The Orphan Age

04/22/2026

Week #19!

56 middle-American artists, musicians, writers, new-media creatives & thinkers so far!

hope you'll check it out. Feel free to reshare and/or submit your work...

THIS ISSUE:
* Fiction by Jon Lee Grafton
* PhotoArt by Jeff Hogue
* Music by Jerame Gray

NOTE: link is in the comments

04/09/2026

April may be the 'cruelest month' but it's also poetry month!

this week's issue includes: Jose Faus sharing poems by: Heid E. Erdrich, June Jordan and Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwish. Also a triptych of paintings by Lee Smalter and a World Cup essay by Lola.

link in the comments

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04/01/2026

…once more into the breach!

New issue is dedicated to the small things that add up to a full-court press (keeping with our ‘march madness’ theme 😉).

https://www.theorphan-age.com/the-orphanage-vol-1-13/

03/18/2026

top o the marnin’ and Póg mo thóin!

this week’s issue celebrates out celtic brothers and sisters and their art and thought.

First Lines Once upon a time a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road… ~ James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man March is the month God created to show people who don’t drink what a hangover feels like. ~ Garrison

03/12/2026

Well, we've gone and done it (again...). New issue chock full of poetry, comix and a snippet of fiction. hope everyone is weathering the whiplash of springtime in Missouri.

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First Lines You know more than you think you do. ~ Dr. Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care I can’t recall who said it: We all love a tantalizing mystery… but they were spot on. With so much of what’s interesting in writing these days

03/04/2026

With a growing weekly catalogue of issues, this week’s may be one of our favirites (so far 😉😎). … our ‘Punk’ issue:

- Visual-audio from z McGowin
- songs from the bent aesthetics of John Bersuch and his: Bacon Shoe, and Minds Under Cover
- visual graffiti from Dave Lackey (go see him behind the bar at 39th street’s Our House
- an interview with L Ron Drunkard of Red Kate and Black Sight Record Collective

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03/03/2026

OrphanAGE contributor, Jason Ryberg has a fine, fine new poem up. Go read it and make your day a better day!

https://www.thewiseowl.art/jason-ryberg?fbclid=IwZnRzaAQT2nNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEexCa6R-HyJqDOICY0ZULQFWhjVRk0LDa-iVdwRGudh2XxCcaViPQnc4enjNk_aem_kFMNANa3Wt1BSqAsl5E3Cw

Bringing the Appropriate Officials, a poem by Jason Ryberg

02/25/2026

and the Ladies have it! (and we’re not just talking team USA Women’s hockey). This week’s OrphanAGE turns the lights on creative work by three very talented women:

Poetry from Celeste Oster
Watercolor Paintings by Jeanne Kasten, and
3 musical works from Juliette Frost

good stuff; dig in & feel free to reshare!

First Lines A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses the moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. ~ Graham Greene, The End of the Affair In This Issue * Poetry by Celeste Oster * Paintings by Jeanne Bangs Kasten * Music by Juliette Frost

02/22/2026

Do you think? Do you write? Do you like being with others that do?

Seeking: Thoughtful cultural criticism exploring the whole of the modern human condition: what’s good, what’s not so good… [aka Essays & Cultural and Arts Criticism]

the OrphanAGE offers a platform

Criteria:

* Thoughtful
* Artful
* More than a Meme
* NOT a rant or screed
* mid-length (400-1,000ish words)
* more than invective and name calling
* brings to bear a wide, multi-disciplinarian watershed of arts & cultural understanding

Style note: the word ‘f**k’ does not make you cutting edge or counter-cultural [though, we certainly aren’t opposed to a good, emphatic “f$ck” when used to good advantage].

Submissions are open (but juried). We even pay a little for good writing and thinking…

visit: theOrphan-age.com