The Abstract Art Gallery
A writing gallery created by writers from around the world. From poetry to song lyrics, from essays to entire novels and short stories.
…electronic beeping of the alarm clock made my head hurt. I rolled over and clicked it off. Had I slept at all in this heat? I could tolerate hot weather and sunshine on holiday where you had air-conditioning and swimming pools and cold lager, but how anyone coped in Manchester with this heat…
By Chris Platt
Read More…cannot work out whether more effort has been exerted hiding my mental health problems or fighting them. As you grow up and become a teenager and then an adult, you are not initially aware that not everyone feels as desolate and hopeless or as manic and psychotic as you. You wrongly assume all people think like you and the way you act is…
By Stuart Alexander
Read MoreSometimes life catches people off-guard and it still ends up working out.
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…wasn’t supposed to happen this way. At all. My girlfriend and I were living on the east side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’d moved there a few months prior with my roommate Paul after he’d convinced me that the east side was the happening area in Milwaukee. Paul and I had been sharing one side of a two-family home…
By Jim Landwehr
Read More…she of the rocking curves and teeny tiny dress; she of the close cropped curls and high, babyish voice. Everyone can practically hear her coo her signature phrase: "Boop-oop-a-doop!" Where did she come from, besides the inventive mind of one of America's most well known cartoonists, Max Fleischer? Actually, her story has roots in black history, a fitting thing for this month of…
By Danny Fantom
Read MoreDealing with disorder of pandemic and mental health issues
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…is no lead up, or warning signs, maybe being centre of this whirlpool; dealing with social distance, no job, not being able to see my family, meant I couldn’t see eddies nor feel how my world went further eschew. Looking back, I wonder if I was a different person, who fell into a hole, unable to craw…
By Karen Lethlean
Read MoreSixty years ago I became a Bronx baseball legend for 5 seconds.
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…been nearly sixty years, but I’ll never forget my ninth birthday. It fell on a pleasant, early autumn Sunday. Unlike previous years, there was no party or exuberant family celebration. In fact, my ninth birthday promised to be a rather bleak one. My father’s terminal bout with cancer had reduced him to a…
By Mark Blickley
Read More…assistance for you. That is what the letter stated from the state of Utah. I had just got off the phone to make an appointment only to discover that the state health insurance plan had cancelled all 12 of my appointments. Sort wild. No letter, no phone call. I had called to ask for the prescription to be refilled and found out that…
By Clinton Siegle
Read MoreSharron tells her harrowing story of her childhood growing up disadvantaged, severely neglected
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…shoplifting at around seven years old for food from the corner shop through sheer destitution, hunger, and survival. On a Sunday I’d run up to Londis on the high road and get us a roast dinner, an oven pie, some tin vegetables, frozen roast potatoes with some Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire puddings. And if it…
By Sharron K Hope
Read MoreMandela effected person talking about lie
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…has family secrets. My family for example have been allowing me to be a time traveler for the past billion of so years. Laugh all you want. I tell them, hey the mountain moved. Or when did the house…
By Clinton Siegle
Read More…had always gone to a Catholic school around the block, my sister and I, the very same one where Mommy and her sisters had gone. The Catholic environment, while potentially restrictive, worked well for me. Along with the dogma, fear, and guilt to which you could get attached, there was the ritual, the Ohhhm of prayer, the quiet of the old, massive church on dark afternoons while some special mass was being offered, and…
By Nora Straub
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