Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2018 i Creative Nonfiction

I’VE BEEN STARTING OVER my whole life. I graduated high school in the bottom fifth of my class. I weighed 220 pounds, and the kids in my neighborhood called me “Slim,” “Jelly Belly,” and “Fat Fuck.” I tried to tell myself that my weight and my lackluster performance in high school didn’t matter, that I would get a job or go to college, sooner or later, and succeed. But I had no money, and the affordable universities in my hometown, Pittsburgh, would not accept me with my abysmal GPA, and I soon realized that it was time to do something different. So I enlisted—in the U.S. Coast Guard, the only service that would accept me at my weight. By the end of my active duty a year later, I had…

PATRICIA HAMPL IS a daydreamer. “I waste my life. I want to. It’s the thing to do with a life,” is how she put it in The Florist’s Daughter (2007). The New York Review of Books has described her as “a memoirist almost completely devoid of ego.” Instead of self, Hampl lauds the mystery of being. “Observing it all,” she declared in Virgin Time (1992), “noting it, seeing it—this was the real point not only of literature but of life itself.” Hampl, who received an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor in the MFA English program at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, has authored two books of poetry and six prose works. When she started writing memoir, the…

“MAYBE IT’S YOUR CHOICE; MAYBE IT’S YOUR FATE.” My clock radio alarm went off, blaring the conclusion to an advertisement. A gray glow radiated through the bedroom curtain. Half-awake but still dizzy from insomnia’s fatigue, I punched the radio off, pawed for my glasses on the bedside table, and hooked them over my ears. Beyond the bedroom curtain was a wall of snow. The snow was thick even in the upper branches of the trees, and it seemed as if those trees were in a forest, not in a courtyard surrounded by apartment buildings. Until now, my third-floor apartment had been an oasis from the hugger-mugger passive-aggressive tussles of Moscow’s streets and subways. I would come back from doing the simplest things—buying a train ticket or finding a place to…

MY BALLET TEACHER’S studio wall featured a black-and-white photograph of her dancing as the prima ballerina for Boston Ballet in the 1960s. Edra Toth was captured in one of her favorite positions, écarté, which translates from French as “separated” or “thrown apart” because of the way the dancer’s body seems pulled in two different directions. The image was striking in its softness—the elongated L shape of her arms, fingertips floating above her extended leg and curved foot; the profile of her head, slanted down, eyes tracing past her lower arm into the shadow. The fluid lines of her arms and legs glowed white against the black backdrop, and perhaps it was the old camera’s quality, but it was as if she were dancing as a mist, rising up out of…

ON THE LAST DAY of November 2016, my brother Marc and I were wrapping up three months of cleaning out our parents’ house. We had uncovered the wood floors just the day before. The carpet, over a half-century old, filled the dumpster. The house was scheduled to go on the market December first, so in a last-minute Hail Mary, we had ripped out the brown broadloom, heavy with dirt, reeking of cigarette smoke and cat pee. I had just vacuumed the tobacco-stained cobwebs off the walls and the powdery dust, like gray velvet, out of the hall closet. Mom and Dad had lived in the 1950s tri-level for forty years, raising children, celebrating birthdays and Christmases, cooking dinner and feeding animals and watching television and reading the paper. Every room—every…

BRENDA STUMPF’s art invokes ancient, universal archetypes by way of myth and metaphor, and often seems shrouded in secrets. Her works on paper and elaborate, large-scale assemblages demonstrate a ceaseless intrigue for the mysterious, featuring cryptic motifs and conjuring energies both enchanting and disturbing. Self-taught, Stumpf is driven by an astute understanding of materiality through process. She works intuitively, rarely sketching or planning, and chooses unorthodox materials, such as found and discarded objects, in creating her work. Stumpf has an extensive exhibition history that spans over twenty years, and she has been commissioned by numerous commercial and private clients. Currently, her art resides in more than three hundred collections throughout the United States and abroad. She lives and works in Pittsburgh.…

OF THE TENS OF THOUSANDS of honeybees in a hive, the queen stands apart. Her body is longer and fuller than the other females’, her wings shorter. The workers and drones cluster and throb around her, their sun. Usually, the queen lives longest; her lifespan can stretch more than three to five years past the average worker’s. But sometimes she does not. Sometimes the colony finds itself hollow, without its heartbeat. Around 50,000 bees and one queen have invaded the roof of my childhood home in Uvalde, Texas, making their way through the uppermost eastern corner, humming between wall and cream-colored exterior siding. They’ve been there a while, according to my dad. He says he and Mom noticed them months ago, when they were out in the backyard gardening. As…

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.— ALBERT CAMUS MICHAEL MAWHINNEY toyed with his food. There was a pile of grilled prawns before him, which he pushed around in circles on his plate. “I’ve been dreading your arrival,” he said, looking up at me. Shaking his head, he asked, “How did you find me here?” Here was Anchorage, Alaska, in the middle of winter. During the winter in Anchorage, it is light out for roughly six hours a day, and that light is surreal. Dim and yellow-green, it resembles neither day nor night, neither waking nor dreaming. Other things felt strange, too, like the moose that strolled down the sidewalk outside my hotel on my first morning in town. Indeed, Alaska…

WE WERE IN the Cuernavaca station, waiting for another bus, going on another date that we called an “excursion,” as if renaming it could turn it into something else, something permissible. As if I didn’t have a husband at home. David and I had met at a Spanish language school, though we weren’t in the same class. He was fluent, a Spanish teacher taking classes toward his credential. I was trying to learn enough Spanish to fulfill the language requirement for my doctoral work. We had met our first weekend in Mexico on one of the program’s cultural excursions, a trip to Teotihuacan, the ancient Mayan city. Strolling along the Avenue of the Dead, David had made me laugh harder than I had in months. Now, we were headed to…

The human body: a horse gliding through a field. A monkey skipping between branches. A comet hurtling through the black moors of space. The human body can be these things, or anything, without pain. Sontag famously declared that “everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.” For some, illness is a visit to that other kingdom. For others, it is banishment, exile, a one-way ticket to a strange and unwelcoming foreign land. The most famous debate about Darwin’s theory of evolution took place in 1860, at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. But the author was not there to defend his work. He was too sick. It starts with a rash on her face, a florid rash that…

A WRITING CLASSROOM is an intimate space, and so before I tell you about this night, years ago, when I was still what might be classified as a young professor, a fresh transplant to Indiana soil from the wilds of the Pacific Northwest via the red clay of Alabama, and a mother to a seven-month-old baby who took most of his nutrition from my body—before I bare all—I need to tell you something about what I was wearing. I’m sorry, but I do. Between my voracious boy and the lack of maternity leave, I was shedding pounds like a calving glacier, dipping below my pre-pregnancy weight and still melting. Naturally, there was no time for clothes shopping, but this was a night class, three hours away from the baby, so…

WHEN I HOLD MY FIRSTBORN, Patrick, for the first time, embracing him against my chest, my Army-issue brown T-shirt is still damp with sweat and blotched with patches of dried sand from the nineteen-hour trip from Afghanistan to Ohio. My son is six weeks old, buttoned to the neck in a long-sleeve white onesie with a brown giraffe on his chest, and I can smell the stench of breast milk on his breath. His body is warm and fleshy and light—just a little heavier than the 8.79 pounds of an M16A2 rifle fully locked and loaded with a thirty-round magazine of 5.56-millimeter ball ammunition. And as I hold him between my calloused, dried palms and peer into his blue eyes, that same methylene dark as his mother’s, I realize his…

JUST AFTER MY MOTHER tlearned she was pregnant with me, and a few months before she married my father, she was prescribed a drug, diethylstilbestrol (DES), intended to prevent miscarriage. The pregnancy was unplanned, and she had never before miscarried; my mother’s doctor simply gave her the pills and ordered her to take them. DES caused my own reproductive organs to develop irregularly in utero, as was the case for many other thousands of “DES daughters”—women whose mothers were prescribed the drug in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Candy Tedeschi, a nurse and activist for people affected by DES exposure, examined me when I was a teenager and explained that the irregularities in my reproductive organs caused by DES would make conceiving a child difficult. She declared my…

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! ConnieKuhns He had been paralyzed for almost 40 years. Right before he died, he told his daughter he could feel his toes. 17 Mar 18 finn_janning Last night my son couldn’t find his book. “What about this one,” I said, pulling War and Peace down from the shelf, “it’s Tolstoy.” He took it, and asked: “This is Toy Story?” 12 Jan 18 saradovrewudali The teens walked in the door, laughing, mid-conversation, "… nothing rhymes with Byzantium!" Hoping to someday be invited back into their games, I whispered to my book, "Chrysanthemum." 7 Jan 18 SusanRogers6 Your…