Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2017 från Creative Nonfiction

i am writing this column from the Blue Spirit Resort in Costa Rica, where I am teaching at a yoga and creative nonfiction writing retreat. It’s a pretty terrific place, located on a hilltop overlooking the Pacific and a sparkling white sand beach, which is mostly free of tourists (except for us yogis) and clean. There is no trash—just driftwood, shells, a few surfers and swimmers, and an occasional motorbike zipping along the edge of the water at low tide. There are twenty in our eclectic group, which includes a physician, two chemists, an attorney, a songwriter and performer, and a couple of elementary school teachers, from as far away as California and Norway. I teach two writing sessions a day; each is followed by yoga, taught by Sean Conley,…

WINNER! Best Essay Prize MARGARET DOWNEY is a trained secondary English teacher, who has spent the past few years living in an area of New York that is so rurally upstate, most people from Albany have never heard of it. Margaret now resides in Copenhagen, where she works in a child development office at a study abroad institution for American college students. She spends her spare time reading, writing, traveling, and playing with her coworkers’ children. “The Month That I Taught English . . . ” is her first publication. ON MY FIRST FRIDAY as a long-term substitute teacher in a high school English classroom, the middle school science teacher’s chinchilla went missing. “Please keep an eye out,” the secretary announced on the intercom before the first-period bell rang. The…

NIKKI SCHULAK writes and performs comedy about bodies and relationships in Portland, Oregon. She has a master’s degree from the Bank Street College of Education. Her essay “On Not Seeing Whales” (Bellevue Literary Review) was chosen as a Notable Selection in Best American Essays 2013. Sometimes, she’s a little bit of an unreliable narrator. UST AS I WAS putting nachos in the oven, my son came bounding down the stairs, slipped into the laundry room, and slammed the door. I know the importance of giving kids space, so I minded my own business. But when the nachos were baked and he was still in with the dirty clothes, I knocked. “Leo? Is everything OK?” “Yeah.” “Can I come in?” “Yeah.” He was standing in the laundry sink, his left foot…

RUNNER-UP! Best Essay Prize ELLEN MICHAELSON is a physician in Portland, Oregon, and an MFA graduate from Pacific University. Her work has appeared in Portland Monthly, Women in Solitude (SUNY Press), and Literature in Medicine. From the Love of Strangers, her novel, has been a finalist/semifinalist for the Brighthorse Prize and the William Faulkner Society Writing Competition. “CALL MRS. ROTH and explain why you’re not coming today,” my mother announced, her arm outstretched toward me with the receiver of the black rotary telephone. My first piano teacher, Mrs. Roth, had dark, fussy hair and stylish glasses she constantly pushed up her small, straight nose, which I was sure had been surgically perfected. She sat to my right. She pointed one of her long fingers over my shoulder at the lines…

DEB WERRLEIN is a former adjunct English professor, who now works as a freelance writer/editor and volunteer literacy tutor. Her writing has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Literary Mama, and a variety of newspapers and academic journals. “Concatenate” is an adapted excerpt from “Professor Never,” her unpublished memoir about academic life. Concatenate Cretinize. On the first night of class, my Introduction to Literary Theory professor asked us to state our research interests. I scanned the room for other perplexed faces but didn’t find any. It appeared no one else expected to be told what to study. I glanced at the door just a few steps away. Flee! I thought. Denigrate. A woman raised her hand: “Bill, how specific would you like us to be?” Bill? I slunk further into my…

What is to give light must endure burning. — ANTON WILDGANS INES SHERYL ST. GERMAIN has published five poetry books and two memoirs, the most recent of which is Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair. She co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century and, with Sarah Shotland, Words Without Walls: Writers on Violence, Addiction and Incarceration. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chatham Universit I’VE TAUGHT CREATIVE WRITING in universities for about thirty years. For the last twelve of those, I’ve directed an MFA program and paid close attention to what other MFA programs are doing. In addition to constant worry about graduates finding jobs in a bleak economic climate, I also worry that some of…

DR. MEREDITH CRANDELL majored in English literature and creative writing at Harvard College before becoming a Harvard-trained pediatric cardiologist. After the birth of her high-functioning autistic son, she left clinical practice to pursue clinical medical research, writing, and parenting her son more intensively. She has published two creative nonfiction essays in the Journal of the American Medical Association and has recently finished her first memoir. “DO YOU REALLY KNOW what you’re getting yourself into?” my husband, Tom, asks me. We are eating a mixed grill of steak, asparagus, and corn out on the back deck one June evening, enjoying the early summer air. Benjamin, our five-year-old son, is frolicking in the yard, which we’ve fenced in to keep him off the street behind the house. The little-kid wading pool is…

JESSICA LAHEY is a teacher and the author of the New York Times best-selling book The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. Her writing on education and child welfare appears regularly in the Atlantic, Vermont Public Radio, and the New York Times. She lives in New Hampshire and teaches in Vermont. I’ve taught monsters —ancient, ravenous monsters. Scylla and Charybdis, Grendel and his mother, and Polyphemus hurling rocks at the sea. Their stories are best taught out loud and without irony, lest dramatic interpretation give way to camp. When Beowulf dives into the “heaving depths of the lake” in pursuit of Grendel’s mother, I let my voice slip down as well, into dramatic, low tones to convey the dire threat…

CECILIA WOLOCH has published six collections of poems and a novel, Sur la Route. Recent honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Indiana Review Prize for Poetry. She collaborates regularly with artists in other disciplines and conducts workshops for writers around the world. HIGHLY GIFTED/HIGHLY AT-RISK. That’s how the kids—seventh and eighth graders at El Sereno, a school on the east side of Los Angeles where I’d been hired to lead poetry workshops for the next ten weeks—were described to me. In other words: really smart gangbangers. These kids were bright enough to have tested into the Gifted and Talented Education Program, or to have been recruited into it, but they weren’t in my workshop because they were model students. They had also been…

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! Brackenhedge I urge the 17-year-old to make dreams plans. I want to tell her the truth: that most of us fail. But that would be so cruel. 6 Aug 16 anikawriter I listen to my daughter’s grammar errors without correcting her. Preserving her childhood is more important than past participle. 15 Aug 16 RileyMaclean Lead a horse to water, and he might not drink. But he might well remember your suggestion and come back when he’s thirsty. 4 Oct 16 AnandaO108 “What did you learn in school today?” “I’m brown.” “What?” “You’re brown too, Mommy. Emily…

RACHEL TOLIVER has work published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Mid- American Review, West Branch, TriQuarterly, Puerto Del Sol, American Literary Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the New Republic, and Brevity. A winner of the 2017 AWP Intro Journals Project, she is an MFA student in nonfiction at Ohio State University. I COULD TELL YOU about the island fox: how, in the end, it was saved; how interventions were made; how mistakes were corrected. I could tell you how the problem was diagnosed, how redemption was enacted by caring professionals. The foxes, the smallest in North America, were nearly extinct, and then—through radio collars, captive breeding, and the elimination of predators—they were no longer endangered. Success was measureable. In the year 2000, there were seventy foxes on Santa Cruz Island, the…

DAVID MACWILLIAMS teaches writing and linguistics at Adams State University in Colorado. His essays have appeared in Pilgrimage, Mason’s Road, Apple Valley Review, and elsewhere. He earned a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2001, and in 2011, his MFA in creative nonfiction from Ashland University, Ohio, where early drafts of this essay were workshopped. AUGUST. SIZZLING HOT. YEARS AGO. The two young Saudis whom in fun I call “my handlers” are showing me around the campus of the Mahad Al Idara, or in English, The Institute of Public Administration, here in Riyadh. We’ve left the cafeteria and are crossing the plaza in the center of campus. The walls of office and classroom buildings around us provide some shade. We’re on a gravel path…

MATTHEW MERCIER is a writer, teacher, and storyteller, living in New York. His work has been published in Glimmer Train, Rosebud, and the Fairy Tale Review, and heard on NPR’s Moth Radio Hour. He just completed his first novel, loosely based on his time as caretaker for the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage in the Bronx. WHAT IS the Statue of Liberty thinking? Brainstorm a little, but then just go. Write for twenty minutes. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar or if your idea is good. Try to write neatly since you’re doing this by hand and I’ll need to read it later. Put away all screens, and pop out your headphones. No tech or talking for twenty minutes. After time is up, we’ll go around and share first lines. OK, begin.…