Schuylkill Valley Journal Online

Through The Keyhole: An Addict's Account (Part 1)

Creative non-fiction

by Rob Kaniuk

The Ukrainian called with news. He got the big settlement we’d been waiting for. This would keep us satisfied for a while. We both owed money around town to dealers, and had no credit left to speak of. All of our usual schemes of scrapping copper, and pawning gently borrowed items, had been exhausted. The thoughts of how to score were getting darker every day.

by Ray Greenblatt

Things became eccentric as soon as I applied for a job teaching English out of grad school. With two English degrees—one in British Literature and the other in American Lit—I contacted an educational employment agency in Philadelphia to get me possible interviews. One school in northern Jersey was small with practically one-on-one instruction, which I liked. However, it was a school for learning disabled and I had no Special Ed degree! Another high school in Marblehead, Massachusetts had an opening for head of the English Department—but I had no teaching experience yet! I had a hunch years later that these schools already knew whom they wanted, but they had to appear to their Board as if a “world-wide search” had been conducted.

by Gerry LaFemina

I am standing in the dark at 315 the Bowery, staring at a stage waiting for Jesse Malin to perform. This is not 1983. This is not CBGB, though I am located close to where I stood when it was CBGB, waiting for Heart Attack to play, a band fronted by Jesse Malin when we were both young teens. This is a John Varvatos store, although all the clothes have been hidden (jeans that cost more than the take at the door at CBGB on a Sunday hardcore matinee) and with the lights out it can almost be CBGB again.

by Eric Greinke

Everyone knows that poetry underwent a radical deconstruction with the advent of modernism.  The poetic conventions of rhyme and meter were the primary losses.  Efforts by new formalists notwithstanding, the rhyme and meter of the pre-moderns has been replaced by the conventions of free verse, but many of theses conventions have become so rigid that they are now in themselves a type of free verse formalism.

by David P. Kozinski

Lynnette Shelley recently celebrated both a birthday and the ten-year mark of her quest to become a full-time working artist, a goal she has mostly fulfilled. That in itself is remarkable – how many artists do you know who don’t depend on a day job? Now, imagine having the energy and creative drive to simultaneously sing and write songs, as Shelley has been doing since age nineteen.  She sang in the chorus in high school, and in several bands after that, while studying journalism at the University of Delaware. After college, she had jobs with a start-up internet company, a small weekly newspaper in Delaware, and for The Metro newspaper in Philadelphia, meanwhile teaching herself to use Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver, among other design programs. Shelley attributes her appreciation of deadlines – a helpful trait in any endeavor – to her experiences in journalism.  

the poetry of Ace Boggess, Merilyn Jackson, Jennifer Judge, Lorraine Henrie Lins, and David Livewell

This issue, the Schuylkill Valley Journal is proud to host the work of Ace Boggess, Merilyn Jackson, Jennifer Judge, Lorraine Henrie Lins, and David Livewell. The poems featured here are sure to delight, so don't hesitate. Read them here.