Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2016 från Creative Nonfiction

There’s an element of mystery to the weather; that’s what keeps it interesting. THE WEATHER IS ALWAYS SURPRISING US; maybe that’s why we like to talk about it so much. Of course, we can predict the weather, to some extent—probably more precisely now than ever before in human history—but as Al Roker points out in our interview with him in this issue, the weather is behaving in extreme and sometimes unpredictable ways as a result of climate change. There’s an element of mystery to it; that’s what keeps it interesting. At Creative Nonfiction, we appreciate the importance of keeping things interesting. Of course, you want a magazine to be at least somewhat predictable, but I think one of the elements that’s helped us (ahem) weather the storms of the past…

WINNER! Best Essay Prize AMARIS KETCHAM teaches interdisciplinary courses at the University of New Mexico. Her creative work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Rattle, and the Utne Reader, and is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review. 1. All of my patients had been struck by lightning. The summer between high school and college, I worked as a physical therapy technician at a family practice in Eminence, Kentucky. The town was small and strange. In my memory, it hailed every afternoon that summer. Even though I knew correlation does not equal causation, I could not help but conjoin two there-universal facts: not only had my patients all been struck by lightning, but they were all ambidextrous. According to the National Safety Council, the odds of dying by lightning strike are…

LEXI PANDELL is a Bay Area-based writer and a research editor for WIRED magazine. She has been published by the Atlantic, Condé Nast Traveler, Grist, and others. She is at work on her first novel. I GREW UP IN A LITTLE HOUSE perched high in the Oakland Hills, with a wooden deck that jutted above the forest and overlooked the cities of the San Francisco Bay Area. At sunset, I would pad out barefoot, careful to sidestep any splintered panels, to watch the orange sky turn deep blue, see dusk fall over the glittering cars on the Bay Bridge, and hear the whistle of the train in the flatlands roll up to meet my ears. But then, appearing on the horizon, the fog would unfurl, first consuming the bridge and…

SEJAL H. PATEL is a San Francisco-based writer and criminal defense lawyer. A former federal prosecutor, she is a graduate of Northwestern Law School and Harvard Divinity School. Her essays have been published in The Rumpus, Brevity, Carve Magazine, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and The Champion. She is working on a memoir entitled Seven Almonds. HERE IS A QUESTION for our times: can memory represent truth when technology can reveal far more than we might remember? I answer that question differently based on what professional hat I am wearing. The attorney in me knows that a video or photograph is better evidence of an event than memory alone. As a writer, though, my memories feel holy to me—an amalgam of fact and feeling where vague recollection can, in itself, be the…

In 2005, while cross-country skiing, MARK NYSTROM spotted an oak leaf with its stalk stuck in the snow. As the wind blew, the leaf’s edges carved into the snow, making a temporary drawing. Inspired to make his own drawings with the wind, Nystrom outfitted a ballpoint pen with sails and suspended it over some paper. For an entire day, the wind pushed the pen across the surface of the paper, recording each shift in wind speed and direction. Delighted with the results, he repeated the process for thirty-four days. Curiosity about the forces that made these “wind drawings” led Nystrom to develop digital wind-drawing processes. Using weather instruments and custom electronics, he collects wind data every second and writes software to interpret it. To date, Nystrom has developed thirty-two digital…

LAURA JONES is a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist living in Madison, Wisconsin. She writes for the alternative weekly The Isthmus and Madison Magazine. Currently, she’s an MFA student at Northwestern University, studying creative nonfiction. EL RENO WAS MASSIVE, the widest twister in recorded history. Due to its unprecedented wind speeds in excess of 295 mph, it was initially rated an EF5, the indicator used by the National Weather Service to forewarn total destruction. At two and a half miles long, it was the largest storm chasers had ever seen. By the time the vortex dissipated, the El Reno tornado was responsible for eight fatalities, 151 injuries, and an estimated $35-$40 million in damages. Jennifer Brindley, a professional photographer and amateur storm chaser, watched the ominous structure form from the southeast.…

TIM BASCOM's memoir Running to the Fire (University of Iowa Press, 2015) is about his missionary family leaving the town of Troy, Kansas, to return to Ethiopia during a Marxist revolution. It follows on the heels of Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia, which won the Bakeless Prize in Nonfiction. Bascom, whose essays have been selected for Best American Travel Writing and The Best Creative Nonfiction, directs the creative writing program at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa. IN THE WINTER OF 1970, my family came “home” to the United States, and my father opened a doctor’s office in the little town of Troy, Kansas. We had been in Ethiopia for five years. I couldn’t remember having lived anywhere else, and I missed the open hillsides, so different from…

ANITA HUSLIN is a writer and teacher of creative nonfiction. She has worked as an editor and reporter for the Washington Post, the New York Times, National Public Radio, and other national outlets, where she has focused on communicating complex, rich subjects through narrative storytelling. She recently moved to Montana, reported to be “the last best place” for writers. STORIES, GOETHE TELLS US, are a human service, a way to share with another person “how things have gone with others and what he has to expect from life,” to instruct that “whatever happens, it befalls him as a man and not as one who is specially fortunate or unfortunate.” We tell stories to suggest sense and meaning when there seems to be none and to create a semblance of order…

IN FEBRUARY 1998, as NBC’s Late Night show went head-to-head with the winter Olympics on CBS, ratings plunged for host Conan O’Brien. In a sketch called “Nobody’s Watching,” O’Brien and his team made “confessions” they’d otherwise never get away with on-air. He praised the widely loathed ’90s boy band Hanson and smoked cigarettes while bandleader Max Weinberg described murdering Bruce Springsteen’s original drummer. One of the biggest laughs came after Al Roker strode onto the set. “Nobody’s watching, right?” Roker asked O’Brien. He turned, looked straight into the camera, and said, “I have no interest whatsoever in the weather.” The joke worked because, for many people, Al Roker is the weather. Since 1990, he’s walked America through rain and sleet and sun—and quite a few historic storms—on NBC’s Today show,…

RUNNER-UP! Best Essay Prize ASHLEY HAY's essays have appeared in anthologies including Best Australian Essays and Best Australian Science Writing. Her most recent novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and received the Colin Roderick Award from the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies. It will be published in the United States this spring. AFTER THE MILLENNIUM TURNED PAST Y2K and the world didn’t end, my friend Steve decided to leave Sydney and move to India for a while. He went to Dharamsala—to learn Tibetan, mainly, though he did other things there, too, including waging war with local monkeys that stole his underpants and watching a cow sled past his house—at speed, and quite surprised—during a mudslide. He also befriended a Kashmiri man called Altaf, who…

GLENDA REED is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Next Step Fund. She is currently working on a memoir about hitchhiking around the world on sailboats. You can connect with her online at Hitchsailing.com and Facebook.com/Hitchsailing. When the sea is calm, every ship has a good captain. —SAILING PROVERB I WATCHED THE SLEEPING OCEAN from a corner of the cockpit. In the deep darkness, blind waves broke and collapsed in rhythmic, drawn-out hisses, luring me to sleep though they misted me with spray. Even in sleep, the ocean swell rolled forward, constant, like a shark that never stops swimming. I had felt that I could go on forever, too, sailing west without stopping…

BEATRICE LAZARUS's poetry has appeared in The Lyric, Pearl, JAMA, Poem, Sou’wester, and Plainsongs, among others. She won the 2013 Briar Cliff Review Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the editor of Lay Bare the Canvas: New England Poets on Art. THAT FEBRUARY MORNING back in ’78, the trees in our yard stood like skeletons, as if something had frightened the life out of them. In the eerie stillness, the air heavy with humidity, mourning doves cooed nervously, huddled in the eaves of our cottage. I watched birds move in squads across the gray sky in a ritual of coalescence. Melancholic birdsong was embedded in the distant, cold air, the music faint as I cast breadcrumbs and sunflower seeds on the frozen lawn. Suddenly, a…

DIANE SEUSS's most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, was published in 2015 by Graywolf Press. Seuss is Writer-in-Residence at Kalamazoo College. Eden: An Outline I. The question has been can I accommodate this Eden A. Without apples or Adam B. The only thing slithering, the black sky wriggling free of the stars C. The smoke tree 1. hazy poofs of rusty fuzz 2. like a circle of unshaved redheads in mid-striptease D. Not hyacinths, not hydrangeas 1. but six-foot-tall stalks covered in unlanguaged vulgarities 2. put my ear close and hear something like Fwahhh a) Fwahhh, darling 3. the lipsticked center 4. stamen the color of cream beaten toward butter E. Smoke tree sitting back and blowing smoke rings II. The erotic as Eden A. In grade school, a kid said…

TINY TRUTHS from winner of the daily #cnftweet contest Can you tell a true story in a single tweet? To join in the fun, follow us @cnfonline and tag your entries with #cnftweet. Your micro-essay could appear in the next issue of CNF! Desisoccermom I am trying to forget the rain-soaked evening, us standing under the leaky canopy of a chai stall, your wife calling on your cell 5 Sep 15 spitballarmy The tornado drops bits of Tuscaloosa in Birmingham yards: shingles, chunks of insulation, a bank deposit slip, a woman's swimsuit. 1 May 11 artmercenary "Being struck by ground lightning has its benefits," she pauses for either effect or coffee, "I've never slept better." 12 May 11 kathyboyg For the hurricane run, I packed practical: records, meds, money. My…