Search
SIGN UP
Email Us
Facebook

Author: Michael Brian O’Keefe

Past Issues

Issue #2

The Umgebung

Bucky McMahon

Sort of a Christmas Story

No one at the Christmas party seemed particularly interested when Bird brought up Jakob von Uexküll’s insight into the mind of the tick. The tick? people said to Bird, eyebrows raised, shoulders turning ever so slightly towards an exit. Are we talking ticks? I wouldn’t think a tick had much of a mind. Exactly! Bird said. As von Uexküll pointed out, the tick’s simple sensory apparatus recognizes only three aspects of the physical world: a sensitivity to sunlight which leads it to the top of a blade of grass; the smell of butyric acid from the sebaceous follicles of mammals, which tells it when to let go and fall; and the heat of blood which guides it through the hair to its dinner. In von Uexküll’s theory that’s the tick’s umwelt—it’s self-world—the specific way in which it is embedded in the umgebung, the otherwise unknowable reality which surrounds us all. Though surrounding isn’t quite accurate…

Title Fight

Janet Marshall Watkins

“How Come We Have to Have the Girl Coach?”

Roadkill

Steve Watkins

Something Smells. Must Be Those Confederate Street Signs.

Issue #1

O, Brother

Steve Watkins

This Getting Old, These Failing Hearts

A Modest Proposal

James Noll

(With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)

Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations

Why Pie & Chai

Janet Marshall Watkins

Expanding Minds, Forging Connections, Sweetening Lives

We’re launching Pie & Chai Magazine for a simple reason: to provide good writers with a place to tell good stories, the kind worth sharing. In these stories—under the broad categories of Deep Dives, Being Human, Prescriptions, LOL, Etcetera, and 22401(ish)—we hope to move, enlighten, and amuse you, and draw you in to a creative community.

We aren’t here to make money. We won’t sell subscriptions, we won’t run ads, we won’t pirate your data, and our contributors won’t get paid. Everything here will exist because someone cared enough to create it. For free.

All Categories

Deep Dives

Contrary to Life

Steve Watkins

Fool’s Gold
Years ago, I took my daughter Maggie to India. She was 14 at the time, and we found ourselves early one morning wrapped in blankets and drinking chai on the balcony of a small hillside hotel overlooking a wide bend in the upper reaches of the Ganges. We were near the village of Lakshman Jhula, just north of Rishikesh in the mountain state of Uttarakhand. The valley below us was thick with rising fog, but as the clouds slowly lifted we saw white-clad figures making their way down to the rocks and sand on a wide point bar at the river’s edge.

Letter to a College President

Janet Marshall Watkins

The Mary Washington Way

When University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino found out students had once again erected tents in Jefferson Square to protest the war in Gaza, he decided to make his way to the grassy square rather than call in Virginia State Police. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon, April 27, and a dozen 20-somethings were sitting inside the tents, eating snacks and studying for exams. Campus police were already there monitoring the situation as they had been since the sit-in started the day before. The students weren’t being disruptive or violent in any way, Paino said later. “By all accounts, they were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.” 

Being Human

The Beat

Michael Brian O’Keefe

A Police Cadet in 1970s D.C.

Prescriptions

Cell Block

Steve Watkins

Clear and Present

Shortly into my first year teaching English and International Baccalaureate Lang & Lit at Mountain View High School in Stafford County, Virginia—the first day, actually—I knew I was going to have to do something about the cellphones. If a school shooter had blasted his way through the door to our classroom, the kids might have videoed first, posted on social media second, and only then looked around for somewhere to hide. And that’s IF they’d been able to pull their faces away from whatever was streaming on their iPhone screens to even notice. Not that I allowed them to be on their phones. They were just that good at sneaking them out, and that uncaring about my disapprobation and orders for them to put the damn things away already so we could get back to discussing the implications of the curious elliptical passage at the end of chapter two in The Great Gatsby. (A drunk Nick Carraway, the narrator, is standing in the bedroom of the photographer Mr. McKee, who is sitting on the bed in his underwear.)

Letter to a College President

Janet Marshall Watkins

The Mary Washington Way

When University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino found out students had once again erected tents in Jefferson Square to protest the war in Gaza, he decided to make his way to the grassy square rather than call in Virginia State Police. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon, April 27, and a dozen 20-somethings were sitting inside the tents, eating snacks and studying for exams. Campus police were already there monitoring the situation as they had been since the sit-in started the day before. The students weren’t being disruptive or violent in any way, Paino said later. “By all accounts, they were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.” 

LOL

Letter to Trump

Hugh Lowry

Mexico’s Just Sitting There Waiting for You. Step on It.

Porn Free

Amy Satterthwaite Pappas

A Cub Reporter Makes the Front Page

22401-ish

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Penny Parrish

Late October
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

–Robert Frost

Cell Block

Steve Watkins

Clear and Present

Shortly into my first year teaching English and International Baccalaureate Lang & Lit at Mountain View High School in Stafford County, Virginia—the first day, actually—I knew I was going to have to do something about the cellphones. If a school shooter had blasted his way through the door to our classroom, the kids might have videoed first, posted on social media second, and only then looked around for somewhere to hide. And that’s IF they’d been able to pull their faces away from whatever was streaming on their iPhone screens to even notice. Not that I allowed them to be on their phones. They were just that good at sneaking them out, and that uncaring about my disapprobation and orders for them to put the damn things away already so we could get back to discussing the implications of the curious elliptical passage at the end of chapter two in The Great Gatsby. (A drunk Nick Carraway, the narrator, is standing in the bedroom of the photographer Mr. McKee, who is sitting on the bed in his underwear.)

Charc Bites

Maggie Johnson

“How ‘bout them hors d’oeuvres ain’t they sweet? Little piece of cheese, little piece of meat!” –Mason Williams

Etcetera

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Penny Parrish

Late October
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;

Expanding Minds, Forging Connections, Sweetening Lives

Categories

Contact

Write to Steve Watkins at [email protected]. If you’re interested in submitting something for publication, best to run your ideas by me first. You can do that by emailing me at [email protected].

Facebook

PieAndChaiMagazine.com  |  Copyright © 2022  |  All Rights Reserved | Designed by Metro Nova Creative  |  Fredericksburg Website Designer