Table of contents for Winter 2019 in Creative Nonfiction

“HOLD YOUR BREATH, or the fumes will choke you.” My mother held a lowball glass to her chest, vodka glinting in the morning light, and said, “Then you swallow.” She raised her chin, peered from under thick glasses, and tossed a shot down her gullet. She said we should take a break from chores. We were living in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, a suburb of Albuquerque. My stepfather, Gary, was not home. She breathed through her nose and hissed out: “Then you take a breath.” She poured another shot over ice and said, “Now it’s your turn.” She held out the glass. I grimaced, but I also felt grown-up, mostly because I was thirteen and drinking booze was something grown-ups did. Also, the emotional and rational parts of my brain…

Calix meus inebrians quam praeclarus est!(My chalice which inebriateth me, how goodly is it!)—LATIN VULGATE, PSALM 22 (DOUAY-RHEIMS TRANSLATION) THE LORD OF APRIL It was strange, but in the pre-service prayer that Sunday, as I began to feel the crushing presence of God and to slip into the intense spiritual intoxication we commonly call “speaking in tongues”—as my prayers in English began to give way to a language that, in sound, could be every language, or none—the words that came to my mind were not from the Bible. I sensed these words so strongly and clearly, it was as if someone was whispering them in my ear. But they didn’t belong to any prophet or apostle. Instead, the words that came to my mind were Chaucer’s: Whan that Aprill with…

I READ A LOT about junkies. I read a lot about drunks and tweakers and stoners and cokeheads. It’s part of my job because I teach creative writing in jails, prisons, and drug treatment centers. The writers I work with often want to document their lives, and it’s my job to help shape their stories. My own work also explores addiction, so between my students’ work and my own, I’m basically addicted to reading about addiction. I can’t get enough. On the first night of my most recent class, a writing workshop for women in recovery from substance abuse disorders, we took a few moments to discuss the clichés we hoped to avoid when telling our stories. I’m so sick of being called brave for telling my story, one woman…

Yellow You pour the glass of white wine, your second, at ten in the morning, and wonder why it is called white when it is yellow. Even the grapes aren’t white; they are a pastel green with an even paler yellow flesh, or even red, purple, or sometimes black. An obvious deceit. You wonder about that as you swirl the liquid and watch it catch the light. You began drinking in the morning after irregular night shifts in the Emergency Department, required from the beginning of a career in emergency medicine and misery for all but the dedicated night owl. Coming home from the hospital, exhausted, knowing you had only eight hours to sleep before your next shift, you would have a glass or two of wine to help you…

WHY DO WE DRINK ALCOHOL? I heard it spelled out with clinical precision one night, years ago. I’d recently landed a job as a fact-checker at Gourmet and found myself out for drinks near the magazine’s Times Square offices with some editors I was a little in awe of. My shoes were all wrong. Where I’d gone to college was all wrong. I was pretty sure any drink I ordered would be judged wrong, too, as my companions sloshed singlemalts around on their palates and assessed the esters and phenolics. But I needed a Manhattan—my grandma’s cocktail and, for me, always, a big boozy hug of a drink—so I ordered one. The grizzled editor seated next to me did the same, which I’ll confess I found affirming. When our Manhattans…

WINNER! Best Essay Prize The cedar waxwings swarmed the backyard this afternoon—at least a thousand of them.… Poor trees. They looked so patient in the snow, so resigned to being stripped of their color for the sake of the birds.—ANGELA PELSTER, “LES OISEAUX” IN 1908, A BILL came before the Vermont legislature, “an act relating to the protection of fruit from the cedar waxwing.” The title was rather euphemistic: H.474 proposed protecting fruit by removing protection for the cedar waxwing, a fruitloving common songbird with a gluttonous streak. Quite simply, the fruit growers wanted to shoot the birds, and they convinced the members of the House to pass the bill. But then the bill reached the Senate. And just as the prosecution in a murder trial might show the jury…

“Now remember,” my mother began, “Waylon will be there, and you know how he is, how much he loves children.” (Yes, my father agreed, he really does love children.) “If he asks you to sit on his lap and you’re feeling shy, you don’t have to. But what you do have to do—” “Is be polite,” snapped my father. “Which you will,” said my mother more softly. “Of course you will. You have great manners.” My father matched his tone to hers. “Because he’s your father’s boss, you know,” my mother added. “I know, I know!” I said, pretending it was no big deal, that Waylon Jennings didn’t terrify me. Not because he was some sinister child molester; that is not where this story is headed. (He was a womanizer—that…

Creativity on Tap SHEILA REGAN On the terrestrial globe there is an uncounted, unnamed multitude, whose suffering would not be sufficiently allayed by sleep alone. For them wine composes its songs and poems.—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “ON WINE AND HASHISH” FROM THOMAS DE QUINCEY’s seductive descriptions of his visions under the influence of laudanum in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to Hunter S. Thompson’s coke-addled gonzo journalism, the body of literary writing fueled by legal and illegal substances is rich. The substance-influenced canon, if we can call it that, includes quite a bit of writing about drugs themselves—trips, binges, and highs are described with technicolored prose, often written while the documenter was still in the throes of the drug, or at least right afterward. Think of “Kubla Khan,” composed entirely (Coleridge claimed)…

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! senior_moment_ She drove a busload of trench-coated, gin-in-a-paper-bag drunks to detox each morning at dawn. Keeps me sober, she said. 19 Oct 18 onlydavesmith A monthly chore to take bottles back for their deposit. Two men were ahead of me. The first, his face almost as worn as his clothes. The other, older, in a new Porsche jacket. He should give his bottles to the first guy, I thought. And then he did. And then, so did I. 9 Nov 18 BrianaBrakhage I quit my job with a shout, clamping my shears and brushes into my…