Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2016 i Creative Nonfiction

MELISSA SHEPHERD has been a high school teacher, a university instructor, a medical instrumentation company executive, and a writing workshop facilitator. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in CrossCurrents, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is currently working on a poetry collection. PETE TOOK MY HANDS and looked into my face with a quirky half-smile. “Will you marry me?” Tim, his best friend and one of his three roommates, hung back near the kitchen door, observing. Master of throwaway punchlines and understatements, he resembled a taller, lankier Woody Allen. I had a feeling I was being set up. Actually, having dated for nearly a year, Pete and I had already discussed marriage and had decided to wait awhile, until after we graduated from college and had jobs…

KATHLEEN McKITTY HARRIS is a native New Yorker who now lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and two children. Her work has appeared in the Rumpus, Literary Mama, Brain, Child, and McSweeney’s. She has been named as a finalist for Glimmer Train Press’s Short Story Award and often performs at local story slams. MARRY THE MAN who gives you socks for Christmas. Say you’ll spend the rest of your life with the guy who squirrels away a few pairs for you, in the days and weeks of early December, as gifts. He’s the one who remembers to stop on lazy Sunday afternoons at the small store you like to peek into on Bleecker Street, the one that contains wares you never think to purchase because they’re too decadent…

PATRICE GOPO is the child of Jamaican immigrants and was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. Her essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Gulf Coast, Full Grown People, and online in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She lives with her family in North Carolina, and she is working on a collection of essays. NOT LONG AGO, I heard a black American speak about best practices when pursuing racial justice and the formation of multiethnic communities. He acknowledged that in these pursuits, a major challenge occurs when people develop a perception that they understand another cultural experience because of extended interaction with someone from that culture. He shared that he has even encountered this reality because of his marriage to a Chinese American. Sometimes, he…

Marriage: A Story We Tell Ourselves and Others RANDON BILLINGS NOBLE RANDON BILLINGS NOBLE is an essayist. Her work has appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, the Georgia Review, the Rumpus, Brevity, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She is a nonfiction editor at r.kv.r.y quarterly, Reviews Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and a reviewer for the A.V. Club. HERE IS ONE STORY I tell about marriage: for a long time, I thought I’d never get married. In high school, I made snarky plans for a joke wedding. I picked the most hideous prom dresses from Seventeen for my bridesmaids and decided my reception dinner would be a pile of Happy Meals, topped off with a Carvel Fudgie the Whale cake. In college, I wanted to be…

JEFF OAKS is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Mistakes with Strangers (Seven Kitchen Press, 2014). His poems and essays have appeared in Field, Mid- American Review, Creative Nonfiction, At Length, and Assaracus. The recipient of three fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. ON THE ANNIVERSARY I ordered General Tso’s and bought a bottle of Woodbridge Riesling. When we first sat on the floor, we were celebrating— something for M, a promotion at the bank where he was working then, I think. We talked about all sorts of things, although I think M will agree that he did most of the talking. He was so nervous, so surprised that I was actually interested in listening to what was going…

MARIBETH FISCHER is the author of two novels, The Language of Good-bye and The Life You Longed For, and has received two Pushcart Prizes for her essays. She is the founder and executive director of the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where she teaches and lives. THE LIGHT THAT DAY must have been muted, for in the black-and-white photographs, no shadows stretch out before or behind us. Irony, I think now, for, of course, there were shadows, enormous shadows already looming into the future and trailing from the past. I remember only that it was humid, that I was sweating in my sleeveless gown, my long hair a weight against my back. The thick August sky pushed heavily against the trees. Earlier there’d been a threat of…

JANE MAHER is the author of four biographies, and she is currently completing a profile of Sister Tesa Fitzgerald, the founder of Hour Children, an organization that serves women who have been released from prison and their children. She is a professor at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York, where she teaches composition courses. She has also taught college-level writing for almost twenty years to the women in the college program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County, New York. OBITUARIES DON’T COME immediately to mind when we think about creative nonfiction, but they may be the truest form of the genre, particularly as they are being written today, and particularly by Margalit Fox of the New York Times. Fox has a reputation for…

AMANDA J. CRAWFORD is a writer, professor, and musician, whose work has been published by the Baltimore Sun, the Arizona Republic, National Geographic, People, Ms. Magazine, Bloomberg News, Businessweek, Hippocampus, and others. She is a professor at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, where she and her husband perform in the indie band Former Friends of Young Americans and run the FFOYA House community arts organization. I LEARNED [family secret] from one grandmother, then the other. First, it was Millie, my father’s mother, in the house in Pennsylvania, which smelled of smoke and deodorizer, in the living room decorated with small crocheted blankets of coarse rainbow yarn. My grandmother’s third husband, Grandpa Floyd, was watching pro wrestling on the television as Millie told me stories about our family, her shrill…

Good Riddance: An Illustrated Memoir of Divorce CYNTHIA COPELAND (Abrams ComicArts, 2013) This graphic memoir about divorce, dating, and single parenthood is at once humorous and heartbreaking. In an early scene, for instance, the narrator says that “it was an ordinary day” when she discovered her husband was cheating on her. The accompanying illustration shows the narrator standing by an electronic control board: “[N]othing on the radar screen.” Copeland’s endearing sense of humor pulls the reader through what could otherwise simply be a harrowing tale of grief and loss. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation RACHEL CUSK (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) This memoir focuses on the period of separation preceding Cusk’s divorce, and intersperses the personal narrative with stories from Greek tragedies. Leaving Before the Rains Come ALEXANDRA FULLER (Penguin,…

KIM WYATT is the publisher of the award-winning press Bona Fide Books in South Lake Tahoe, California, where she runs the Center for Wayward Writers, home to Tahoe Writers Works, the Lake Tahoe Society for Storytelling & Enlightenment, and a letterpress print shop. WE WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO BE STUCK in Christchurch. We were supposed to be driving around New Zealand’s South Island, in the camper van we had rented. The trip was a gift for Mike’s fiftieth birthday, our first significant time off in years, and the first time in a long time we had traveled together. We had both been traveling alone a lot—too much—for work, and in the parlance of currency, our marriage was overdrawn. The only place we met was to fall into bed after long days…

CANDACE OPPER's work has appeared in Guernica, Brevity, and Bitch magazine, among others. After receiving her MFA from Portland State University, she spent three years working with Late Night Library, where she produced and cohosted a podcast focused on promoting the work of diverse women writers. On most days she is busy at work on her own book—a cultural and personal investigation into suicide and the ways we give it meaning. She currently writes and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. AL ALVAREZ CALLED suicide “a dubious immortality”: “All that anguish, the slow tensing of the self to that final, irreversible act, and for what? In order to become a statistic.” In 1971, Alvarez published The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, a literary and philosophical expedition into the places where creativity…

TINY TRUTHS from @SloMoTrainWreck In 2013, as his marriage of nineteen years began to unravel, MATTHEW G. MILLER started a Twitter feed for catharsis. He tweeted almost daily for two years, documenting “a cinematic train wreck, folding and twisting in dramatic slow motion.” Currently, Miller tweets @matthewgmiller and works as a sign language interpreter in Seattle, where he lives with his son half time and three cats full time. She does laundry, cleans house. I cook meals, pay bills. Easily, six months can slide by before we can’t stand each other again. 16 Jan 13 I wasn’t meant to hear her tell our son “It doesn’t matter how you load the dishwasher. Your father will rearrange it anyway.” 26 Feb 13 “I tell Mama ‘I love you’ by cooking her…