Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2021 från Creative Nonfiction

Here are some moments of clarity that … Are strong but unspoken: From “CHOP SUEY” by IRA SUKRUNGRUANG My mother grabbed my hand and took one step toward the man. In that instant, I saw in her face the same resolve she had when she spanked, the same resolve when she scolded. In that instant, I thought my mother was going to hit the man. And for a moment, I thought the man saw the same thing in her eyes, and his smile disappeared from his face. Quickly, she smiled—too bright, too large—and said, “You’re welcome.” From “FIRST” by RYAN VAN METER To be back here in the dark, private tail of the car suddenly feels wrong, so Ben and I each scoot off to our separate sides…. No one…

ERIC L. MULLER has been studying and writing about the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans for more than two decades. He is a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. WE DON’T KNOW MUCH about Mr. Otomatsu Wada of Unit B in Barrack 14 in Block 63 of the Gila River Relocation Center in southern Arizona beyond the fact that on May 1, 1943, eight months to the day after he arrived at the concentration camp for Japanese Americans, he went missing. Census records and ship manifests do little more than sketch a picture of a typical member of the generation of Japanese that came to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. We know that he was born in Japan in…

ATIYA JONES is a multidisciplinary artist who employs abstraction and a range of media—including ink drawings, photography, collage, graphic design, and fiber—to investigate subjects such as selfexploration, womanhood, human migration, and gentrification. Having witnessed major socioeconomic and demographic shifts in her native Brooklyn, as well as in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, where she now lives, she questions how populations reconnect, rebuild, and are reflected within their communities. “One must see that communities of color have most often been moved by force for capital gain,” she says. Her work is “a visual depiction of healing, finding one’s tribe and building a life as a unit,” she adds, with an emphasis on exploring human connection. “It is about the magic permeating beneath the surface of self, and the search to find it.”…

AURELIA KESSLER lives in Alaska, where she works at her local public library. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Tidal Echoes, Wildheart Magazine, Cirque, Crab Fat Magazine, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. IN THE MOUNTAINS north of Santa Fe, there is an adobe house. It is clay, sand, and straw mixed with the sweat of my greatgrandparents, Jacobo and Eloisa. They dug the clay soil and mixed it in a wheelbarrow, taking turns with a shovel, stirring the clay and straw with water from the galvanized metal tub on the ground beside their feet. The water had come from the acequia that trickled through their land. The water in the acequia had come from the Rio de las Trampas, the River of Traps. Their hands were…

BANUTA RUBESS is a writer and director with a string of innovative productions to her credit for audiences in Europe and Canada. One of the first batch of women to win the Rhodes Scholarship, she has a doctorate in history from the University of Oxford. She is currently at work on a television series based on the story of a doomed Latvian press magnate. I know now, I understand at last, Constantine, that for us, whether we write or act, it is not the honour and glory of which I have dreamt that is important, it is the strength to endure.—THE SEAGULL, ACT 4 ONE DAY, my friend Juris asked me to go see a new version of The Seagull. This was in Riga, in 2017. I had returned to…

Worried Daughter • Unqualified Caretaker • Derelict OBJECTIVE: To survive the many roles an adult child of a father with Alzheimer’s must play WORK EXPERIENCE MEDIA CRITIC March 2015 – present • Called bullshit on the relatively utopian snapshot of Alzheimer’s pedaled by a PSA-style commercial in which a sweet old lady misplaces her keys in the freezer• Scoffed at a video dramatization of a family having “the driving talk” that followed a neat script to a neat resolution but offered zero guidance on best practices should your six-foot-four dad lunge at you when you try to take his keys PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZER March 2015 – present • Excavated a room packed with paperwork stuffed into boxes with no discernible pattern by sorting through it all piece by piece, throwing away most…

RANDON BILLINGS NOBLE is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in March 2019, and her anthology of lyric essays, A Harp in the Stars, is forthcoming from Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, the Rumpus, Brevity, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. Currently, she is teaching in the West Virginia Wesleyan low-residency MFA program. She is also the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art. IN 1939, at the urging of her sister and as a break from writing a biography of art critic Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf started drafting her memoir, which she later titled “A Sketch of the Past.” It begins with a simple moment: It…

MACKENZIE BRANSON is an editor at JuxtaProse and has a degree in English and creative writing. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and four children. MY UNCLE WAS a boxer, and the brutality of the sport made me nervous around him. That, and he always greeted me the same way, by squeezing that part of my leg where thigh meets knee. And I mean squeezed—well past the point of a tickle, his laugh too loud. It hurt; how could he not know it hurt? Maybe he did. In any case, he taught me something: to smile instead of squirm, to pretend to like it, and he’d let me go sooner. SOMETIME DURING my eighth-grade year, I was called out of class and told to go to the…

SUSAN McCARTY’s essays have appeared in Ecotone, the Iowa Review, Utne Reader, and elsewhere. She is the author of the story collection Anatomies (2015, Aforementioned Productions) and teaches at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. WHEN I WAS PREGNANT, I learned that North Korea had finally developed a missile capable of reaching the United States, one that might someday carry a nuclear warhead. The improbable Donald Trump had met the news with taunts and jeers. Kim Jong-un was Rocket Man, a crazed Kubrick-esque villain. My body swelled, and I listened to the reports on NPR with one ear as I held the line with the insurance company with the other. I was ordering my breast pump, a Spectra, to arrive a month before the birth of my child. On the one…

Excerpted from Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction, published 2008 by W. W. Norton. A succinct but rich compendium of ideas, terms, and techniques, this book provides all the information writers need to write with verve while remaining true to their story. DEFAMATION AND LIBEL HERE ARE TWO important tenets of libel law every writer should know: (1) no matter how scurrilous, if what you say is true, it cannot be libel; and (2) generally speaking, you can’t libel a dead person. Libel is defined as a false and defamatory statement, in writing, concerning another, which has been negligently published to a third party. In other words, if John sends a letter about Amy to Amy, that isn’t libel. But if John…

TINY TRUTHS from winners 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! evorbachcollins I wouldn’t let them take him to the nursery. Kept my hand on him all night. At three, he said he remembered his hair floating inside me. When I asked him about it at 5, he had no memory of any such thing. Now he’s grown. I remember his hair floating inside me. 13 Jul 20 ConnieKuhns My grandma was a psychic born at the end of another century. She told us “stories” until my dad said no more. I was mixing baby formula the moment…