

March 7, 2015, would be the 50th anniversary of the famous march for voting rights over the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, headed for the state capitol in Montgomery.

When that march was attacked by deputies and state troopers, images of the melee were flashed around the world as “Bloody Sunday.” I was there (and recount it in the memoir, Eating Dr. King’s Dinner). Even though my Bloody Sunday assignment was to march with the day’s second contingent — which didn’t happen because of the assault on the first — the experience left its marks on me as well. Continue reading Saving Obama With Santa, In Selma 2015;