Creative Nonfiction Spring 2022

Us? We’re—you know. We’re … fine. We’re not really fine, of course; no one is, right now. And yet. “I hope this finds you doing ok in these strange times,” our emails still begin, before getting down to the business at hand. (Thankfully, there is still business at hand, work to be done.) When the lockdowns arrived in spring 2020, we had several open calls for submissions. We didn’t read most of those essays right away, and when we finally did, we found that many were interesting snapshots of the pandemic’s early days but generally didn’t age very well. Unsurprisingly, almost none of them anticipated how strangely the world would change, or the scale of loss we would come to experience. This issue includes CNF’s first examples of “pandemic literature”—essays written…

Congratulations to all of us! It was, after all, recently our golden anniversary. Sort of. Fifty years ago, on Valentine’s Day of 1972, New York magazine published “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe,” a proclamation that, it is clear from this vantage point, provided a standard and direction and a way of unifying nonfiction writers—essayists, journalists, memoirists—into one cohesive, albeit loosely determined, category that we now call creative nonfiction. To be fair, this is sort of an arbitrary anniversary to celebrate. Much of what Wolfe was saying in 1972 he had said before, as had a few others. But this article was a wake-up call, what I believe was the beginning of the changing of the guard. A symbolic moment when all of the different…

Maybe demolitions are actually renovations, which has me thinking that this world is being rebuilt big time—although, sure, right now it feels awfully torn apart. I say: Let’s wait and see? Or that’s what I tell myself as the mandatory evacuation area creeps closer to my home and acre of land in the foothills of Colorado. The nearby mountains are on fire, and so is most of the West. Demolished forests near and far land on my house in the form of ash. As I turn on the sprinklers to prevent dry-grass fires, and stare at the milky sky and red sun, I wonder: Is this what renovation feels like? Fires bring renewal, sure, and these forests needed to burn. Their tinderbox status, like our society’s, is real. But this…

On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered twenty-six people. Twenty of them were first graders. I have a hard time remembering that number. I have to look it up every time I mention it. Sometimes I remember it as seventeen, sometimes as four hundred, sometimes as infinite. Infinite bodies, infinite death, infinite pain. I remember everything else about that day, though: my twin daughters, one home sick from kindergarten and the other at school, well and unknowing. I remember President Obama, I remember weeping with him, I remember leaning against a door frame in my home and praying it would hold me. I remember the parents on TV, shattered. I remember picking my daughter up from school and being able to…

“Step away when it becomes overwhelming. I know it may sound counterintuitive, but getting up, taking a walk, and ignoring the writing can sometimes help. Then, when you find yourself alone and capable of thinking without interruption (I prefer the shower!), work out an idea, a frame—a path into the subject at hand. Sometimes not writing is the best thing one can do for their writing. ADRIANA E. RAMÍREZ, award-winning author of Dead Boys The best advice I’ve ever received about writing trauma comes implicitly from Lidia Yuknavitch and her book The Chronology of Water. I was often told not to address my trauma, to focus on ‘nicer’ things. Yuknavitch’s book gave me permission to write from a place of uncertainty and to write with honesty about my own experience—to…

CANCER JOKES & THE HERMIT CRAB ESSAY The past two years have been anything but funny. And yet, to remake my mind during the pandemic, as virus variants and sociopolitical atrocities floated through my news feed, I turned to female stand-up comedians. It all started with Tig Notaro’s 2012 comedy album, Live. Recorded shortly after Notaro’s breast cancer diagnosis, the album deals with content that doesn’t at first appear to be very funny; in addition to the cancer diagnosis, Notaro shares she’s just lost her mother, and that the hospital accidentally sent her dead mom a satisfaction survey. Then she uses the survey’s form to structure the segment. At the time, I was preparing to teach a creative nonfiction class on the hermit crab form. As I toggled between the…