Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2019 från Creative Nonfiction

What’s the Story? I FIRST SAW this machine in the student union building at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. CMU is a way station in my various running routes, kind of a middle point where I can go to the bathroom, hydrate, and maybe even answer a text or two. But one day, walking through the union, I saw this Short Édition dispenser, nestled in a corner and surrounded by a few easy chairs and coffee table. It is a tall, narrow, and neatly designed device, and it invites you to do something really cool—press a button and get a short story. I pressed the button, and a story came right out for me on a long, narrow strip of paper. The Short Édition dispenser at CMU has two buttons,…

I HAVE A VIVID MEMORY of sitting next to my childhood best friend on her plaid couch, watching her older brother conquer his most recent video game obsession. The game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, centered around a protagonist named Link, who must defeat Ganondorf, the evil ruler of a tribe that had taken over the kingdom of Hyrule. As with previous versions of Zelda, the game progressed through battles, but this edition also had a music-making element, as Link (and, by extension, the player) learned to play songs on a magical ocarina that conferred special powers. It was the first video game that ever enthralled me, and we sat there for hours, watching the colorful, digitized mossy green and gold world unfold over the swirl of hair…

Student-Instructor: Geoff Martin Phone: low signal, no landline Office: The Montague Bookmill Contact Hours: 24/7 At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me. —DAVID SEDARIS, ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY Introductory Remarks: Congratulations! You quit your teaching job, left the city, and now find yourself camped out on other people’s furniture in a rental house in Western Massachusetts. And since you’ve gone and lost US work authorization during the move, making money is illegal (but living off your spouse’s salary is not). Welcome to your yearlong writing retreat. Some ancillary tips up front: housework may not be wage work,…

IT’S NOT ALWAYS EASY to tell someone you’re a game scholar, or that you use public and private dollars to harness the power of games and play for social good. Sometimes the reaction is, “How fun,” tinged with an underlying skepticism suggesting that what we do is not important. Sometimes people ask if you can hire their kid, who is “really into video games.” Occasionally, you get a “Thank you,” with sincere hope that we can do something to make the huge amount of time our kids—and, increasingly, adults—spend immersed in video games more productive and empowering. In our relentlessly achievement-driven society, it’s tempting to consider games and play as frivolous, but in fact, they serve many important purposes, providing opportunities to play with possible selves and futures; to collaborate…

WHEN I WAS TWELVE years old and starting to break competitive-swimming records, I read only books about athletes. I started with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. After that, Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, biographies of Olympic gymnast Carly Patterson and Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, and a tale of Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Major League outfielder whose career was ended by his alleged involvement in fixing the 1919 World Series. Convinced of Shoeless Joe’s innocence, I went so far as to send a letter to The Shoeless Joe Jackson Society, outlining all the reasons he should be inducted to the Hall of Fame. I think I was attracted to these sports books for the same reason my mother always thumbed through the shiny gossip magazines in…

MY FATHER’S MOTHER, Ma-Ma, taught me to play mah-jongg at the lucky age of nine. At first, she had refused. Her lips were so taut, her tiny mouth disappeared. “It’s a gambling game,” she spat, as if that should immediately disqualify it. “Why do you want to know?” I shrank back. Why was she acting as if I’d asked a personal question, prying into her past? I knew better. Besides, she’d already taught me casino, blackjack, five-and seven-card stud, and gin rummy. Wasn’t mah-jongg just another game? Little did I know of the custom, the flow, the excruciating etiquette. Maybe Ma-Ma was thinking, She’s too young to learn all those rules. She’ll just be an annoyance. Or perhaps she was hinting at something more insidious—that I might have inherited our…

A FEW MORNINGS AGO, I found myself wandering through my house, searching for my five-year-old son. “Where, oh where, is my beloved Jeffrey?” I cried. “I’m starting to get worried!” What I was feeling, in truth, was not worry—I’d already spotted Jeffrey’s feet sticking out from the laundry pile—but rather the tense agitation of a trapped animal. There was no escaping the moments I knew must unfold before this game could end. First, I would need to pretend to look in all the wrong places: Is he in the closet? No. Behind the bathroom door? Nope. Then, I would have to disappear to a faraway room, as if thrown off the scent: I’ll just head down to the basement and search for him there. Finally, I would need to loop…

IN CREATIVE WRITING courses, we’re often told that quotidian topics make the best grist for the mill. We’re asked to consider the most mundane of items, the ones we step over in the houses of our memories or don’t notice because they are always there. Lotería, the popular Mexican bingo game, was such an item for me when I was a kid in the 1970s, growing up in Laredo, Texas, on the USMexico border. It did not have the shine of the board games my siblings and I played on long, languid evenings when our homework was all done. Monopoly had the monopoly on them all with its play money, and the Game of Life seemed almost as important, with the allure of adult themes of marriage and careers, but…

“STYLE IS a very simple matter: it is all rhythm,” Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter to the poet Vita Sackville-West. “Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.” Trying to teach rhythmic prose, however, is a bit like trying to teach a hapless friend how to dance to a pop song in your living room. Yes, there are steps (a leg here, a hip there), corresponding to the beat, but there are also other rules more difficult to quantify: you can’t try too hard; you can’t be self-conscious. Alas, some people just can’t dance. Likewise, some of us, despite our best efforts, simply struggle to find a graceful rhythm on the page. And yet, the writers who master this are often the ones who make the deepest…