Downtown street trees glowed with Christmas lights as music from the holiday carousel wafted over from Seattle’s Westlake Park. “How cute is that!” chirped my sister-in-law as we stepped around a line of families waiting to take Santa pictures. Prattling over our 2016 gift lists, we came to a stop behind a pack of shoppers […]
I began drafting this essay at the end of the presidential election season, in light of what many of us thought would be a landmark historical moment: the United States’ election of our first woman president. On November 8, as we are all too aware, despite winning the popular vote by (as of this writing) […]
The People wanted a reality television star to be their leader and we have to take responsibility for creating that. It was 2003 when the first season of The Bachelor aired. Girls were on their hind legs like animals begging to be picked for a rose. Jerry-Springer-type talk shows began their de-evolution into hysterical chanting […]
1. There was a table. Around the table, there were women and men and people who entered rooms holding their hearts in their hands. Around the table, people sat and they brought with them stories or words that would make stories, parts of little poems, thorns, and parts of their hands that would tremble with […]
I sip on my coffee and scan over emails: doesn’t apply, not me, junk, I have a meeting with the Colonel today. The Marines’ voices bounce off the walls with excitement as they chug Rip-It energy drinks, the unofficial sponsor of war. When I ask where they get neverending cases of the eight-ounce cans of […]
In a chemical reaction, when compounds combine to create something new, or when one compound breaks into two or more new materials, some form of energy is expelled or absorbed. Heat, light, electricity. Things light up. They flicker, blaze, melt test tubes. Out in the world, they can burn mountainsides. Later, we pull over to the shoulder […]
Eloise Klein Healy is a poet and the Founding Chair and Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita at the Antioch University Los Angeles (AULA) MFA program. Eloise has written eight books, and been a literary beacon as editor, educator, mentor, LGBTQ advocate, and feminist pioneer. In 2012, Eloise was appointed first Poet Laureate of Los […]
Last month I was the guest author at a writing workshop. I’d been invited to talk about memoir and the complicated and often discouraging journey of getting published. I had just finished reading an excerpt from my book, an addiction memoir about my former life as a junkie bank robber, and I was fielding questions […]
A few days after our last issue’s publication, in South Carolina, a gunman entered a 199-year-old church during a prayer service. This specific place of worship had held a prominent role in social activism from the slave era to the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Lives Matter movement. The white gunman, in what is […]
One warm southern California day, I strolled up the sidewalk of my apartment building in West Hollywood and spotted my white seventy-something neighbor sitting at her window, her daily spot. “Hey Virginia!” I greeted her as I approached. She glared at me and asked, “Are you a racist?” “What????” The suddenness of the question and […]
Once when I was in my early twenties, the tires on my car had gone bald, and my mother offered to take me to Sears to get replacements. At the time I didn’t even know the department store sold tires. And who still shopped there anyway? But my mom assured me […]
Lunch Ticket’s inaugural poetry editor and MFA graduate, Daniel G. Reinhold, died unexpectedly in the early hours of Tuesday, April 21, 2015, while sitting up working at his computer. He died as he lived his entire adult life, engaged with art. Daniel had been a member of the Antioch community in one way or another […]
As this is my final issue as Editor for Lunch Ticket, and thus my last “Word from the Editor,” I wanted to take a moment to reiterate what I think is a core belief of the magazine before exiting. Now more than ever we writers face the question of whether art can still function as a […]
July 14, 2013 (Not Guilty) The rally is not the mourning I need. A Protestor wears a new gray, leopard-print hoodie, carries tropical flavor Skittles, 99-cent honey-iced tea. Black boy—still dead. White Man richer, free, alive. Tall White Guy with the Socialist T-shirt is the master of ceremonies […]
You may not know this about me, but I’m pretty reticent. I am also an able-bodied white heterosexual male (read: abundantly privileged from the get-go). Speaking out and speaking up is a challenge for me, and it’s one I often let get the better of me. I am privileged in more ways than I know, […]
I never thought I’d be doing this. I recall sitting in a foxhole as a paratrooper, reading the book of Psalms and thinking, hey, I kinda looove this. I always thought the point of poetry was to confuse. Thousands of couches later, five books and literary festivals all over the world, I want to take […]
I knew that being the editor of Lunch Ticket would require filling some pretty big shoes, but it wasn’t until I was directing the journal that I fully understood the extent of what that implied: it wasn’t just a matter of successfully leading a staff of almost 40 volunteers, but of building upon what the editor before me […]
In the past couple years, I’ve written essays about writing bondage erotica at the age of thirteen, suffering from bipolar II, and idly standing by while my Nazi cousin nearly killed a man for being black. Once, I wrote an essay on bisexuality in which I was tied to a bed having trouble climaxing while […]
I like to tell people—uncomfortably early in the conversation—how I’ve had three times more therapists than lovers. When someone asks me why I stopped responding to email communication for two weeks, or why I disappeared from Facebook for three months, I might say that I was busy weeping under my desk while curled up in the fetal position. I tell people that I can’t go out on Wednesday…
I was privileged to take over editorship of Lunch Ticket after the first issue. I’ve worked at other publications, but this was my first venture into literary publishing. I’d like to thank each and every person who has ever contributed to this publication, and to the hundreds of others like it. Even if your work […]
I first knew Diana Woods as a fiction student in the Antioch MFA program. Though I primarily teach creative nonfiction, she was assigned to my workshop two years ago during a genre jump into creative nonfiction. She was just recovering from a round a chemo then and came to class with a different, brightly colored […]
We’ve just come through a contentious election, and regardless of your pick on election day, the election process asked people to examine their beliefs and make choices accordingly. Our lives are full of choices from the second we get up in the morning and have to decide what to wear until the minute we decide […]
The heat swells up from the boardwalk as I descend from the second floor open-air restaurant in Kona on the Big Island. Only a block away the ocean slaps onto the shore within the breakwater surrounding the cove. I grip onto one side of the iron railing, moving one hand over the other as I […]
Social justice infuses nearly all my fiction, whether directly or indirectly, and I cannot imagine what shape my stories would take if they did not in some manner address this. Issues concerning social justice are most often what first move me to put pen to paper, even if the threads of the injustice are woven into a seemingly unrelated arc.
I don’t remember when I first started reading about the Occupy Wall Street Movement last year, but I do remember where. Facebook. People started posting about Occupy, asking why nobody was reporting on it. At first I thought the word Occupy was code for something I didn’t understand. Having lived outside the US for over […]
Since 2003 I’ve had the privilege of directing an MFA in creative writing program that is like no other, a program dedicated not only the education of literary artists but to community engagement and the pursuit of social justice—a program that stresses not only the refinement of craft and artistic vision but the rights and […]
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