Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i Creative Nonfiction

It’s more important than ever for writers to remain clear-eyed and to grapple with the big questions. THIS ISSUE IS ABOUT how to keep up—personally, politically, scientifically— with our rapidly changing world. In these essays, writers find new normals, ways to adjust or adapt and move forward in the face of adversity. But the flip side of adaptation—resisting changes that could be problematic and hurtful—is just as important. In particular, what I want to talk about today is how crucial it is for us, as creative nonfiction writers (and readers), to resist adapting to what seems to be a rapidly eroding belief in the existence of truth, and facts, not to mention a widespread failure to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Of course, an individual’s perception…

JODIE NOEL VINSON is a Seattle-based writer and editor. Her essays and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, Nowhere Magazine, Pleiades, the Rumpus, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she developed a book about her literary travels. AUTUMN ARRIVED IN ALASKA almost overnight, a subtle but tangible transformation, as if the state had slipped a golden overcoat over its summer garb. In the Chugach Mountains, precipitation crystallized and accumulated, and rock faces that were slate gray one day were pale and glistening pearls the next—a sparkling backdrop to Anchorage’s sparse skyline. In town, the souvenir shops emptied of tourists, and the vendors hawking reindeer sausage on every corner had…

Red Shoes SUSAN GRIFFIN Griffin alternates personal and academic nonfiction styles to develop a meditation on the color red, on fabric, on intimacy, and on the ways we write about bodily experiences both in and outside of the academy. Unstitched States GRETCHEN HENDERSON and ALLISON DALTON This ongoing collaborative project, which came together through a process much like a quilting circle or quilting bee, unites hybrid texts by artists who were asked to respond to the outcome of the 2016 elections. Henderson, who previously headed the Kenyon Review Hybrid Book Arts Workshop, calls it “a testament of solidarity to the principles of equality and dignity.” Fitting the Pattern or being a dressmaker’s daughter: a memoir in pieces CHRISTINE WILKS This interactive essay takes the form of a dress pattern and…

ELIZABETH BOBRICK is a visiting scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at Wesleyan University, where she has also taught for the Department of English and the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education. Her publications range from scholarly articles to essays on an array of topics, from baseball to teaching Greek tragedy in a maximum-security facility. THE MEMOIRIST IS simultaneously character and creator, actor and author, vulnerable yet intent on controlling the reader’s emotions. The author must speak and act convincingly as a character, and as narrator, they must step effortlessly out of frame and chronology to tell readers what the author claims to have understood only later. When a memoir is adapted to a movie, however, as was Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the narrator is no…

NICOLE WALKER is the author of two forthcoming books, Sustainability: A Love Story and Microcosmology. Her previous books include Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She also edited Bending Genre with Margot Singer. She’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. The nouns in that sentence define nearly all of my writing. I write from a first-person point of view, from a place that defines and makes that “I”—I am as much Salt and Lake and City as anything. Salt is a place noun but, here, also acts as an adjective, describing the kind of lake. Salty also describes a kind of writing—irreverent, maybe even sailor-like. The lake part is misleading…

GABRIELLA M. GEISINGER is a New Yorker now living in London. Her freelance writing focuses on arts & culture, feminism, and human rights. DEALING WITH A PARENT who develops dementia or Alzheimer’s is nothing new to the universe, and, yet, one of the hardest parts of being involved in a parent’s transformation—from Mom or Dad to patient, and then to child, and then to something not even quite that—is that there are very few people to talk to. Those who haven’t had to deal with this type of caregiving or witness this kind of deterioration praise caregivers for their selflessness without quite understanding how trying it can be. There is little solace, even sometimes from other family members. Fortunately, in recent years, myriad memoirs that deal with this topic have…

BETH ANN FENNELLY, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables; a book of nonfiction, Great with Child; and The Tilted World, a novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs will be published by Norton in the fall of 2017. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford with their three children. I LIVE IN OXFORD, Mississippi, which lies along the ruby-throated hummingbird’s migratory path. Did you know ruby-throats migrate? They do, spectacularly. Come late summer, ruby-throats drift from their breeding grounds in North America to points south. When they reach the states that border the gulf, they linger, juicing blossoms, storing up energy before their journey to…

RENÉE E. D’AOUST teaches online at North Idaho College and Casper College, and is the managing editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Her first book, Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press), was a ForeWord Reviews “Book of the Year” finalist. In 2017, she is an NEH Summer Scholar at the University of Washington’s “City, Urban: Environmental Urban Humanities” Summer Institute. She lives in Switzerland. JOURNALISTS HAVE STARTED to refer to the current US president as a performance artist. In The New Yorker, David Remnick writes: “Insofar as [Trump] had political opinions, they were inconsistent and mainly another form of performance art, part of his talk-show patter.” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien has said, “He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.” The New York Times Editorial Board…

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! karakahnke At the pool, the water holds us up. Finally close, we embrace, kiss, pant. Strangers watch. Our wheelchairs wait. 26 Feb 17 jd_stillwater The smallest desperate sound brings me running, bolted up at 2 AM. Long ago, for our infants; now, for their mother. 28 Aug 17 BudlongReads To avoid being a hypocrite, I've had to try all kinds of new things as a mom: wearing a helmet, cleaning my room, loving myself. 26 May 17 sweetjesilu I prep my boy's necktie for a Windsor knot. Left, under and loop. My father's phantom hands cover…