Creative Nonfiction Summer 2015

Being able to publish great work is what makes all the rest of the waiting worthwhile. TODAY—as is pretty much the case on any given day, week, month—I am waiting. An editor working on a manuscript I submitted in late April said she would need three weeks to get back to me. Three weeks later, she wrote again, telling me she was headed to Europe on vacation but would get to my work in two more weeks. I am waiting. Back in October, at the Creative Nonfiction office, we submitted a detailed letter of intent to a national foundation, proposing a project and a special themed issue. We waited. Three months later, the foundation requested a full proposal, giving us two months to work on it. We complied—and waited some…

Born in 1979 in New York City, JENNIFER NAGLE MYERS is a visual artist and director based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work locates itself at the intersection of video, performance, drawing, photography, and sculpture. In this charged space she examines personal and political narratives whose common refrain is “everything is connected, everything is at stake.” Her work is at www.punkypip.com. Born in 1979 in New York City, JENNIFER NAGLE MYERS is a visual artist and director based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work locates itself at the intersection of video, performance, drawing, photography, and sculpture. In this charged space she examines personal and political narratives whose common refrain is “everything is connected, everything is at stake.” Her work is at www.punkypip.com.…

DINTY W. MOORE is author of Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals as well as the memoir Between Panic & Desire. A professor of nonfiction writing at Ohio University, Moore lives in Athens, Ohio. FOR AS LONG AS THE TERM creative nonfiction has existed, people have questioned how well the expression captures what writers actually do in the genre, and more than a few have wondered why in heaven’s name we started using the term in the first place. I’ve probably spent roughly half my waking hours over the past twenty years trying, variously, to justify, replace, or explain the unsatisfying label. That may be a slight exaggeration, but if you’ve ever been to a writers’ conference, you know how often the question comes…

MAGGIE MESSITT has spent the last decade reporting from inside underserved communities in southern Africa and Middle America. Author of The Rainy Season, Messitt lived in northeastern South Africa for eight years, during which time she was a long-form reporter, newspaper editor, and founding director of a writing school. A PhD candidate at Ohio University, Messitt is working on her next book, a hybrid of investigation and memoir—the story of her aunt, an artist, missing since 2009. EVEN AS A TEENAGER, I knew I wanted to write documentaries on paper. Of course, at that young age, I had no language, no terminology, no understanding of how to do that or what it really meant, but writers like Ted Conover, William Finnegan, Thomas French, and Jonathan Kozol were my teachers. Their…

WINNER! Best Essay Prize JOE FASSLER’s work appears in venues like the Boston Review, Electric Literature’s “Recommended Reading,” and TheAtlantic.com, where he interviews writers for the “By Heart” series. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in Brooklyn. EARLY ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING, I heard an anguished cry—then silence. I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain. “Something’s wrong,” she gasped. Timestamp: September 18, 2013. About 8 AM. This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Iowa City as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her…

On any given day something claims our attention. —HARUKI MURAKAMI JUDITH KITCHEN was the author of five collections of essays, including the novellalength The Circus Train (2014), and the winner of two Pushcart Prizes in nonfiction, as well as a prizewinning novelist, poet and critic. Her fourth anthology of short nonfiction, Brief Encounters (coedited with Dinah Lenney), has just been published by Norton, and a selection from her thirty years as poetry reviewer for the Georgia Review is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. She was cofounder of the Rainier Writing Workshop low residency MFA program and founder of Ovenbird Books, specializing in literary nonfiction. Kitchen died at home, November 18, 2014. MONDAY: May. I’ve been waiting for this all year, and now the talk of the World Cup is…