Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2017 i Creative Nonfiction

The intersections of these two ways of understanding the world are rarely examined—and when they are, the primary narrative is one of conflict. I KNOW THAT EXPLORING the harmonies between science and religion is not the kind of subject your average literary magazine might focus on for an entire issue— and maybe that is why I am particularly excited about this issue of Creative Nonfiction. Longtime readers may remember our 2014 “Telling Stories that Matter” issue, which featured essays coauthored by science-policy scholars and creative writers. That issue grew out of an innovative program called Think Write Publish (TWP) in which science-policy scholars and creative nonfiction writers worked together to write collaborative essays that turned the scholars’ research into creative nonfiction. In the process, the scholars taught the writers about the…

MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S accomplishments are impressive by any standard: she has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Humanities Medal, among other honors. But perhaps a better measure of her eminence as a writer and thinker for our times is this: When the New York Review of Books ran an extended interview with Robinson in November 2015, her interviewer was … President Obama. Robinson’s fiction and essays display a combination of fierce intelligence and profound human empathy. Her four novels are at once gorgeous, revelatory, and lapidary; her essays, ruthlessly clear and often deeply challenging. At the heart of her work is her Christianity, and from there she explores everything from the prospects for democracy to the role and limits of…

SOME PEOPLE GO RUNNING or meditate; they recite mantras or affirmations, carry pictures of the saints. My brother used to keep one of those mini Zen rock gardens in his room as a teenager, turning over his thoughts as he raked the sand back and forth. But for me, there’s nothing like pouring anxious feelings into an empty search bar, posing questions too big for any one person to answer. Some questions I’ve asked Google, between the ages of eleven and twenty-six, in roughly chronological order: Why did my cat die? How do I talk to people? • Why don’t my parents understand me? • Who shot JFK? • Do I have a brain tumor? • Why isn’t love enough? • Will I ever stop grieving? • Why are there seasons?…

THE FIRST TIME I approached Nurit*, she was leaning against the wall with a dessert plate in her hand. Cookies and sliced fruit and occasionally birthday cake with rainbow-colored icing were staples of the social hour that followed every Friday night service at Beth Chayim Chadashim. It was called the oneg, a Hebrew word for “joy”—aspirational, like the tribe of single queers it attracted alongside the already partnered. For me, joy did not come naturally, but hung back, had to be coaxed from its hideout gradually, a fact that was not obvious, for I moved through the world with a joyful façade. People loved my sunny disposition, which seemed especially pronounced in Jewish contexts. I was the unencumbered Jew, unburdened by grim history, by grandparents murdered, by deeply ingrained distrust.…

Getting Away from Getting Away from It All RACHEL MABE JUNE OF 2016 FOUND ME lying on a twin-sized daybed on the third floor of an unfinished house in Marquette, Nebraska—a village of 230 whose sole purpose seemed to be the two-step monoculture of corn and soy. Flies slipped through the shoddy screens to explore every available surface. I had pointed a fan directly at myself in an attempt to abate the ninety-degree heat. The room had no real ceiling, just sheets of Styrofoam resting on wood beams, beyond which I could see the rafters in the attic, and in one corner, if I looked up at just the right angle, I could see beyond walls to the blue sky. Half the wood flooring was covered with raw squares of…

ILENE WINN-LEDERER writes and illustrates books published under her imprint, Imaginarius Editions, including An Illumination of Blessings in 2014; a collection of annotated illustrations based on personal travel journals, Notes from London: Above & Below, in 2015; and Bestiary: An Imaginary Menagerie, published last year. Ilene’s unique drawings and paintings are included in public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, and her clients have included the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Hadassah Magazine, New York, Lilith, Cricket, Children’s Television Workshop, Scholastic, Charlesbridge Publishers, and Simon & Schuster. Her website, www.MagicEyeGallery.com, showcases her books, original works, and custom giclée prints; she also offers twenty unique lines of custom-designed products based on her illustrations at Society6. She is a member of the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators.…

I HEAR THE WORD, of course. I go to Mass some Sundays, listen to Al Green’s Greatest Gospel Hits, and have lived in or near the Bible Belt for the better part of the past decade. Even still, the word God has never quite fitted itself to my ears. And when I’m called upon to say it, I get shifty-eyed and spastic. I smile hard and mutter other words— spirit or goodness—anything but the word God, which sits like a fistful of rubber bands in my mouth. God bless you, people say, and unless I’ve sneezed, I’m at a loss. I visited my friend Mary this summer. A ninety-six-year-old church lady adorned with more medals of the saints than I can count, Mary’s been an ardent and unlikely guide as…

REPORTERS LIKE TO SAY their job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. And to some degree, that’s how I saw it, too. For more than a decade, I’ve spent my days wading through the grim realities of the world—mass shootings, disasters that decimate entire communities, atrocities quietly carried out by authoritarian regimes. I’ve seen both touching kindness and horrific cruelty and have tried to expose and make sense of both. I once thought of my job as being not so different than that of my father, a minister who spent his life searching the world for truths and bringing words of comfort to the suffering. But these days, I am not so sure. From the time I was a young man, I had the goal of following…

STANDING BEFORE A CROWD of listeners in 1914, the fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday took a few moments to ridicule science’s pretensions of being a new salvation. “People are dissatisfied with Philosophy and Science and New Thought as panaceas for heart-aches!” he cried: It does not amount to anything, when you have a dead child in your house, to come with these new-fangled theories … Let your scientific consolation enter a room where the mother has lost her child. Try your doctrine of the survival of the fittest. Tell her that her child died because it was not worth as much as the other one! … And when you have gotten through with your scientific, philosophical, psychological, eugenic, social service, evolution, protoplasm and fortuitous concourse of atoms, if she is not…

It’s not difficult to imagine a line. First, close your eyes. Remember when you were a child and noticed everything about the world: the light stretching just so across the baseball field, the white dog fur on the kitchen floor, the map-like lines on your mother’s stomach. It can’t be that hard to see a line. Open your eyes. Do you see it yet? Hold it up to the window. To the bedroom lamp. You’re searching for light. Take it outside. Squint harder. Tell your husband, I think I see something. Watch as he squints. I don’t see it, he says. Get angry with him. Think how you always notice what he doesn’t: the new restaurant downtown, your friend’s haircut. Hold it closer to his face. Does he see it…

OUR FACES ARE BURIED, and I don’t mean in the sand. They’re snuggled into our machines these days as we scroll and click and finger type away. We travel into virtual lands, disconnecting from the three-dimensional one around us. I worry that we’re no longer able to walk in this world and communicate with each other one-on-one. I worry that we no longer understand how to be alone. And being alone and lonely and bored is important to us as creative people. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” (Of course, he had his mother do his laundry for him while living on Walden Pond, so we have to take the simplicity of his enthusiasm with…

JEFF, JOHN ELDON, DAVE, BEN, AND BRUCE meet most weekdays around the back table at the only McDonald’s in Ravenswood, West Virginia, chomping sausage McGriddles and swapping theories about why “it has all gone to hell.” One reason, they tell me, is because the aluminum plant south of town has shrunk from 12,000 to fewer than 1,000 employees, and another is that “people nowadays simply have no common sense.” The men offer a variety of examples, focusing on out-of-town visitors who can’t drive, don’t think, and huddle mindlessly, blocking the fast food eatery’s back entrance. The six of them are retired, having once earned their livings as electricians, aluminum smelters, mechanical engineers, and dairy farmers. They seem inordinately proud of the fact that Ravenswood is said to have once had…

If then th’ Astronomers, whereas they spie A new-found Starre, their Opticks magnifie, How brave are those, who with their Engine, can Bring man to heaven, and heaven againe to man? —John Donne IF YOU TAKE the Green Line from the Salt Lake City International Airport to the Temple Square TRAX station downtown, you’ll be within walking distance of the Salt Lake Temple. If you decide to venture onto the temple grounds and cast your eyes up its lofty spires and battlements, the castle-like exterior will reveal a host of astronomical markings: sunstones, moonstones, Earth stones, and even Saturn stones adorn its granite face. Most captivating for me as a teenager—a starry-eyed wannabe scientist and scrupulously obedient Mormon—was the Big Dipper on the western face of the temple’s central tower.…

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 The cook opines on politics as she preps the kitchen. Bartender nods, says nothing, a choir of one who's heard this sermon before. 19 Jul 17 AngeleOutWest "The middle of nowhere is actually somewhere, you know." - Callum, my almost 8-year-old son. 10 Jul 17 gregrmarshall My mom, bald from chemo for much of her adult life, loves the smell of hairspray. "It reminds me of health," she says. 1 Aug 17 ConnieKuhns My magazine subscription says "TIME IS RUNNING OUT." I couldn't have said it better. 20 Jun 17 victoriastopp Otis lowers his graying…