by William Reichard

When I was 17 years old I discovered the film Cabaret while flipping through channels on late-night TV. Seven years after its premiere, I hadn’t heard of the movie.  Something about the film’s style and mood drew me in and held me. Although I usually didn’t enjoy musicals, I kept watching. Michael York’s character seemed so familiar, but I couldn’t articulate why, at first. A gay teenager in rural Minnesota in 1980, I was as clueless as Sally Bowles, and lacked her bravado. As the film came to the scene where Michael York’s and Liza Minnelli’s characters discover they’ve been sleeping with the same man, I experienced the revelation just as Sally did, in real time, and I was just as shocked. For me, however, the experience was also one of unmitigated joy, as this was the first time I’d seen a gay man portrayed on television, in the movies, anywhere. For a closeted and fearful teenager, the experience was profound. I’d never seen myself reflected in anything I’d watched or read before, and I was a voracious reader, an avid watcher. Or if I had, I wasn’t ready until that moment to recognize it. I was hungry for any kind of affirmation, any sense that I wasn’t alone in the world, and there was Cabaret, broadcast right into my living room by ABC late on a Friday night.

by Athena Kildegaard

I first loved my husband in the fall of 1979, and I’ve been loving him again and again ever since. All that time I’ve written poetry, but until January first this year I’d written only a handful of love poems.

That curious pair of facts began to needle me in early December last year. Driving from here to there I thought about a love poem by Dorianne Laux I’d read that morning, how true and necessary it was and how unwrought it seemed. That thinking led me to wonder why I’d written so few love poems over the years. I realized that I was just plain afraid of writing them.

by Jennifer TerBeest

When I think of being a rural writer, it does have its advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages include plenty of fresh air and a night sky full of stars and planets. On really clear nights, the Milky Way hovers close. Certain times of the year I can see a meteor shower in the night sky. Recently, I saw the International Space Station and space shuttle Discovery pass overhead. It was totally awesome.