Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2021 i Creative Nonfiction

BRIAN DOYLE (1957–2017) was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of many books of essays and fiction, most notably the novels Mink River and Martin Marten. ONE OF THE THINGS that we do not talk about when we talk about writing is the sound and scent and sensuality of it, the scratching and hammering and tapping, the pitter of pencils and the scribble and scrawl of pens, the quiet mumble of the electric typewriter like an old pharmacist humming, the infinitesimal skitter of forefingers on keyboards; and the curl and furl of paper, the worn and friendly feeling of pocket-notebooks, the shards and scraps on which we have started essays and stories and poems, trying to catch an angle of light or…

FROM ISSUE #49: SURVIVAL STORIES GENEVIEVE ANNA TYRRELL is a visual artist and creative writer. She earned her BS in Electronic Media and Film at Towson University and her MFA in creative writing at the University of Central Florida. Her writing has been published in Creative Nonfiction, the Rumpus, Hippocampus Magazine, Carve Magazine, and Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine. Her art has appeared in the Rumpus, Smokelong Quarterly, and Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine. She is an assistant editor for Ghost Parachute, which has a flash fiction anthology forthcoming. She lives with her husband and daughter in Altamonte Springs, Florida, and teaches flash fiction and scriptwriting. I am waiting, you know. Waiting. For the next note. For the next beat. Something other than dead…

ELISSA BASSIST is the editor of the Funny Women column at the Rumpus. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Longreads, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Electric Lit, Bitch, Jezebel, and more. She currently teaches humor writing at the New School, Catapult in NYC and online, 92Y in NYC, the Satire and Humor Festival, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. DAVE EGGERS is the author of books including The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, What Is the What, A Hologram for the King, and The Lifters. He is the founder of McSweeney’s and co-founder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers. SHERI FINK is the author of several books including the New York Times bestseller Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a…

DEANNA MANCE is a self-taught artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. Working predominantly with ink and gouache on paper, she explores the interplay of the conscious and unconscious, as well as the relationship between nature and human experience. Her detailed drawings contain geometric, organically arranged motifs that include imagery symbolic of family-based faith and heirlooms, ancestral history, transmutation of death and rebirth, and personal relationships to ritual and spirituality. Using spontaneous mark-making and freehand drawing techniques, her compositions form without inhibition or premeditation. Through this approach, she embraces the unpredictable qualities and uncertain outcomes of her work. Mance’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Bankside Gallery in London, and the Pittsburgh International Airport. In 2016, she created Pittsburgh’s…

FROM ISSUE #53: MISTAKES SUZANNE ROBERTS is the author of Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Bronze Medal Winner from the North American Travel Journalists Association for Best Travel Book) and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (winner of the National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four books of poems. Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included twice in The Best Women's Travel Writing and has appeared in the New York Times, CNN, Brevity, the Rumpus, Hippocampus, the Normal School, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler, she holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and teaches for the low residency MFA program in…

FROM ISSUE #71: LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX B. PIETRAS is a writer with essays in TriQuarterly, BuzzFeed Reader, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He is at work on a novel, as well as a nonfiction book—part memoir, part cultural history, part travelogue—about the queer afterlives of Christian saints. I WAS A FRESHMAN in high school when my religion teacher faced the class and asked, with a knowing smile, “How many of you have seen pornography?” There were about twenty boys in the classroom that day, and until then, we probably weren’t paying full attention—some of us were thinking about lunch, others about the quiz next period. But when the question came, everything in the dusty room seemed to go still; the air itself seemed to thicken, to prickle against our skin.…

FROM ISSUE #69: INTOXICATION FASSLER: In [The Recovering] you talk about the usefulness of clichés, especially how AA members tend to traffic in these wonderful, pithy bits of advice and wisdom. Phrases like Take it one day at a time are shopworn in AA circles and may not be exciting on a language level—and yet, you write, they can have demonstrable, immediate value for a person struggling with addiction. This is so antithetical to the way we’re taught to think as writers: we’re trained to reach for the original detail, the thing no one’s said before. I’m curious if your experience of going through AA—and seeing the value in truisms—changed your relationship to writing. JAMISON: As I was writing the book, and as I was considering the emotional dynamics of…

FROM ISSUE #66: DANGEROUS CREATIONS MARGARET WARDLAW (MD, PhD) is a pediatrician. Her writing has appeared in US Catholic, The American Journal of Bioethics, and Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Her research and clinical interests include medical ethics, disability, and the care of children with medical complexity. The old victorian anatomy lab was the final resting place for hundreds of human remains, carefully dissected, labeled with pins, and floating eerily in jars of formalin. The pathological museum was once the crown jewel of the state’s oldest medical school, and a full century later, the jars remained. The specimens were long since obsolete, but what could be done with them? Their eerie glass gathered dust, and they became dismembered sentinels, staring out at each new generation of novice physicians. There were babies…

FROM ISSUE #55: MEMOIR EMILY BERNARD is the author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine. Her work has appeared in the TLS, the American Scholar, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Yale Review, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essays have been reprinted in the Best American Essays and Best African American Essays series, as well as The Best Creative Nonfiction: Volume 2. She teaches at the University of Vermont. BLACK HISTORY One day, two years ago, when my twin daughters were six, they were watching television. It was February, Black History Month. A commercial came on. It was more like a thirty-second history lesson, the commemoration of a pilot, a poet, or a politician—a First Black, as a writer I…

FROM ISSUE #58: THE WEATHER AMARIS FELAND KETCHAM is the author of A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains, Glitches in the FBI, and Best Tent Camping: New Mexico. She is an Adobe Master Teacher and teaches interdisciplinary liberal arts at the University of New Mexico Honors College. 1. All of my patients had been struck by lightning. The summer between high school and college, I worked as a physical therapy technician at a family practice in Eminence, Kentucky. The town was small and strange. In my memory, it hailed every afternoon that summer. Even though I knew correlation does not equal causation, I could not help but conjoin two there-universal facts: not only had my patients all been struck by lightning, but they were all ambidextrous. According to the…

FROM ISSUE #60: CHILDHOOD JUDITH BARRINGTON is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Long Love: New & Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2018). Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is also the author of the bestselling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. Short memoirs have been published in many literary journals including Creative Nonfiction, Narrative, Prime Number, Catamaran Literary Reader, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. ROY WAS A LANDMARK. Everyone who had cause to walk or drive or ride the number 12 bus up or down Tongdean Lane noted his presence just before the narrow, sooty tunnel under the railway that led to a…

FROM ISSUE #56: WAITING JUDITH KITCHEN (1941–2014) was a prizewinning novelist, poet, and critic. She was the author of five collections of essays, including the novella-length The Circus Train (2014), and the winner of two Pushcart Prizes in nonfiction. She was cofounder of the Ranier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program and founder of Ovenbird Books, specializing in literary nonfiction. On any given day, something claims our attention.—HARUKI MURAKAMI MONDAY: May. I’ve been waiting for this all year, and now the talk of the World Cup is all about injury. Suárez, Costa, even Cristiano Ronaldo—all a bit iffy. Ghana’s team doctor—a witch doctor whose name translates into “Devil of Wednesday”—is claiming credit for Ronaldo’s problems, says he is “working on” a curse that will keep him from playing. My boys—Messi, Modric,…

ASIA BEY is a Pittsburgh-based comedian and multidisciplinary artist. Her work ranges in tone from somber to absurd, with a focus on sequence, transition, and abstract narrative. She is the creator of GoodTalkGoodFun: w/Asia!, an absurdist public-access variety talk show that hosts independent comics and abstract storytelling performances. When she is not committed to personal projects, she vends at local and national small press fairs, works as a contract illustrator, and is a teaching artist with Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. SETH CLARK’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures have shown nationally, including exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Chautauqua Institution. Recent honors include Best in Show at the Three Rivers Arts Festival and publication in New American Paintings. Clark was named Pittsburgh’s 2015 Emerging Artist of the Year…

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! amalchik “When I grow up, will I have a baby?” She's four. The answer “You can choose” feels both liberating and precarious. 14 Jan 15 | Issue #56 EarthAndKids In a Front Range sandstone, I find a dinosaur footprint. Fresh mud records my footprints alongside. Will anyone find mine? 26 Aug 14 | Issue #54 bethwestmark They call it Memory Care now, but everyone knows it’s lack of memory that’s the problem. Good days, Dr. Jack wore his old dental smock and stalked the halls. When I spoke, he would smile and say, “So good of…