Indice dei contenuti per Fall 2016 in Creative Nonfiction

There’s a story in every design and a design in every story. PRASAD BORADKAR AND I met almost ten years ago, and we connected right away. Prasad, who is one of this issue’s two consulting editors, is a professor in the school of design at Arizona State University; back then, he was running a program called InnovationSpace, which challenged teams of students to develop products that are sustainable, marketable, and helpful to society. When I asked him how students found their product ideas, Prasad explained, “Well, they create stories.” He went on to say that designers, architects, and engineers don’t make stuff up out of thin air; they formulate stories or case study scenarios about the people who will need the product they are designing, and how and why and…

VIVIAN WAGNER is an associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Zone 3, the Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Atlantic, and other publications. She’s also the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music.  women nonfiction writers have long had a complex relationship with wilderness. From conceptions of “Mother Nature” in the early environmental movement to contemporary narratives of adventure and self-discovery, women have found nature, at various times, to be a reflection of themselves, an ally, a series of challenges, a place of peril, or a safe haven. Wilderness, in other words, is not a simple thing, and the way it’s perceived depends on the one doing the perceiving, and…

 SUZANNE COPE is the author of Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits, and the Return of Artisanal Foods and the upcoming Feeding the Revolution: The Legacy of “Cuba’s Julia Child” and the Reinvention of a Food Culture. She has written essays and articles for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and NPR, among others, and teaches writing at St. John’s University and in the University of Arkansas at Monticello’s MFA program. Ambrose bierce, the American editorialist and journalist, wrote in his 1909 craft book, Write It Right, that “good writing” is “clear thinking made visible,” an idea that has been repeated and adapted by countless writers over the past century. My own addition would be to add that the act of lyric essay writing not only makes thoughts visible but also institutes order…

ADELHEID FISCHER is assistant director of the Biomimicry Center at Arizona State University. She is also a writer who focuses on natural history, ecology, and environmental history. Her work has appeared in Utne Reader, Orion, Conservation, Places, Arizona Highways, and elsewhere. She is the coauthor of Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River Region, winner of a Minnesota Book Award for Nature Writing. With Minnesota ecologist Chel Anderson, she coauthored North Shore: A Natural History of Minnesota’s Superior Coast. In 2014, she received the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award. There is all the difference in the world between looking at something and living with it. In nature, one never really sees a thing for the first time until one has seen it for the fiftieth. It…

 YELIZAVETA P. RENFRO is the author of Xylotheque: Essays (University of New Mexico Press, 2014) and A Catalogue of Everything in the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). She was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve in July 2015. WINNER Biomimicry Center at ASU Outstanding Essay Prize  The disco bus drops us off at Mile 60, where the tundra undulates away from the park road and then buckles up into green hills. There are eight in our group. Everyone but me has spent the better part of three hours on the road; they boarded at the Wilderness Access Center—the Grand Central Station of Denali National Park and Preserve. Our guide, Ranger Ali, is leading a “discovery hike” for a young couple from Pittsburgh, a middle-aged couple from Cincinnati, and two male anglers in…

 CATHERINE MUSEMECHE is a pediatric surgeon and the author of Hurt: The Inspiring, Untold Story of Trauma Care, from which this essay is adapted. She lives in Austin, Texas.  when i look inside the heavy black trash bag, I find a leg, an entire human leg—hairy, male, cut off at the hip. A parade of diseased organs crosses my desk in the surgical pathology lab every day: a uterus, knobby with fibroids; an appendix, swollen with pus and the stench of anaerobic infection; a shrunken gallbladder, packed with yellow-green stones, the last few drops of bile oozing out. But a leg is something different. A leg is a body part a person would miss. Of course, we know that the two legs we humans walk around on might not remain perfect…

 EVAN EDWARDS is a doctoral student in the philosophy program at DePaul University, where he is working on a dissertation on Walt Whitman’s understanding of the ways poetry can attune the body to recognize and evaluate the social and natural world. His research interests include early German Romanticism, Marxian/Marxist political economy, American Transcendentalism, the reception of Hegel in America, and, more broadly speaking, the influence of nineteenth-century German philosophy on American thought and “common sense.” Henry david thoreau is known to most because of his stay at Walden Pond or for his essay “Civil Disobedience.” When I teach his work, I find some students also have an acquaintance with his essays on the abolitionist and insurrectionist John Brown, or his essay-manifesto, “Walking.” There’s good reason these are his best-known works;…

JIM SCHNEIDER is a writer and ex-expat currently rediscovering America. He has an MFA in creative writing from The New School. JIM SCHNEIDER died at 44, in Colorado Springs. He died at 71, in Fountain Hills, after a long battle with leukemia. He died at 88, in Waterford. He passed away at 67, in Lititz; at 80, in Washington; at 90, in Racine; at 79, at 69, and at 83, 53, 73, 40, and just nine days shy of his 61st birthday; in Fort Wayne, in Orinda, and in Bay City, Jacksonville, Westphalia, Lindstrom, and while vacationing in Naples. He was 50 years, 6 months, and 4 days old when he died in Omaha; he was 86 when he died peacefully in Pomona; he was 32 when he died in…

What essays give you is a mind at work. ROBERT ATWAN  DAVE MADDEN is the author of If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There and The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy. His shorter work has appeared in Harper’s, the Normal School, Prairie Schooner, the Rumpus, and elsewhere, and he’s received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. I used to bandy about this quotation as a writer of essays, and as a teacher of them, because for a time I thought it was useful. I thought it pointed to what was most glorious about the essay: its ability to show off some first-rate creative thinking.…

 DEBRA GWARTNEY is the author of Live Through This, a memoir, and the co-editor of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. She has published in such journals as Tin House, the Normal School, Prairie Schooner, and the American Scholar, and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University in Oregon.  on a warm morning last March, my friend Sally showed me how a post at her gate had been torn up, as if gouged with a screwdriver. Four feet of pressure treated wood, now splintered, that I chipped at with a fingernail. Sally didn’t have to explain what had happened. I knew right away that mountain lions had used the post in the middle of the night to sharpen their claws. Meaning that, only hours earlier, mountain lions, also…

 WENDY BONE is a Canadian writer, who lives with her Indonesian husband and four spoiled kampong cats next to a rice paddy in West Java. She’s currently working toward her MFA in creative writing, online, at the University of British Columbia and writing a book on palm oil and the Indonesian rainforest we threshed our way up a ridge, through waist-high ferns that grasped our legs and dispersed sticky spores all over our pants. My guide, Tailah, took slow measured steps ahead, using his machete to cut away hanging vines and branches bearing medieval spikes that might impale my hands or tear my clothes. Suddenly, he paused, stood stock-still in the middle of the whirring, chirping, dizzying jungle, and listened, gazing into its depths as if waiting for it to…

THÉRÈSE D’AURIA RYLEY is a design anthropologist, urbanist, and writer. Her work explores the intersections of urban infrastructure and public life, and her writing spans genres of creative nonfiction and ethnography.  Yeah, you know? I don’t care for The City. I really prefer to be in Nature.” My colleague said this as we stood in the courtyard of the university campus four years ago, discussing our research. We were preparing to set off to conduct another stint of ethnographic fieldwork, both of us with destinations in Senegal. But I worked in Dakar, a bustling, overcrowded urban center full of human activity, and he, some hours away, in a sparsely populated region known as the Futa, on the Senegal-Mauritania border. The main livelihoods in the Futa are agricultural production and pastoral…

from winners of the daily #cnftweet contest kathyboyg The woodpecker taps frantically on the metal gutters. Many miss that giant pine tree, not just me. 13 Apr 16 WilliamReagan He liked the smile lines spreading like a dry river delta around his eyes. Having a face wrecked by happiness felt like a victory. 29 Jul 16 bethwestmark My mother's escape scenarios were dreamed while leaning on the handle of a hoe in the sweltering Mississippi sun. 7 Aug 16 ChrisGNguyen I finally run to grab binoculars, focus, and . . . a grey plastic bag, its tip sunlit, bobbing in a breeze. Not a grazing rabbit. 20 Apr 16 MichelleRobinLa Do you hear the mockingbirds at night, my son asks? No, I say. But that night I wake up and…