I step into the din that is opening night of “Abstracted” at UFORGE Gallery, and am instantly struck by the energy of the small space on Centre St. in the artsy Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. The brightly lit white walls scream hospital sterile, yet the patrons paint the room vibrantly colorful. This is not the pearl-adorned SoWa crowd of those warm, careless summer days. No, the crowd here is salt-of-the-earth artists and art admirers, chatting away about process and inspiration as much as about personal interests and weekend plans. The sheer volume of artwork strikes me. Thirty artists are featured in this exhibit with one to three pieces each, making the walls close in a little and the people stand nearly shoulder to shoulder throughout the room. As I make my first pass through,…

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Sometimes, we find art in the strangest of places, like in an overturned driveway marker. Other times, we find art right where we are looking for it, like at an art exhibition. In either case, it’s in those quiet, fleeting, open-minded moments that we see the depth of beauty in the world around us. This month, we invite our readers to take a moment to acknowledge the art in their lives – whether it’s on a walk through the neighborhood or on a trip to the museum. For a little inspiration, we offer you our November Submissions. This month, we’ve got submissions from a new acquaintance, an old friend and an FC regular. First up, we have Erica Nazzaro’s hauntingly evocative mixed media art. She paints scenes that bring abstraction and reality together to create…

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Summer’s bounty is autumn’s benefit. Rather than pickling our harvest, we decided to throw a feast. Without further ado, we give you five courses of October Submissions. Last week, we published three novel excerpts as an appetizer for an event that featured Fictional Café members reading from their novels. We’d like to thank our authors for their work and congratulate them on their reading. We hope you will take a gander if you haven’t already and check out their books if you like what you see. For our main course, we will be featuring an artist whose unique take on art has produced some fabulous sculpture pieces. Woodsybug creates shelves, lamps and art using the guitar as the canvas. The Fictional Café is excited to showcase these guitars from an up-and-coming artist with a very…

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One of my all-time favorite books has recently come up in an unexpected way. The don’t-call-it-nonfiction travelogue Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck, has always hit me squarely on my adventurer’s funny bone. For those unfamiliar with the book, a late in life Steinbeck decided to travel across the country with his dog Charley in a highly modified camper truck (affectionately named Rocinante) in an effort to place his finger back on the pulse of a nation he so masterfully depicted in such works as The Grapes of Wrath. His journey was captured within the pages of Travels with Charley, and all the colorful people and scenery make for a cross-country story that one might think Kerouac would have seen if he’d not been on so much *ahem* coffee. My time in Maine taught me…

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It’s been a busy month here at the Fictional Café. In case you were on vacation, out at the beach or having a barbecue, here’s a recap. We started our second serial podcast in August. (You can find our first here). Every Saturday morning, we invite you to wake up with Jack – our resident novelist and founding father of the Fictional Café – to hear the next chapter of Nate Flowers and company in our podcast of Madrone. August also marked the second time we published a serial story. We thought Adam Gottfried’s supernatural, Gothic thriller was too good to merely excerpt for the Café. So we chose to post it in three installments, which you can read here. One more shout out before we get to the batting order for September. Last month,…

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