The cover may be goofy, but the poetry inside is all deep thinking. About four times a year, it is my job to come up with a cover. This month is about friends finding each other. The title is “While on Vacation, Two Icons Share a Quiet Moment.” Photo of Yosemite National Park by Connor McSheffrey. The two “icons” are the Pacific Northwest’s beloved Bigfoot and the Bellingham Sloth.
Visit the post to learn more about this exciting FREE monthly poetry project https://shannonplawswriter.com/2025/04/26/corridor-zine-submit-your-art-and-poetry-today/
The collection for each CORRIDOR comes together organically. People submit poems, yes, a few are seasonal, but honestly, the majority of the collection is knitted by the universe. Not to get too deep, but I got deep. Let’s get deeper…
At the heart of this collection is an expansive vision of motherhood intertwined with a restless search for meaning. Motherhood appears not only as biological devotion, but as environmental guardianship, ancestral memory, and chosen love. In Betty Scott’s Mother Despairs For Her Offspring, the figure of Mother Earth grieves humanity’s recklessness while still holding the possibility of forgiveness. In Her Hands, Shannon Laws honors the quiet labor and promise carried in a mother’s garden gloves, while Barbara Wells ten Hove’s Beauty in Strange Places reflects on a mother who keeps singing even after faith has shifted. Alongside this reverence runs an undercurrent of questioning. Harvey Schwartz’s Autobiography aches for what has not yet been discovered, Susan P. Braman’s Serenity weighs emotional distance against acceptance, and Harry Needham’s humorous And My Wife Is Right admits that certainty often arrives only in hindsight. Together, these poems suggest that to mother, in any sense, is to live inside uncertainty while continuing to love, tend, and search anyway.
BIOS BIOS BIOS
Victor Ortiz, a Bellingham poet and Pushcart Prize nominee, writes free-style English-language haiku, preserving elements from Japanese haiku aesthetic and technique.
Betty Scott plants images, sounds, and rhythms she hopes will bloom in readers’ minds after she dips her hands into life’s muddy soil.
J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she tears words out of magazines and stares at them until they turn into poems. Find out more at
https://chocolateisaverb.wordpress.com or on Instagram @jikleinberg.
Harvey Schwartz hitchhiked west in 1971 for a summer vacation and never returned. His life since has been sprinkled with magic that he tries to put in words.
Harry Needham Is an Englishman living in Bellingham with his amazing wife. He has been in the U.S for 8 years. More stuff about barely remembered things at www.poetryconcrete.org
Duncan Shields is an animator, writer, podcaster, and performer currently living in Vancouver BC, with his wife and daughter. He enjoys the rain and burritos, and he’s happy to be here.
Susan P Braman appreciates being able to say with poetry what might otherwise go unsaid. She lives in Bellingham.
Elizabeth Jane Pryce is a poet, “Wild Child”, (2010). Author of an early childhood memoir, “Chosen”, (2022). She currently writes a blog: bluebottleswritingstudio.com
Barbara Wells ten Hove is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister who brings her Southern upbringing and NW life experience to her writing.
Lynn Geri lives in Bellingham… She has 3 books and 5 Scrollbooks of poetry published, available at Village Books, Bellingham. Lynn’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Shannon Laws is the publisher of Corridor. Her fifth poetry book, “Tongue in Ink,” is
available at Village Books. shannonplawswriter.com
ARTISTS
Peer Smits (The Netherlands).3 books. Writing also prose, composer, photographer. Publications in several magazines. Painter.
Teagan Tilford is a multimedia artist living in Bellingham, Washington. You might find them vending with their prints, patches, and up-cycled clothes at art markets around Bellingham! Follow their Instagram! (@squigglylinesbyteagan)
Kathleen A. McKeever has published two books of poetry, available at Village Books or
Bellingham Washington Public Library, “Lightbound” and “Body/Today.”
shannon p. laws 