Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2017 i Creative Nonfiction

BRENDA MILLER The most fun I’ve ever had writing was when I wrote my first hermit crab piece, “How to Meditate.” I loved poking fun at both myself and the earnestness of the meditation community while still getting at the heart of some essential experiences. It was the first time I felt so immersed in a voice not my own, and I wrote the entire piece in one twelve-hour writing day on retreat at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. BRIAN DOYLE Oh man, a nonfiction book about a year in a vineyard: The Grail. That was fun for all sorts of reasons, not just the wine. To write loose and free about a real place and people and science, to write a fun book about wine in a world filled…

ALICIA REBECCA MYERS's chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium, was published by Brain Mill Press as part of their 2015 Mineral Point Chapbook Series, and her essays and poems have most recently appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Fairy Tale Review, and Wave Composition. She teaches English and creative writing at Wells College. The gym for unstructured playtime smells like kielbasa. I’m hovering on the edge of the trampoline, ready to rush it in the likely event that my son Miles drop-kicks a ball or clambers up the adjacent pommel horse to launch himself onto a baby’s face. “More like a pummel horse, am I right?” I ask another mother, making sure to position myself so she’s on my right side, near my good ear. “This,” she says, with a grand…

LAURA HAUGEN is a writer and former diplomat living in Dubai. Her essays have appeared in Brain, Child, and River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things” column, as well as in the anthology Mothering Through the Darkness. Her fiction won an “Editor’s Choice” prize in Carve’s 2015 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. outside the butterfly pavilion at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, we see a 20-million-year-old butterfly preserved in amber. My five-year-old is captivated by the translucent shell, the winged creature inside, and the story of how it became trapped for all of eternity. As we near the ticket booth for the Pavilion, we follow along the wall of the exhibit. There’s a zebra longwing, a tiger butterfly, and a luna moth on display. I read the descriptions aloud as my…

LEAH KAMINSKY’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, won the prestigious Voss Literary Prize. Other books include We’re All Going to Die, Writer, M.D., and the coauthored Cracking the Code. She is poetry editor at the Medical Journal of Australia and holds an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. I t’s an age-old idea that mortality shapes our lives. Samuel Johnson wrote that the prospect of one’s own imminent death “wonderfully concentrates the mind.” Sam Keen, in the introduction to Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning seminal work, The Denial of Death, like Johnson, observes that the contemplation of our inevitable death is, “paradoxically, the tincture that adds sweetness to mortality.” And yet, in contemporary Western society, most of us cling to denial. When I carefully broach the subject with…

I work at the kitchen table, and sometimes my husband or son will wander in, take one look at me, and ask, “Are you OK?” “I’m writing,” I’ll say, as my features rearrange themselves from Ominous Writing Face into the familiar Natural Resting Bitch Face of their loving family member. I don’t yet subscribe to the old chestnut attributed to Dorothy Parker—“I hate writing, I love having written”—but, for the most part, the act of writing doesn’t bring me joy. It would be nice if it did; who doesn’t want to spend their days in joy? But, according to research in positive psychology, a relatively new branch of psychology that homes in on positive emotions, it’s probably for the best that it doesn’t. Joy is overrated. JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is the…

RUNNER-UP! Best Essay Prize JENNIFER SINOR is the author of two forthcoming books: a collection of essays entitled Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe and the memoir Ordinary Trauma. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University, where she is a professor of English. We left for the Dalai Lama’s temple a little after six in the morning. Clouds snagged the tops of the Himalayas, still snow-covered in June. In the plum trees, bulbuls sounded their alarms; their long cries woke us each morning just as the skies began to lighten and did not cease until nightfall. My sons, Aidan and Kellen, ten and eight, greeted the cow tethered in the neighbor’s yard, as well as the random stray dogs they had named and now loved. I helped…

BRENDAN O’MEARA is an award-winning reporter and author of Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year. He also hosts the #CNF Podcast, featuring conversations with creators in the genre of nonfiction. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his wife and dogs. It’s my thirty-fourth birthday, yet I’m thinking about my old crush on Jesse Audette and the events surrounding our Eighth-Grade Dinner Dance (a moment of impossible intrigue and apprehension). Middle school encompassed the ripest years following my parent’s divorce, as well as those when the barbarian horde of hormones spewing from my endocrine system couldn’t be contained. What better way to celebrate another year passing than by picking at the scars from two decades ago, running a finger…

MELANIE BROOKS earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program. She teaches professional writing at Northeastern University in Boston. Her work is forthcoming in the Stonecoast Literary Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Modern Loss. She lives in Nashua, NH. George drops the tattered tennis ball a few inches from my feet and sets his expectant gaze on me. I bend over, pick up the ball, and toss it down the grass-tufted dirt path ahead. George charges after it, floppy ears bobbing, and wrestles the ball to a stop. He trots back, shaking it to the death, and sets it like a prize at my feet again. Bedlington terriers were originally bred as vermin killers, so it’s only natural for George to see his…

SUSAN BRUNS ROWE lives in Boise, Idaho, where she teaches at The Cabin and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Boise State University. Her writing has been published in the American Oxonian, Penny, Quest, DiscRespect, and Fighting the World’s Fight: Rhodes Scholars in Oxford and Beyond. A graduate of University of Oxford, she is working on a memoir about growing up on a farm in the Idaho desert. On the last morning of a writers’ retreat I went to a year ago, there was a tiny bell lying on the seat of every chair in the spacious conference center. The weekend was unlike any gathering of writers I’d ever been to: for two days, we attendees had listened, enthralled, to one heresy after another. “Find a hobby that isn’t writing,”…

WINNER! Best Essay Prize KIM KANKIEWICZ is a Seattle-area writer and editor. She writes essays, articles, and reviews for publications including Brain, Child, Salon, Pacific Standard, Colorado Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Full Grown People. Her work has been anthologized in Full Grown People’s Greatest Hits. Vega, Altair, and Deneb form the famous “Summer Triangle,” with a right angle at Vega. All navigators know it. It is easy to find. — FROM FIND THE CONSTELLATIONS BY H. A. REY This is a story about glimpsing heaven, but it begins in hell, in the summer before my twenty-first birthday. The heat is so heavy it could knock you down. I’ve starved away a third of my body weight. Just a few pounds more, I believe, and I’ll shed the burden of…

ANGELA PALM is the author of Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here, winner of the 2014 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, an Indie Next selection, and a Kirkus Best Book of 2016. Palm was awarded the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Axinn Foundation Fellowship in Narrative Nonfiction. Her work has been published in Ecotone, At Length Magazine, Brevity, Paper Darts, Post Road, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. “You never laugh anymore,” my seven-year-old said from the backseat of the car while I was driving. It was early November. “What did you say?” I asked, though I had heard him clearly. I had been thinking about what it meant that Donald Trump had not yet stopped running for president. About the errands we still had to do that night. About the balance of my…

TOI DERRICOTTE's most recent book is The Undertaker's Daughter. Her honors include the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and Poetry. She co-founded Cave Canem in 1996, and she currently serves on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors. Tell myself: Trust in experience. And in the rhythms. The deep rhythms of your experience. — MURIEL RUKEYSER IT wasn’t until i was an old woman that I began to enjoy being beautiful. I had come to the art of self-possession. For many years before that, I would look into my closet when I wanted to feel pretty. I would go through the clothes, asking myself, What…

LAURA KENDALL received her MFA from Butler University, where she was the nonfiction editor of the journal Booth. Her essays have appeared in Vela and Tahoma Literary Review. She is the owner of Second Flight Books in Lafayette, Indiana. +3 I am a scraggly-haired four-year-old. I like to stay up late, so I tell my mother I am Cinderella, and I have to be awake at midnight. She nods her head, saying I can stay up in my bedroom. “Go tell your dad good night,” she says. I run into the living room and crawl up into the worn brown recliner. I give my daddy a kiss on the lips. His beard tickles, and I giggle on his lap as I tell him good night. I slide back onto the…

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! WilliamReagan I called my dad's jumpshot lucky. "I intended to do it, and I did it. Where's the luck?" 40 years later, still irrefutable. 12 Jul 16 tweetsfromteep Old people get a kick out of the wood paddle my parents had for me as a kid. It had a prayer on it. They always ask the psalm. 15 Oct 16 SusanRukeyser From the next stall at the highway rest stop, a sneeze: “Excuse me!” she calls to no one. A flush and she is gone, hands unwashed. 28 Jun 16 smbeutler She swore she'd never turn…