Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2015 i Creative Nonfiction

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…

I JOSEPHINE FITZPATRICK is a retired attorney who lives in Southern California. She has taken writing classes at University of California–Irvine and UCLA, and co-facilitates a memoir writing class at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the campus of California State University– Long Beach, where she coedited an anthology of student memoirs of WWII. THE WAIT BEGAN, as it did for more than fifty-five thousand families during the Vietnam War, with a telegram that was personally delivered by two Air Force officers. They arrived at our home on May 22, 1968, and told our parents that my stepbrother, Major Thomas B. Mitchell (he went by “Mitch”), and eight other men had gone missing in action while on a night mission over Laos. Mitch was one of the pilots flying a…

MYLÈNE DRESSLER is the author of the novels The Deadwood Beetle and The Floodmakers, among other books, and her essays have previously appeared in journals including the Kenyon Review, Pilgrimage, Flyway, and Creative Nonfiction. She teaches fiction and creative nonfiction and directs the Sherwood Anderson Creative Writing Scholarship Program at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. I DIDN’T TAKE MY FIRST surfing lesson until I was forty-nine. My friend Maia, who started surfing at age forty, talked me into it. She told me she’d waited too long. She told me she’d spent her summers as a child with her grandparents out in California, digging into the beach, watching the riders dart into the surf; but the old folks never let her get in the water, terrified they’d lose her under…

RACHEL BEANLAND writes essays and short stories, and is at work on a memoir. She lives in Lexington, Virginia, with her husband and three children. THE IDEA THAT READING might be beneficial to a troubled psyche is as old as books themselves. Older, even: as the Greek historian Diodorus described it, the entrance to the royal library of King Ramses II was marked by the inscription “The House of Healing for the Soul.” D.H. Lawrence wrote to Bertrand Russell about his struggles in the dark and the cure he found in literature: “One sheds one’s sicknesses in books.” Today, bibliotheraphy has become an accepted method of treatment for depressed and grief-stricken patients. I see now that I nursed my own grief with books. When my fifty-seven-year-old father was diagnosed with…

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! brevitymag How could he be anything other than a writer? His parents rejected him for twenty years. 26 Jan 15 SeePlayMakeGive I just saw a license plate that reads, 4U2LUVME. The "waiting" seems to be implied. Unrequited love on the back of a Mercury. 3 Feb 15 gailwriter I measure winter in cocoa, 59 servings just enough to sweeten days layered in snow and bitter cold. 16 Jan 15 ARtwistfic A line on a zoo sign reads, The golden toad is now extinct. Is it the loss…

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…

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…

RUNNER-UP! Best Essay Prize SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN’s new memoir, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, is a finalist in Foreword Reviews’ 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards (essays category). Her two other memoirs are Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, also a Lifetime TV movie, and Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award in creative nonfiction. Her craft book is Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. As a professional speaker, Sue has appeared on various national radio and television programs, such as The View and Anderson Cooper 360, as well as CNN Headline News and the Discovery Channel. She teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing program at Vermont…

SANGAMITHRA IYER is the author of The Lines We Draw (Hen Press 2014). Her writing has been published by n+1, Hippocampus, Waging Nonviolence, and others. She is the editor of a special 2015 anniversary edition of Satya magazine. She received a Literature Travel/Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation to conduct research in London and Burma for her book in progress, Divining Water. IN MY TWENTIES, I spent a lot of time playing with dirt. As a geotechnical engineer, I alternated between days behind a drill rig and days behind a desk. In the field, I logged soil samples as they were extracted from the depths to the surface, and recorded what was retrieved. I rubbed soil between my fingers to ascertain the fineness of the sand and the plasticity of…

NATHAN ELLIOTT grew up in the mountains of north Idaho, was educated in the suburbs of Chicago, and then took an academic job in the Deep South before falling in love with a Newfoundland poet and moving to the island to be with her. Currently, he resides in Newfoundland while teaching online English composition courses for Georgia Perimeter College. He also tries to write when his toddler son will let him. 12. On a separate sheet of paper, provide any additional details of your current relationship that you believe would help to prove your relationship is genuine and continuing. . . . Five years after I first met Robin Durnford in Baton Rouge, and in the middle of a divorce from my first wife, I was in Texas for yet…

BRIDEY HEING is a freelance writer based in Washington, dc: AWRITER’S CAREER spans many significant milestones—first breakthrough publication, first book—each with its own allure and reward. The final pages written by great authors, although sometimes overlooked, lost in the sea of their works, can be significant in a way that other groundbreaking and career-defining works are not. With a name made and a life of work behind him or her, an author is able to write those final pages from a deeper, perhaps more honest perspective than that of an author starting out. An established reputation confers privilege, and privilege brings freedom to push conventions, challenge norms, and even contradict oneself. For example, in her last work, Susan Sontag was able to refute many of the very ideas that made…