Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2020 från Creative Nonfiction

It takes great courage for writers to bring the realities and secrets of their lives to the surface to share. SHE IS IN the hot tub with her husband. His hands are wandering, touching her leg, her thigh. He moves closer, wrapping his legs around her and caressing her breasts, then leaning over for a deep kiss. And they are both more than a little surprised: he because he has an erection and she because she had assumed that, after a year of abstinence, she would never have sex with her husband again. Not since his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Cut to another scene. A man is washing his face in the restroom, looking into the mirror and giving himself a pep talk: “You can do this. Your whole life…

STEPH AUTERI has written about sexuality for The Atlantic, Vice, Pacific Standard, and other publications. She is the author of A Dirty Word. “What’s that, Mommy?” asks my daughter, pointing to a long, clear plastic canister filled with individually wrapped condoms. The condoms are on my desk, next to my laptop, on which I’m typing an article on innovations in condom technology. “Open?” “It’s a maraca, sweetheart. See?” I shake the canister so it makes a muffled schick-schick sound. She doesn’t buy it. “No! Open!” she wails, reaching for the canister, her fingers scrabbling to pop off the end piece. I roll my eyes because I can’t even, and then I pluck it from her hand. Place it out of reach. I am all about educating my daughter, and I…

NATALIE VAN HOOSE writes, fishes, and watches insects in her native Florida. Her fiction has appeared in The Southeast Review. I HOLD THE DUBIOUS DISTINCTION of being something of an expert on the sexual behavior of houseflies. This is not due to some bizarre fetish or fascination with fly sex. Rather, I became the resident brain on the ins and outs of the reproductive habits of Musca domestica because my boss told me to. It was 2005, and I’d been working for Drion Boucias, head of the Insect Pathology Lab at the University of Florida, for a year when he suggested I run a full-fledged experiment, a step up from my usual undergrad lab duties of scrubbing beakers and counting beet armyworm moth eggs. Drion was a sharp and thorough…

JOE MORAN is a professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. From First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran, to be published on August 13, 2019 by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Joe Moran. SOMETIMES SENTENCES just need to be long. The world resists our efforts to enclose it between a capital and a full stop. Why, Malcolm Bowie asks, does Proust write such long, vermiform sentences, always subdividing then reassembling, loath to come to rest? Because, he says, they mimic the workings of desire and the neurotic rereading of situations we make when we are in love. Their denial and shaky restoration of meaning is “Eros become visible.” Such sentences…

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! kpnwriter My daughter’s body stretches. Any mention of the word “sex” or “sexy” twists her face into a mask of horror. She watches K-pop on her laptop, smacks the carpenter ants in the bathroom with my flip-flop. Life is a funhouse mirror. 6 Jun 19 jshdoff My garage spot is #69. Best part of Mom’s memory loss? Explaining what 69 means every time we come home after she asks, every time, “69. It’s a sex thing, but *what* exactly is it?” 6 Jan 19 pamelarothbard He kissed her like he was going to war; she kissed…

NICOLA WALDRON is a graduate of Cambridge and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been published in Post Road Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Assay, and Agni, among others. She currently teaches writing at the University of South Carolina and is working on an essay collection. SETTING THE MOOD When I was younger, I wrote at my desk, a gracious Mexican affair bought in a first-sight passion. The seat was hardwood, ambitious. Many an essay has this desk to thank for its existence, as does my son; it’s where I measured out my fertility drugs into a hopeful series of syringes, before resting my weight on its kindly bulk to stick myself—a useful metaphor, perhaps, for the writing life. These days, I write most often with legs stretched…

SUE FAGALDE LICK is the author of Stories Grandma Never Told, Childless by Marriage, and Up Beaver Creek. She lives in South Beach, Oregon, where she is music director at Sacred Heart Church. SITTING NEXT TO my husband, Fred, in the hot tub, I watched as his hands began to wander across my body, touching my leg, my thigh, my— “Hey, what are you doing?” “Just looking around.” “Oh yeah?” He looked down at his penis bobbing in the water. “I believe I have an erection.” “Is that unusual?” He didn’t answer, but moved closer, wrapping his legs around mine, leaning over for a deep, tongue-filled kiss. His hands roamed over my arms, my shoulders, my breasts. It was clear what he had in mind, but we hadn’t done anything…

JULIA KOETS is the winner of the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award, judged by Mark Doty, for her forthcoming book, The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays (November 5, 2019). She is a visiting assistant professor of nonfiction at the University of South Florida. AN OCTOPUS PROTECTS itself by hiding in plain sight. Lacking either an internal or external skeleton, and with thousands of pigment-changing cells just below the surface of its skin, in disguise, it can change not only its color but also its texture and shape. An octopus can blend in with almost anything: rough head of coral, spiny polyp cluster, tunicate-ridden side of a sunken ship. As two University of California–Berkeley biologists discovered, one species of octopus disguises itself by wrapping its six arms around its…

SUZANNE ROBERTS is the author of the memoir Almost Somewhere (Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four collections of poetry. She serves as the current El Dorado County Poet Laureate and teaches for the low residency MFA program in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College. WHEN I WAS about seven, I heard the word fuck at school. When I got home and asked my father what it meant, he said, “It means making love.” Then he told me not to ask any more questions. Within a few days, a picture book was left out for me. Peter Mayle’s “Where Did I Come From?” features two pudgy characters who have sex under a colorful quilt. The man looks like a pink Pillsbury Doughboy. I remember thinking that…