Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2015 i Creative Nonfiction

Sometimes, the most unlikely and unexpected juxtapositions of frame and focus create the most effective stories. IS THE THEME for this issue “woe” or “death”? It is damn dark. But the pieces are all very good, and I think it’s quickly becoming my next favorite issue. That’s the note we got from our long-time copyeditor, Jill Patterson, after we sent her the essays for this issue. We laughed here in the office when we got that e-mail, because we could see Jill’s point: the essays we selected are not, let us say, cheerful. It wasn’t something we deliberately set out to do; it’s just that the literature of reality is sometimes—maybe even often— as Jill put it, “damn dark.” But in addition to being damn dark, the essays in this issue…

KAREN GENTRY lives in Madison, Georgia. Her work has appeared in Bayou, PANK, New Orleans Review, and American Short Fiction. This fall, she will be a writer in residence at the Ucross Foundation. SHE AND HER HUSBAND thought it would be temporary, the daytime work they found after they quit their jobs at the restaurant where they had met. Law school application season would soon open for him, and they planned to leave the DC region and start their permanent life together wherever he was accepted. Her husband’s first temp assignment was as a receptionist for a company that sold boat insurance. In college, he’d gotten in the habit of carrying around a voice-activated microcassette recorder for recording his thoughts. Each night at dinner, he played the highlights, the moments…

KRISTINA MARUSIC works as a writer for MTV News’s social justice vertical, “Issues,” covering topics including the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQ issues, and feminist pop culture. She holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is working on a memoir about her undergraduate career as an FBI-monitored animal rights and anti-war activist. ON AN OPPRESSIVELY HUMID NIGHT in the summer of 2005, I suited up in all black like a bank robber and headed out in an unmarked white van to steal live chickens under the cover of darkness. I was twenty-one years old. I had planned this mission last-minute with my on-again, off-again boyfriend, Jake, and our close friend, Paul. Earlier that evening, we had stood together on a darkened street corner in a disconsolate, gunshot-plagued…

BETH TILLMAN lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She has practiced estate planning and probate law for twenty years. This is her first published essay. 1. PICK A DAY, ANY DAY Having spent my childhood concerned that my parents would die at any moment, I chose a career that allowed my continued fixation with The End: I became an estate planning attorney. I invited death into my life, and I visit with it daily. Sometimes death arrives via text: Mrs. Olsen died. Her daughter says please call. Other times, I see death on my call sheet. My assistant posts to it: Chloe died of Alzheimer’s today. Her son says he needs to see you. My assistant does not know I have known Chloe for twenty years and that her death…

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! shawnajkenney "Is anything sadder than a double-sink bathroom in a single woman's home?" he asked. I'd never thought about it. 27 Jul 15 c_biondolillo A love story: I thought he saw steel in my stubborn backbone, and admired it; instead he saw valuable wood and readied an axe. 28 Jul 15 ChrisGNguyen Blackbird couple. A flurry of feathers, a flash of red and yellow epaulettes. Sometimes fighting and flirting look the same. 19 Jun 15 anikawriter Bushy beard in a teal Geo--I see him everywhere I go in my cherry red hatchback. Meaning, I realize suddenly,…

NED STUCKEY-FRENCHteaches at Florida State University and is the book review editor for Fourth Genre. He is author of The American Essay in the American Century and co-editor (with Carl H. Klaus) of Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time. His essays have appeared in magazines such as In These Times, Culturefront, the Pinch, Guernica, and Middlebrow. IN THE FALL OF 1976, I lied on an application in order to get a job as a janitor at Massachusetts General Hospital. I left out the fact that I’d graduated from Harvard and done a couple of years of graduate work at Brown, claiming instead that I’d worked as an oil field roughneck, carpenter, liquor store clerk, trash collector, and groundskeeper. Indeed, I had done those things, but I stretched summer…

ANNE BRANNEN, a former professor of medieval literature, now teaches privately online. Her poetry has appeared in such venues as Cabinet des Fées, Literary Mama, and Kestrel. I NEVER MET MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, Robert Greene Elliott, who died long before I was born, but I know exactly where he was at 12:05 am on January 6, 1927. He was in the death chamber of the penitentiary at Charlestown, Massachusetts. He wasn’t sitting in the electric chair—that was Edward Heinlein, part of a trio of young men who had killed James Ferneau, a watchman, during a robbery fifteen months earlier. My great-grandfather was standing behind Heinlein, controlling the switch. But he could see the condemned man; Elliott—who was already, just a year after he began the work, a seasoned executioner—refused to pull…

SAMM DEIGHAN is a Philadelphiabased writer. She maintains a film blog, Satanic Pandemonium, and is currently writing a book about World War II and cult cinema. OVER THE CENTURIES, going as far back as the lyric poetry of Sappho and Ovid’s didactic The Art of Love, Western culture has steadily amassed a body of erotic literature. Primarily, such work has taken the form of poetry, drama, and fiction, while nonfiction writing on the human sexual experience has been slower to emerge. Anaïs Nin’s bold diaries, which she began writing during World War I but which were not published until the mid-1960s, are a powerful symbol of the Western world’s changing attitudes about sexuality in the twentieth century. In recent years, the landscape has steadily begun to shift toward various forms…

JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is the editor of Full Grown People and two anthologies: Full Grown People: Greatest Hits, Volume 1 and Soul Mate 101 and Other Essays on Love and Sex. She’s also the author of Practically Perfect in Every Way. IF PEOPLE ASK me what I do, I tell them I edit a web magazine called Full Grown People. I’ve been at it for two years. I read, I edit, I collaborate with writers and Gina Easley, the staff photographer. Work from Full Grown People has earned special mention in Best American Essays and has been included in the Best Food Writing anthology. I’ve published one Full Grown People anthology and have just launched another. The magazine has a healthy readership. The business is a registered LLC. It’s all legit.…

KEVIN HAWORTH is the author of two books, Famous Drownings in Literary History and The Discontinuity of Small Things, and co-editor of Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing. His essays and short stories have been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Witness, and the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row, among others, and he writes a bimonthly essay for Michigan Quarterly Review. Haworth is the MFA Director at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. IN 2000, WE MOVED TO JERUSALEM. My wife, a rabbinical student, spent her days walking the curved uphill streets of the city to classes at various yeshivas, learning in Hebrew and in English, piecing together the knowledge she would need to return to America and become a rabbi. We were to be there for…

NICOLE R. ZIMMERMAN holds an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. Her essays and reportage have appeared in anthologies and newspapers, such as The Best Women’s Travel Writing and the Los Angeles Times, and in literary journals, including South Loop Review, which nominated her nonfiction for a Pushcart Prize. She works as a copywriter and copy editor in Northern California and blogs at paperpencil-pen.blogspot.com. THE PAGER WAKES YOU at 1 am, just after you’ve drifted back into a dream—except that you can’t really sleep on call anymore; you’re always on alert, like a mother anticipating a newborn’s cry. After the beeping, you curl into a ball with your face against the pillow and groan, then turn on the light and get out of bed. There is no…

KATHY ROBERTS recently graduated from Cedarville University. She spends her summers working in outdoor ministry in Indiana and teaches English in South Korea. Her work has also appeared in Spittoon. Impression: There is no acute brain process, but features of a likely remote lacunar infarction of the superior left cerebellum are noteworthy, given the age of the patient (20). Explanation for this focal abnormality is not strongly suggested, and further evaluation using cerebrovascular imaging is strongly recommended. One Wednesday near the end of summer, I stood up from the toilet and my brain Right hemisphere slid down forming a dip-slip fault. I could pinpoint the hypocenter in the left. Centerline the fault. On the house of my face the windows, normally parallel, were now stories apart. My brain couldn’t reconcile…