Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2022 i Creative Nonfiction

This issue of Creative Nonfiction was made possible by support from: https://julietleahillmansimondsfoundation.org/ https://www.arts.pa.gov/Pages/default.aspx Creative Nonfiction receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. https://www.arts.gov/ It goes without saying that the world around us constantly changes, but surely the pace has picked up over the past couple of years. Perhaps it’s that the COVID-19 pandemic, in breaking most if not all of our routines, has also given us a fresh perspective on what seemed normal, and the opportunity to reconsider the many ways in which “normal” didn’t always mean “good.” Here at Creative Nonfiction, we’ve used this time not only to redesign the magazine you’re…

The lyric essay escapes its hermit crab shell to wander free Whenever I teach my course The Lyric Essay, I start with Stephen Dunn’s “Little Essay on Form.” A single line—“We build the corral as we reinvent the horse”—makes up the entire piece and says it all, exemplifying what can be the reciprocal nature of form and content in creative nonfiction. I came across it in 2000, in an issue of Seneca Review devoted to the lyric essay, and the image has stayed with me ever since, that shape-shifting horse forever morphing in my imagination. I’ve been teaching lyric forms in creative nonfiction for more than two decades. In the early years, I scrawled Dunn’s credo on the chalkboard in my terrible handwriting; later, in barely discernable dry-erase marker (why…

The Icelandic word for dinosaur is risaeðla, which means giant lizard. Bergmál, the word for echo, means language of mountains. To say wedding, you use brúðkaup, which means to buy a bride. Quotation marks are goose feet, bras are breast-holders, and planets are wandering stars. If I tell you I’m in love with a guy with gray-blue eyes and an accent, I’m really saying I am imprisoned by affection. Many summer nights, this guy—my husband—and I sit on a patch of damp grass in a suburb of Reykjavík, watching the midnight sun smolder and bouncing between languages. Half-Icelandic and raised in the United States, I have forgotten many of the words I knew as a child, and I laugh as if hearing them for the first time. Sometimes I get…

How cooperation sparks creative adaptation and creates a stronger literary ecosystem If you learned about Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory in school, most likely it was presented as a straightforward explanation for how species have evolved to become what they are today. Individuals with different traits competed, and the strongest traits became dominant over time. Likewise, in the introductory class to creative nonfiction I took as an undergraduate in the mid-aughts, the evolution of the genre was presented as a simple one: memoirists had mated with traditional journalists, and they’d had a 1960s love child whose name at birth was New Journalism. It was a new species that broke the old boundaries and filled a niche in the ecology of literature. Later, when New Journalism grew up, it took on a…

Between March 22 and October 21, 2021, the following individuals and organizations contributed to the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. Their generosity makes the magazine and CNF’s other publications and educational programs possible. We are tremendously grateful for their support. PATRONS • $1,000 OR MORE Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, Steven Kurutz, National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University FRIENDS • $100 OR MORE The Blackbud Giving Fund, Jerry Nelson, Mimi Schwartz, Sandra Taylor, Syona Varty FANS Carolyn Alessio, Linda Allison, Patricia Anderson, Melissa Ashcraft, Anthony Attardo, Eric Bader, Leah Baer, Judith Baldassari, Gloria Ballard, Anne Barker, Anne Barriault, Sean Barton, Bonnie Bartos, Dana Baunton, DeAnna Beachley, Denise Beck-Clark, Denise Beckfield, Kathy Bell, Katherine Binford, Ellen Birrell,…

Many of my students, and even some younger colleagues, think—assume—that creative nonfiction is just part of the literary ecosystem; it’s always been around, like fiction or poetry. In many ways, of course, they are right: the kind of writing that is now considered to be under the creative nonfiction umbrella has a long and rich history. Many, of course, look to Michel de Montaigne as the father of the modern essay, but, to my mind, the more authentic roots of creative nonfiction are in the eighteenth century: Daniel Defoe’s historical narratives, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, Thomas Paine’s pamphlets, and Samuel Johnson’s essays built a foundation for later writers such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. That is to say, even if the line between…

A common misconception about literary history is that women weren’t writing professionally or significantly before Jane Austen. To talk about women’s historical oppression, Virginia Woolf famously conjured up an imaginary sister for William Shakespeare, naming her Judith in A Room of One’s Own in 1929. But in the early eighteenth century, when Queen Anne ruled Great Britain, three women authors later to be popularly known as “the fair triumvirate of wit” ruled the stage, the page, and the press: poet/playwright/novelist, travel writer, and supposed international spy Aphra Behn; Eliza Haywood, pioneering romance novelist and (later) editor and chief contributor to the first British periodical marketed to and written by women, the Female Spectator; and author, playwright, and political pamphleteer Delarivier Manley. If not for archaeological digs undertaken by feminist critics…

As wilderness disappears, what happens to nature writing? First, there was light—sparking, forking human consciousness. Then, an itch. Bears in Chauvet Cave, Japan’s Jōmon owls, a twenty-foot stone Kalahari python slithering from 68,000 BCE. We’ve always story-told the more-than-human universe. Even now. “Archaeologists dig up clues…” writes Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal, “and piece them together into a saga.” I am on the hunt for a new environmental saga. The roots of Nature’s epic start in early time, but let’s begin at the trunk—Thoreau through John Muir, Mary Austin, branches of Ed Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez, leafing out into Luis Alberto Urrea, Lauret Savoy, Drew Lanham. It’s reductive, but that’s what story does—condense the galactically unknowable into narrative. When I was younger and guiding backpackers in West…

One day not long after we’d moved to Jerusalem—we lived there from 2006 to 2007, when I was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv—my wife, Melanie, and I were just inside Jaffa Gate, the huge arched limestone entrance into the western side of the Old City. Melanie was taking photos of the gate and the Tower of David near it, the limestone tower like a medieval castle you’d see in a movie. Something David himself never laid eyes on, the walls and tower having been built by the Ottomans only after the Crusaders had been cleared out. I was standing, watching, and saw, just inside the gate, a kid beside a cart, a beat-up square green thing with bicycle tires for wheels. What lay atop it was…

HOLLY HAWORTH Beyond “Survival of the Fittest” hollyhaworth.com stalkingthewildspirit MARGARET KIMBALL My Brother Might Never Meet My Baby margaretkimball_ BRONSON LEMER How to Reintegrate lastdeployment BRET LOTT On Za’atar MARISA L. MANUEL Para TheSqueep chat_ace BRENDA MILLER Tell It Even More Slant brendamillerwriter.com CLINTON CROCKETT PETERS Our World, Ourselves clintoncrockettpeters.com KELLY PLANTE The Secret History of Creative Nonfiction kellyplante.com kelly__plante MOLLY SEPKOSKI ST. CLAIR What We Leave Behind mostclair MARGRÉT ANN THORS Gun Bubbles margretannthors.com Holly Haworth’s work appears in the New York Times Magazine, Orion, Oxford American, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her first book, about listening, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Margaret Kimball is the author of the graphic memoir And Now I Spill the Family Secrets (HarperCollins 2021). Her illustrated essays have been published in the Believer, Ecotone, Lit…

-normal Once, I saw an alien—is something I wish I could say. For me, the possibility of extraterrestrials has always held a certain brilliance. Child-me at times wondered whether I was really from space, if only because the idea of being human seemed absurd.1 But in truth, my feelings and features are as earthling as anyone else’s, which is to say, as complicated, unrelated, alien. They don’t always make sense, and they’re not always mine. Not consciously. But my feelings and features are inescapable. They are where I’m headed. Estoy escribiendo esto para mi. In Spanish, “para” is used to reference the destination of a journey.I only know this because of my hours of Spanish-language study.It’s not something I grew up knowing. It’s something I grew uplearning. My last name…

WILLIAM REAGAN @WilliamReagan Public transit offers a curbside seat to every stage of love’s rich pageant. The world may be continually evolving, but the crescendo and decay of ordinary romance still fills the bus with strange and beautiful music. 15 JULY 2014 She’s trying to read. He’s trying to flirt. Neither of them very successfully. 8 OCTOBER 2014 Making out on the bus stop bench, shameless in their passion, unable to imagine a day when they'll just sit and talk. Or just sit. 21 JULY 2015 On the bus with a leafy plant in a terracotta pot, she explains, “It’s his version of roses,” rolling her eyes to a female rider. 25 FEBRUARY 2016 Adorably close, each with an earbud of the same headphones, I imagine the breakup beginning, “No,…

Sejal Shah & Valerie Boyd first corresponded in 2016, after an essay by Shah appeared in Brevity’s special issue on race, racism, and racialization. Boyd, then coeditor of the Crux series in literary nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press, wrote to ask if Shah had a manuscript in progress. Since then, the two women, who’d previously only known each other on social media, have become friendly collaborators. Boyd edited Shah’s collection of essays, This Is One Way to Dance, for the UGA Press Crux series and has welcomed Shah as a guest at the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction that she directs at the university. In this lively conversation, which took place via Zoom in June 2021 and has been condensed and edited for clarity, they shared the…

25 SEPTEMBER 2015 We hiked the Kittatinny Ridge, clambering over rock. Above us streamed a thousand hawks, called south again. 14 OCTOBER 2016 Age has chopped the world into segments by distance, each segment viewable with a different pair of glasses. 20 OCTOBER 2017 We sang together in the darkness, a whole auditorium full, making me wish such unity weren’t so rare. 26 JULY 2019 Letting go happens in stages. We got rid of the litterboxes quickly, but today I noticed the pile of cat toys in the corner, still sitting there after six months. They will sit there for a while yet. 31 OCTOBER 2020 We hiked through brilliant October woods under a blue sky, the air fragrant with wet leaves and pine needles. And I tried not to…

14 OCTOBER 2011 My driveway repaved / in shimmering red and gold / one more leaf drifts down 19 JUNE 2015 Blackbird couple. A flurry of feathers, a flash of red and yellow epaulettes. Sometimes fighting and flirting look the same. 8 OCTOBER 2017 The dump truck hydraulic shovel pandemonium stops only Sundays. On our one quiet day, even the fridge-hum is too much noise. 20 JANUARY 2019 Trees, bird feeders, snow, all horizontal in the wind. A mouse dashes from a hole in the white, grabs a fallen seed and scoots in again. A woodpecker clings to the suet cage. Blizzard or not, we all need to eat. 24 FEBRUARY 2019 Caregiving for a parent with dementia is trying at best, but also rewarding in unexpected ways, like the…