Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2020 i Creative Nonfiction

THE DAY BEFORE she had brain surgery, my mom couldn’t find the word for pen. In the ICU afterward, when asked if she was a boy or a girl, she blurted out, “Boy!” then swore. The speech therapist took notes and left the room. My mother grumbled, “Bitch,” clear as day. This was not her nature, though it seemed an appropriate response. “Shoot me if I can’t talk,” she said a few days later. “Really.” She had a glioblastoma, a cancer with a median survival rate of twelve to eighteen months. She had surgery six months after she was diagnosed and, somewhat miraculously, lived for three and a half more years. After the operation, her ability to speak reemerged, though it ebbed and flowed. We sometimes thought her language was…

IT WAS THE MIDDLE of March 2007, a month after my seven-year-old son had died at home from a bacterial infection we’d initially thought was just the flu. I was sitting on the living room couch, facing the fireplace and the charred logs from the night before. My husband, Matt, had left to drive our four-and-six-year-old sons to school. Outside, gray clouds stretched to the horizon. Maybe it would rain later. There was certainly no chance of sun. My friend Rose sat next to me, our feet resting on the coffee table. As we talked, the stereo played a mix of songs that moaned in harmony with my mood: Ray LaMontagne asking, “Will I always feel this way?” in a tone that suggested the empty feeling would last forever. I…

IT TAKES TIME for a self, with all its flaws and peculiarities, to bend itself out of the universe. It begins with us recognizing our image in the mirror. Our caregivers tell us stories about the past and the present, what’s happening around us, and what we had to do with it. We begin to contribute to these little stories about ourselves. We realise we’re goal-directed—we want things and we try to get them. We grasp that we’re surrounded by other minds that are also goal-directed. We understand ourselves to be a certain category of human—a girl, a boy, working-class—of whom others have specific expectations. We have power and have done things. These pockets of story memory slowly begin to connect and cohere. They form plots that become imbued with…

I PAY FOR my kids’ religious upbringing in monthly installments. Every summer, I fill out a little green card that establishes the figure that will be autodrafted out of our checking account for the next twelve months. There are the synagogue’s dues, which are steep, and then the tuition for my three kids to attend religious school on Sunday mornings. A building fee—payable over five years—is leveraged on all members. It gets expensive, so there are price cuts for people under thirty-five and deeper price cuts for people under thirty. I ask the woman who works in the business office if there’s any way my husband and I might pretend we’re thirty-four for the third year in a row. Kevin looks at our budget and reminds me that we spend…

THE PAST IS present, and the present isn’t yet. We are what we remember plus the current circumstance. Time hurtles forward, but look at us contradicting ourselves as we zig and we zag all over the place. Those of us who wish to write memoir—to engage with the facts and confessingly subvert them, to measure the actual scene against the aspiration—have a challenge. We forget too much, and we’re overwhelmed by what we remember. We work so very hard to hold our storytelling frames, but paradoxically our experiences can seem less true when we present them as one breathless continuum. But what if we allow our writing to reflect the fragmented nature of life itself? What if we rely on white space and seams, celebrate explicit contradictions, make more room…

JoshZimmerer I’m 7 and with my best-friend at Burger King, a Nickelodeon Slime Slushie in his hand. “I can remember anything forever,” I fib. I hold my hands in the shape of a camera up to my face, my eyes—apertures that catch so little. “I’ll remember you here,” and nothing else. 2 Dec 19 PaulCrenstorm When we were kids my brother recorded messages and hid the recorder around the house. We’d be watching tv and hear “You will die soon” or “I am here to haunt you.” But the scariest message came 40 years later from the hospital. “Call me,” his voicemail said. “It’s bad.” 10 Dec 19 DebsValidation Someone just butt-dialed my work line; I’m sitting here listening to traffic in an unknown city because I want to escape.…

KALESHION isn’t a word in the dictionary. It’s a word on your barber’s wall, handwritten beneath a photo of a bald head. There are other photos up there with made-up words to identify other haircuts, but your father never selects those, because they require hair. Male preschoolers should not have hair, your father believes; that’s a crime to which he’ll no more be party than to genocide. Your friends’ fathers feel similarly, so your friends are bald too. But as they turn seven or eight and certainly by nine, their fathers let them try different styles, while yours keeps making you get a kaleshion until you are ten. What’s the deal with that? You don’t know. All you know is he relaxes his stance in the nick of time, because…

EVERY TIME I talk about the shooting, I dream my dog is murdered. I am standing in a field in the twilight, high grass painted black against the glowing, lavender-gold sky. My dog has run away. A man is calling her by her name, and she’s running toward him, not me. I can tell from the tone of his voice that he isn’t calling her out of love and concern, that there’s hate beneath the honey in his voice, and when Daisy comes to him, he says, “I’ll teach you to run away from me again,” and I see his hand, clutching a hammer, rising high above his head, and he brings it down on her over and over and over again. He beats her to death and I stand…

I. Hon, just try to avoid a. Comparing i. Other homes to your home 1. Born and raised to moved around a lot 2. Family heirlooms to family conflict ii. Other moms to your mom 1. Back rubs to “rub some dirt in it” 2. Homemade soup to microwave meals b. Allowing yourself to think i. It would have been different if you 1. Had a different mother a. Terrycloth, instead of wire 2. Had a different father a. Protecting, instead of passive 3. Had been a “better daughter” a. You were a kid b. You were a kid c. You were a kid c. Saying i. “I’m sorry for being” 1. My own person 2. Ambitious 3. Gay a. You must never say this out loud, dear ii. “Mom,…

NEW FACULTY Michael Leong, Anthony McCann RECENT GUESTS Kevin Young, Roxane Gay, George Saunders SCHOLARSHIPS & TASHIPS AVAILABLE AT THE APEX of creative experimentation, CalArts’ dynamic and innovative MFA Creative Writing program is designed for writers to explore a range of forms and styles. Rather than limit students’ courses of study towards a single genre, students have the freedom to explore fiction, poetry, and nonfiction through an exciting mix of workshops, seminars, and labs intended to inspire the generation of new methods, fresh forms, and expanded practices. Weaving a path through the Institute’s course offerings, the program’s four concentrations, Writing + Its Publics, Documentary Strategies, Image + Text, and Writing + Performativity, foster interdisciplinary techniques and approaches as students cultivate their writing alongside the other arts. CalArts MFA writers are…