#1: Hospital Halls
by Meg Boscov
[Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a series of creative nonfiction pieces by the fine art photographer Meg Boscov, who in Spring 2024 was diagnosed with a rare cancerous tumor, which was removed. She continues treatment to prevent its return. Click on the photo below to view it at full size.]
Armed with color, I walked the hospital halls. I imaged my body brimming with flowing shock-resistant blue. A blue that felt like a sigh from the infinite cyan sky to the depths of the lapis ocean. The blue of a heavenly morning glory blossom who gracefully opens and closes each day accepting the all of it with bittersweet ease and peace.
And as if I were backlit, my body was lined with an orange-yellow glow. A symbol of my strength, my life force. It was the sun low in the sky on a bitter winter day lighting up the golden leaves on the beech trees who didn’t get the note to let go and fall. It was the color of Rubeckia whose opening is a marvel of reaching, stretching slowly as if to savor every moment of its fleeting awakened life. After shockingly cruel behavior from my surgeon, I added a much needed layer of protection, a white translucent glow circling me at all times.
Seemingly vulnerable but truly impregnable.
From an outsider’s standpoint, little me, barely 105 pounds, walked in her flimsy hospital gown attached on one side to an IV pole and on the other to a hospital technician. But that of course was not the full, truer image.
Meg Boscov’s background in performing arts put her on an artistic journey that continues to focus on storytelling—on discovering and communicating the creative and emotional story in each image.Her award-winning photography has appeared in numerous in-person, print, and web exhibitions, including the Photo Review, the Shanti Arts Still Point Gallery and Quarterly Journal, the Foley Gallery in NYC, the PhotoPlace in Middlebury, VT, and various galleries and art centers in the Philadelphia area. In her book HEALING VISIONS, fifty-two international writers respond to her images with exactly one-hundred words, and her book HAND-IN-HAND pairs her macro-photography with micro-essays, one for each week of the year. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and currently resides in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where she continually finds personal joy and creative energy in her surroundings.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/15 • Abbie Doll
09/22 • Karen Regen Tuero
09/29 • Amy Speace
10/06 • Jennifer Edwards
10/13 • Joseph O’Day
10/20 • Carolyn Zaikowski
10/27 • Sunmisola Odusola
11/03 • Sara Cassidy
11/10 • Liz Abrams-Morley
11/17 • TBD
11/24 • TBD
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12/29 • TBD
11/17 • TBD
11/24 • TBD
12/01 • TBD
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12/29 • TBD