Indice dei contenuti per Spring 2022 in Creative Nonfiction

Us? We’re—you know. We’re … fine. We’re not really fine, of course; no one is, right now. And yet. “I hope this finds you doing ok in these strange times,” our emails still begin, before getting down to the business at hand. (Thankfully, there is still business at hand, work to be done.) When the lockdowns arrived in spring 2020, we had several open calls for submissions. We didn’t read most of those essays right away, and when we finally did, we found that many were interesting snapshots of the pandemic’s early days but generally didn’t age very well. Unsurprisingly, almost none of them anticipated how strangely the world would change, or the scale of loss we would come to experience. This issue includes CNF’s first examples of “pandemic literature”—essays written…

On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered twenty-six people. Twenty of them were first graders. I have a hard time remembering that number. I have to look it up every time I mention it. Sometimes I remember it as seventeen, sometimes as four hundred, sometimes as infinite. Infinite bodies, infinite death, infinite pain. I remember everything else about that day, though: my twin daughters, one home sick from kindergarten and the other at school, well and unknowing. I remember President Obama, I remember weeping with him, I remember leaning against a door frame in my home and praying it would hold me. I remember the parents on TV, shattered. I remember picking my daughter up from school and being able to…

“I won’t lie: my productivity has dipped, sometimes down to a slow crawl. But what has kept me going, even minimally, is interacting with other writers on social media, on Zoom, in webinars, seeing how writing has been a lifeline, how much harder this lockdown and the accompanying anxiety might have been had we not had an outlet to express our feelings, and more importantly, to explore them. DINTY W. MOORE, author of To Hell with It. Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno I’ve really enjoyed slipping out of the surly bonds of our actual timeline into imaginary worlds. I’ve been working on a novel based on a place I loved in my youth, and it’s been a pleasure to escape into it…

Hugging the northern border of Baja California, a highway called La Rumorosa cuts through the Sierra de Juárez. It’s long been regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous highways. Viewed aerially, the road looks a bit like tinsel tossed carelessly—the ribbon-like curls and switchbacks are staggering. A handful of modern safety measures have been implemented over the years—signage, guardrails, expansion from two precariously narrow lanes—but it’s still iconically treacherous. La Rumorosa owes its etymological heritage to the Latin rumor, and is named for the whispering sound of the wind as it moves through the canyons. At certain points along the road, one can look down the cliffs and see the clustered exoskeletons of overturned cars. Above these, the road is sporadically riddled with descansos: memorial crosses, inscriptions, sun-blanched silk…

Congratulations to all of us! It was, after all, recently our golden anniversary. Sort of. Fifty years ago, on Valentine’s Day of 1972, New York magazine published “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe,” a proclamation that, it is clear from this vantage point, provided a standard and direction and a way of unifying nonfiction writers—essayists, journalists, memoirists—into one cohesive, albeit loosely determined, category that we now call creative nonfiction. To be fair, this is sort of an arbitrary anniversary to celebrate. Much of what Wolfe was saying in 1972 he had said before, as had a few others. But this article was a wake-up call, what I believe was the beginning of the changing of the guard. A symbolic moment when all of the different…

“Step away when it becomes overwhelming. I know it may sound counterintuitive, but getting up, taking a walk, and ignoring the writing can sometimes help. Then, when you find yourself alone and capable of thinking without interruption (I prefer the shower!), work out an idea, a frame—a path into the subject at hand. Sometimes not writing is the best thing one can do for their writing. ADRIANA E. RAMÍREZ, award-winning author of Dead Boys The best advice I’ve ever received about writing trauma comes implicitly from Lidia Yuknavitch and her book The Chronology of Water. I was often told not to address my trauma, to focus on ‘nicer’ things. Yuknavitch’s book gave me permission to write from a place of uncertainty and to write with honesty about my own experience—to…

“What hampers us most when we try to write is always thinking in terms of a product—whether an essay, a short story, or a poem—we can publish, market, and sell. But I’ve written pages upon pages over the past two years that no one will ever read, and I’m fine with that. I allow myself to fail, and that allows me to write as much as I please. JASWINDER BOLINA’s most recent book is Of Color: Essays If I’m not writing, it’s because I’m not reading a book that inspires me. I need to add something striking and absorbing to my nightstand, and that will bring me back to center. Sometimes, though, I have to trick myself into writing. I open the file of something I’ve written that hasn’t been published.…

In 2012, Creative Nonfiction’s book imprint, In Fact Books, published a collection of essays about end-of-life care. It was an incredibly meaningful experience for everyone who worked on the book, which paints, as Francine Prose wrote in her introduction, “a complete, if disquieting, image of what the end of life is like at this point in our collective history.” A decade later, having reached a different, and even more disquieting, point in our collective history, we thought it would be interesting to revisit one of the works from At the End of Life. In “The Business of Grief,” grief counselor and former hospice chaplain Joe Primo considered how we might better care for the dead and console the bereaved, and emphasized the importance of being present for each other. Of…

AMYE ARCHER Shrapnel Amye Archer is the author of Fat Girl, Skinny: A Memoir (2016) and the coeditor of If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings (2019). She hosts the podcast Gen X, This Is Why. amyearcher.com amyewatchestv CLARE MAGNESON Honest Like a Bear Attack Clare Magneson holds an MFA in creative writing and environmental narrative from Northern Arizona University. Over the last decade, she has guided more than fifty river rafting trips down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. She writes from Flagstaff, Arizona. MEG SENUTA Bad News 101 Meg Senuta has served as patient advocate on cancer research grants and as patient/participant in empathy training for medical students. Her work was a finalist for Fourth Genre’s Steinberg Nonfiction Award;…

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CANCER JOKES & THE HERMIT CRAB ESSAY The past two years have been anything but funny. And yet, to remake my mind during the pandemic, as virus variants and sociopolitical atrocities floated through my news feed, I turned to female stand-up comedians. It all started with Tig Notaro’s 2012 comedy album, Live. Recorded shortly after Notaro’s breast cancer diagnosis, the album deals with content that doesn’t at first appear to be very funny; in addition to the cancer diagnosis, Notaro shares she’s just lost her mother, and that the hospital accidentally sent her dead mom a satisfaction survey. Then she uses the survey’s form to structure the segment. At the time, I was preparing to teach a creative nonfiction class on the hermit crab form. As I toggled between the…

The colors of back then, the sounds from that time, the smells from those days, they hang not on the edges of memory. No. They live in the center of moments ago. Unchanging over years, constant in their content, unrelenting in their persistence. Refusing to submit to the eraser of the past. The colors of me are brown. I am brown. My pale, freckled Irish skin is brown. From the sun, and also from the earth in this compound that is powdery, dry, and lifeless. It clogs the pores of my face and my scalp, clings to the backs of my hands, my neck, my ears. I wonder if I will ever be clean again. The Dak Bla is brown, sluggish, silted. I can almost hold its water, so full…

“First, forgiveness. Or permission. I’ve allowed myself to go fallow at times. I’ve been lenient when other priorities have crowded out my writing. I’ve even forgiven my lazinesses and the mindless distractions I too often give in to. The other thing that’s kept me writing is the undemanding encouragements of friends who’ve asked what I’ve been up to or have invited me to contribute to their projects. I am deeply grateful. PATRICK MADDEN, author of three essay collections, teaches at Brigham Young University As with every crisis in my life—breast cancer, losing my husband, these wrenching COVID years—writing becomes my GPS; it lets me navigate an unknown world, feeling in control, albeit momentarily. And in the end, if I’m lucky, I also have something permanent: a map of where I’ve…

Some summer nights as kids we smashed fireflies and rubbed the glowing remains on our bodies so we could see each other in the dark. The glow didn’t last long. Nor did the game. It never occurred to me that afterward the night sky was a little less light @PaulCrenstorm • 21 SEPT 2020 Nine seconds to warm the applesauce for my mom’s morning meds. To replace my disdain for her neediness with a light-hearted care. To see sunlight flicker as wind bends back the spirea branches, setting tiny white petals adrift. The microwave beeps. I go on with the day. @suemell2017 • 13 AUG 2020 Shape of today: head bent in a lab, debugging while the sun rises, peaks and falls. The happiness of being uneventful, same. Hours spanning…