Sonya Chung Talks to Filmmaker Dawn Porter
by Sonya Chung Dawn Porter began her career in corporate law. While working for CBS News, she observed the work of journalists and became intrigued by the intensity and importance of reportorial work....
View ArticleThe Brit and The Pole: New Vessel’s Young Bloomers
by Maddie King A few months ago, I wrote about four artists who became known only after they had passed away. I consider these artists to represent the polar extremity of BLOOM’s quest to examine the...
View ArticleFIVE in BLOOM: Latter-Year Reads
by Mollie Weisenfeld Highlighted here are books publishing in the latter half of the year. We’ve already seen publishing change in the face of the pandemic, and as a publishing professional, I would...
View ArticleDon’t Just Pass ‘Em By
By Martha Anne Toll Please don’t just pass ’em by and stareAs if you didn’t care, say, “Hello in there, hello” “Hello In There,” John Prine And then I turned sixty. I don’t know how. I was just...
View ArticleAt Home in the Past: Q&A with Lea Singer
“Notes rose hesitantly, like the memory of something distant, but never forgotten. It seemed the pianist wasn’t so much playing as he was ruminating, straining to hear whatever it was his fingers would...
View ArticleBeginner’s Mind vs. the Dark House
by Lisa Peet 1.I have exactly three good habits, and they have served me well during the past year: I walk 2-1/2 miles around our local reservoir every morning before work, I take a round of vitamins...
View ArticleBEST OF BLOOM: Walker Percy, The Original Moviegoer
Periodically, we revisit some of the “best of” Bloom from previous years. Following is an encore post, originally published on November 12, 2012. * Walker Percy, author of the 1962 National Book...
View ArticleSoul-searching and Self-soothing: An Excerpt from Megan Culhane Galbraith’s...
The Guild of the Infant Saviour is not just a great title for a luminous story, it was a real place that is now lost. The Guild was the unwed mothers’ home in New York City where Megan Culhane...
View ArticlePerils and Paradoxes of Adoption: Q&A with Megan Culhane Galbraith
I first met Megan Culhane Galbraith over 20 years ago when I was a returning student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We bonded over the weird intersections of being both left- and right-brained,...
View Article“Fiction as a device to bring empathy and understanding”: Q & A with Jerry...
Jerry McGill in his novel Bed Stuy (Amazon Publishing, 2021), centered around an interracial love story between an older Jewish woman and a younger African American man, explores the intersections of...
View ArticleElise Engler on A Diary of the Plague Year
by Lisa Peet Time is always a slippery thing, even under the best of circumstances—and recent years have hardly been the best of circumstances. The past year has been punctuated by some degree of hope:...
View ArticleSari Botton on Oldster, Aging, and Crooked Career Paths
by Lisa Peet Like so many in these pandemic years, I’ve subscribed to a great pile of newsletters, loading my inbox with dispatches from creative, thoughtful, and interested writers. Perhaps my...
View ArticleMaud Newton on Ancestors, Imaginative Spirituality, and Old School Blogging
by Lisa Peet Forget all the received wisdom of happy versus unhappy families; no family is alike, and no family is simple. But—all right—some are more complicated than others, and Maud Newton, in her...
View ArticleAway Game: Marcia DeSanctis on Travel, Movement, and Finding the Thread
by Lisa Peet Marcia DeSanctis has been a broadcast news producer, journalist, and travel writer for Travel + Leisure, Vogue, The New York Times, and BBC Travel, to name a few. She’s also an...
View ArticleYounger: Uncoupling Age from Aging by Paulette Kamenecka
by Paulette Kamenecka The fervent interest, across time and culture, to locate a fountain of youth reflects a common dream to travel back to an earlier version of ourselves—one with more quickness of...
View ArticleAn Overgrown Life
by Anne Rudig We’d rented a house we could never afford to buy in a Midwestern city that had been the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and a terminus of the Underground Railroad. Botanically, it’s a...
View ArticleHappy 10th Birthday, Bloom!
by Lisa Peet This week, Bloom turns 10. Not a long time in the greater scheme of things, maybe, but in internet years a decade is worth celebrating. In September 2011, Bloom founding editor Sonya Chung...
View ArticleBeginner’s Mind: Q&A with DJ Lauren Bufferd on the Mixtape Aesthetic
by Lisa Peet In 2021, I wrote an essay here about wanting to rediscover a joyful approach to work, and life in general, that would light up my creative circuits. My hope was to find a way to contend...
View ArticleDancing with the Muse in Old Age: A Profile of Priscilla Long
by Alice Lowe We get old. And as we do, our creativity and productivity become increasingly challenged. We face—and fear—disability and dementia, decline and death. We’re subjected to increasing ageism...
View ArticleBest of Bloom: Elise Engler on A Diary of the Plague Year
As the news rumbles about future matters electoral and the Federal Government declares the end of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, we revisit our conversation with Elise Engler on her book A Diary...
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