All posts by Eric Robert Nolan

Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations. Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!!

Enjoy it and stay safe.  You guys behave yourselves!!  No roughhousing this year!

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Life magazine cover, November 20, 1890

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, /And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

— from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, 1923

Source: The Marginalian



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Photo credit: J Carlos, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Poster for “Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett” Season 1 (2021)

Disney Plus.

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“But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty.”

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.  That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality — a banality because it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, believed.  Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world.  There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed.  None of these things can be done alone.  But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty.  He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself.  The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

— James Baldwin, The Creative Process, 1962

Source: The Marginalian



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“You can shed tears because they are gone, or you can smile because they lived.”

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Poster for “Hannibal” Season 3 (2015)

NBC.

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A Message from the Editors of The Bees Are Dead.

It is with deep sadness that we are announcing an official close to submissions to The Bees Are Dead.

In all honesty, the webzine has been on hiatus for a while due to issues with our hosting site and growing family and work commitments. However, the unfortunate and sudden death of our great friend – and a third of the editorial Triumvirate, Dennis Williamson (a.k.a. Villelmi) – has caused the tentative process of reigniting the zine to fully extinguish.

We would like to thank everyone who submitted their work to us over the years and contributed to our dystopian labour of love. As has always been the case, please feel free to submit anything you had published with us, elsewhere.

The Bees Are Dead website has been taken down, but we will be leaving our Facebook page live (for as long as Facebook remains active) in memory of our beloved Dennis, whose collaboration, friendship, and exceptional talent for writing dark poetry imbued with a concoction of industrial imagery and classical references, we will never forget.

We wish all of our contributors and readers good luck in your current and future projects, and we hope you will continue to name us within your writer’s biographies.

With love and gratitude,

Philippe and Eric
– B.A.D. Press



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“St. Jacob’s Church,” Piet Mondrian, circa 1898

Gouache on paper.

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Spillwords Press publishes my short poem, “Blue.”

I am so happy this morning to see Spillwords Press feature my short poem, “Blue.”  You can find the poem right here.

Thanks yet again to Director of Development Dagmara K. for allowing me to be a part of the Spillwords Press creative community!



French poster for “Ghost in the Shell” (2017)

Paramount Pictures.

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