Brookside Review

The Brookside Review, unlike The Paris Review, did not start out as a cover for a CIA cloak-and-dagger operation in Europe. This collection is rather an outgrowth of the Brookside Writers Workshop in Berkeley, California. Created by nine different writers, the pieces range from short stories to excerpts from novels, from poems to essays, from slice-of-life vignettes to a short play. They take you on a magical ride through time and space, touching on universal themes such as coming of age, passion and existential quest, viewed through such lenses as a perilous 15th-century Caribbean adventure, a time-travel murder, a canine mystery a la Sherlock Holmes, a graduation speech gone off the rails and a philosophizing teapot. Each writer's unique voice unfurls like a delicate butterfly from a cocoon where the life cycle begins with imagination, becomes words on paper and then emerges with wings, the metamorphosis complete. Or as the late workshop founder Mae Z. Meidav characterized the creative process, writing as transformation.