All posts of Mia Pohlman

Solo Travel: Get out and explore

I was 22 and in Venice, Italy, for four days by myself, walking through winding streets while the city was waking up, women hanging laundry on lines between windows, setting out pastries they’d already baked by breads on shelves, men pushing wheelbarrows over cobblestones to pick up trash. I napped in the park as teenage […]
5 months ago

Make Paint with Monica Foltz

When she was three years old, nurses noticed Monica Foltz’s aptitude for painting while she spent time in the hospital. They suggested to her parents that they put her in art lessons, and as the youngest of art teacher Brenda Seyer’s students, Foltz began her lifelong journey with and love for creating. Foltz says even […]
5 months ago

from the editor, Winter 2023: present

These past few months, I’ve been working towards a goal I felt incapable of achieving. The end product I wanted to get to felt far away, overwhelming; my progress and my own ability, discouraging. So, I mapped out deadlines and timeframes for myself; if I could mercilessly work toward the goal by adhering to a […]
5 months ago

Making an Art Journaling Page with Ann Flowers Gosser

Ann Flowers Gosser started making art as a child and decided in high school “there was no question” it’s what she wanted to continue to do in college. As an art major at Murray State University in Murray, Ky., she studied printmaking and then went to graduate school at Northern Illinois University to study printmaking. […]
5 months ago

Sew with Rachel Bohnert

When Rachel Bohnert looked at a damaged quilt her great-grandmother Emma Steffens had made, she saw how it could be repurposed into a jacket to give it new life. After convincing her mother to let her cut it up, she sewed a jacket for herself from it, as well as a vest. “It’s amazing that […]
5 months ago

meet along the way: Anna Marie Berkbuegler

This story was first published as “Faces of Southeast Missouri: Anna Marie Berkbuegler” in the October 2023 issue of The Best Years. Anna Marie Berkbuegler has been all the way up and down the Mississippi River as a cook on a riverboat. She has traveled on the Ohio River, from Pittsburgh on down. And she […]
6 months ago

from the editor: Fall 2023, “lineage”

My mom is really good at raising kids. While I know that could sound like bragging, and maybe it is, I am grateful to her not only for the way she raised me, but also for the ways she has taught me about how to parent in a way that teaches children to trust themselves […]
8 months ago

Parenting: Karey and Jason Schaitel, foster and adoptive parents

Babies start out blank, clean, new, and parents get to be the ones who expose them to whatever they will know and how they will know it. Like teachers teach who they are, parents parent who they are as their children’s first teachers, passing along bits of themselves and the lessons they’ve learned throughout this […]
8 months ago

Parenting: Velencia Morris-Young and James Young, biological parents

Babies start out blank, clean, new, and parents get to be the ones who expose them to whatever they will know and how they will know it. Like teachers teach who they are, parents parent who they are as their children’s first teachers, passing along bits of themselves and the lessons they’ve learned throughout this […]
8 months ago