genre: Nonfiction
Mexican American Psycho is in Your Dreams
By Scott Russell Duncan
The Chicano Version That Never Will Be Seen The 7th sequel, of a book, movie, video game, or potato chips, gets a Chicano version. We get tossed a limón y chili encrusted bone by a white guy in Day of the Dead makeup shouting: MEXICANS TAKE NOTE, BUY OUR PRODUCT, WE ARE LIKE YOUR… Read more »
A History of Fear
By Laura Price Steele
The violence is coming. We’ve been warned our whole lives that this might happen, but still the fear is thready. The thing is: we know that brutality is always doled out unevenly and we might be spared from it. We say we hope no one gets hurt, but that’s not true. Someone is going to… Read more »
World Peace 101
By Laura S. Distelheim
His name was Eugene Williams and he was seventeen years old on that nearly 100 degree Chicago Sunday in July, 1919. Already a century ago now, and yet I often find that I can’t stop myself from thinking about him when I’m standing in my usual spot at Lake Michigan’s edge on a beach on… Read more »
Refugee Class Party
By Tej Rae
In a brick courtyard tucked behind a busy Roman street, eight students and their teacher stand in an awkward circle, eating turkey and lettuce on whole wheat bread and drinking tap water out of plastic cups. An end of the year class party means some will be in Germany by September, and others will end… Read more »
The Stories We Tell
By Deborah Esther Schifter
“Deb, Alan needs you.” I bolted out of bed, past Alan’s caregiver, to the next room where my husband was rocking back and forth in his wheelchair, gasping for whatever air he could pull into his lungs. ALS had so weakened his diaphragm, he couldn’t get enough breath. The hospice nurse had told us lack… Read more »
The Arc of the Moral Universe
By Steven Harvey
Like a drawn bow the moral universe brings high and low together. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 77 Personal: Glass Art Studio Outside the Art Glass studio, Lake Chatuge lies serenely like a languid lover among the blanket folds of the southern Appalachian Mountains, while inside the chaos of creation roars. David Goldhagen has… Read more »
The Desire of the Country
By Judith Nies
“This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history.” ––Marilyn Robinson I. Encountering History I first went to Holland in the summer of 1976. It was an impulsive trip motivated by a KLM Airlines lottery ticket that I won for $176. The price echoed the numbers in the bicentennial anniversary… Read more »
Borne Back Ceaselessly
By Penny Guisinger
“Then I was drunk for many years; and then I died.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, On Booze When I pulled F. Scott Fitzgerald from my bag, things were often stuck to his head. A quarter. Paper clip. Tin of curiously strong mints. It’s the magnet beneath the sienna fuzz of his hair that did… Read more »
More
By Baron Wormser
I once heard a Buddhist teacher give a talk in which he stated that the word that gave the human race the most trouble was “more.” I see no reason to doubt him. There is much that is inherently uneasy within us, the vulnerability of being in a body, the anxiety of being uncertain about… Read more »
The Road I Choose
By Rachel D.L.
Don’t step on the cracks or you’ll break your mom’s back. It was something my dad had said to me when I was younger. It was something he had said to me before my parents divorced, before my own body spent more time shuffling over the cracks in the sidewalk than stepping over them. I… Read more »
How Do You Help Your Parents Die?
By Robin Clifford Wood
After my second round of standing vigil at the side of a dying parent, my siblings referred to me as “the closer.” They lived nearby and had spent months tending daily to Mom, then Dad. They accompanied them to doctor’s appointments, joined them for dinner, put up the Christmas tree, filled the woodbox for the… Read more »
Toxic: an Outline of Why Men Are Violent Idiots / I Am a Violent Idiot / There Are Too Many Violent Idiots
By Ira Sukrungruang
I. This One Time A. This one time at my buddy ____’s high school graduation party I came outside of myself. One moment I was playing volleyball in a grassy yard, flirting with a girl with pink hair and a pierced tongue who had the habit of looking over her shoulder and winking at me,… Read more »
The Prose Poem as a Jew
By Ben Berman
Not that life was all that bad in France compared to the rest of Europe but we came to America with dreams of making it new. And in some ways we did. The problem, though, was that to fit in you always felt this pressure to be something that you weren’t. There were these anthologies… Read more »
Milk, Oil, and a Night of Tequila
By Adriana Páramo
This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.
Live Find
By Megan Baxter
On an unusually warm Sunday morning in January I must walk out into the woods and try to get lost. Sunday mornings in rural South Carolina are quiet, hauntingly so. In our little valley there is no sound from traffic, just red-tailed hawks screeching and bluebirds chirping in the dull vegetation. I had hoped, when… Read more »
Broken
By Judith Padow
“You get everything. I get nothing.” “Not true,” my brother would have said, in some alternative universe where he and I talked to each other. “You were everything. I was nothing.” “But I felt like nothing too,” I would have told him. _____ Grandma Fannie, a heavyset woman in a floral print housedress, carts… Read more »
The Gleaming Miraculous
By Magin LaSov Gregg
We watch “The Golden Girls” in bed. I am 21, too old to lay against my mother, old enough to sense her leaving. My body clings to her side, while her fingers untangle hair at the nape of my neck. She laughs at something Sophia says, and my gaze turns from the TV to an… Read more »
Mi Piel Morena and I went to England
By Adriana Páramo
I I want to tell you a story about innocence, skin color, privilege and invisible walls. It was a cold, rainy evening in England. My husband and I had flown in to spend the holidays with his adult children and two granddaughters, aged three and one. Vivian, the older of the two, a gorgeous redhead… Read more »
Distanced Daughter: Reflections on Standing Rock
By Suzie Vander Vorste
I. Here, in the middle of the Dakota plains, land races the sky in every direction. The fields of corn, soybeans, sunflowers, and wheat wander mile after mile, rolling off into the horizon. The flatlands are lush, heartened by a recent series of summer rain showers. I spent my childhood here, in a speck on… Read more »
Sonny
By Michelle Blake
One cold morning in January, I wake before dawn and write down: It’s ridiculous to blame anyone else for our lives. Our lives are gifts that exist long before we enter them and go on long after we leave them, intact, just as they are. What we do and see and learn is what we… Read more »
Come Home in Glory
By Gail Hosking
After a long day of writing at a friend’s house, we rest in her kitchen, sipping tea at the table before bed. Her son, home from graduate school, sits with us talking about his future as he pulls potato chips from a bag, his other hand touching the Buddhist amulets hanging around his neck. Outside,… Read more »
When I was dying
By Michele Cacho-Negrete
When I was dying at seventeen I was too young yet old enough. I stole Chinese slippers with tiny beaded flowers from the store around the corner when I was dying, wore my longest silver earrings, my mirrored, tasseled blouse, my Indian silk skirt. I was a kaleidoscope of melting brightness. I ate donuts for… Read more »
Belonging
By thandiwe D. Watts-Jones
Even now, as the mother of a 35-year-old African-American son, I never shake the uneasy feeling that he is at risk. Holding my breath as the late night local news rolls out its not infrequent version of “Two men were shot tonight in Brooklyn, one fatally wounded,” I am not alone. Generations of mahogany… Read more »
The Ferguson
By JoeAnn Hart
In June 2002, as I was driving around Stamford, Connecticut, lost trying to find the library in a city I barely recognized anymore, I had to roll down the window for air. I had imagined that my old boyfriend, Joe, was sitting next to me again, telling me what road to take, and I couldn’t… Read more »
B-Side
By Daniel Mueller
Among the first purchases my father made upon moving into our olive drab duplex on Fort Hood Army Base was a Teac turntable on a cherry wood base, a silver-faced Marantz receiver with LED lamps that turned the radio dial on the AM/FM tuner arctic blue, and a pair of Ohm speakers with eight-inch woofers… Read more »
Bringing Up the Bodies:
An Advent Story
By Gail Griffin
December in Michigan, but no snow yet. A cold, wet night. Five months since Eric Garner begged for breath as his face was shoved into the pavement in New York City. Four months since Mike Brown bled out on the pavement in Ferguson, Missouri, lying for four hours in the heat of an August afternoon
By Trent Masiki
I: Colder Still Once in Texas, I pulled up next to a Latino asleep in something like an Impala, outside the washeteria where I had come to do my laundry. He slept to the mournful Tejano music coming out of his back speakers. One booted foot hung limp outside the car’s window. Maybe tendrils… Read more »
By Gillian Haines
I didn’t know for five years that Ringer was innocent. It wasn’t my fault but I still feel ashamed that at first I’d thought him resigned and defeated. But getting to know him was hard.
By DeWitt Henry
It’s my great privilege to introduce. My honor/function/chance/pleasure to say publicly how I value X, and how you all should value X; to celebrate, to recommend.
By Sandell Morse
The wind moans and rattles the metal fasteners of my shutters. It is the autun, a sister wind to the Mistral, the Levant, the Marin, and in Switzerland, the Foehn, blowing relentlessly and insistently, night and day.
By Josip Novakovich
Following the Day of Liberty, March 3, in Sofia, with a few impressive explosions right outside my window, on Tsar Osvoboditel — a kind of imitation of St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt complete with a huge Cathedral, Alexander Nevsky, at the end of the street — on March 4, I heard explosions again, and looked out the window to see a huge parade of people in red.
By Anne-Marie Oomen
In the country of age, I toss slippers, shove side my mother’s recliner, and ransack her tiny room, searching for her afghan, the blanket of my betrayal.
By Remy Antonio Albillar
“He raped that girl,” said the old man with a snarl.
By Baron Wormser
She has witnessed rant that silenced every reproof. She has waited for some larger affirmation to arise, the vision of decency, but none came
By Amy Grier
RICHARD HOFFMAN author of Love & Fury Interviewed by Amy Grier All-Interview Issue Editor and Solstice Managing Editor Amy: I’m going to begin with my first experience reading your work. My second semester MFA advisor, Kyoko Mori, assigned me your memoir Half the House for a craft annotation. I love analyzing text, and usually… Read more »
By Lee Hope
RANDALL HORTON author of Hook Interviewed by Lee Hope Solstice Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor Lee: The structure of your memoir is so effective. It uses a segmentation or mosaic technique, with letters to and from Lxxxx, Journal Notes to [SELF] interspersed with narrative excerpts from your life. The cumulative effect is emotionally powerful. How… Read more »
By Amy Grier
LESLIE LAWRENCE author of The Death of Fred Astaire: And Other Essays from a Life Outside the Lines Interviewed by Amy Grier All-Interview Issue Editor and Solstice Managing Editor Amy: Several times in your collection of essays, The Death of Fred Astaire, you describe your dreams. In the essay “Fits and Starts, for example, you… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
J.D. SCRIMGEOUR author of Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education Interviewed by Amy Yelin Solstice Assistant Nonfiction Editor Amy: You know that old chicken and egg question—I’m wondering what came first for you—writing poetry or prose? How does the writing process for one vs. the other differ for you? J.D.: Once, when I… Read more »
By Cassandra Goldwater
JEAN TROUNSTINE author of Boy With a Knife: A Story of Murder, Remorse, and a Prisoner’s Fight for Justice Interviewed by Cassandra Goldwater Solstice Nonfiction Reader Cassandra: After reading Boy With a Knife, I am curious about what you heard in Karter Kane Reed’s talk in 2008 that “changed your life.” You had already… Read more »
By Suzanne Fernandez Gray
After a late-night supper and Spanish chatter garnished with English, the women of my family would retire to the bedroom where my grandmother would be transformed from an old woman with wobbly arms into a seer who could shine light on the present and tell you about your future using the Baraja Española, the Spanish… Read more »
By Mollie Murray
1. “I can pick up my pistol tomorrow,” my brother says. “It’s so badass.” His words slide off the plate of our conversation like leftovers. “I’m on my way to grandmother’s house to buy an onion.” This is a drug reference. I shift the phone from one ear to the other, the ridges of… Read more »
By Catherine Mauk
I peeled the striped wrapping paper from the coffee-table book and opened to the inscription. “For you my darling, to bring the Galápagos a little nearer until the time we can visit.” In a biology class in my early 20s I first read Darwin’s The Origin of Species and was rapt. I grew up in… Read more »
Whiskey Under the Mattress, Playboy on the Porch
People Think You Deserve It
Notes on Privilege
Beautiful Hair
CSKA – Lveski
My Mother’s Country
Uncle Kobe
On the big, wall-mounted screen, Kobe Bryant flexed his injured index finger at the foul line during a late-season NBA game between the Lakers and the Spurs.
Hannah Arendt in New York
Richard Hoffman Interview
Randall Horton Interview
Leslie Lawrence Interview
J.D. Scrimgeour Interview
Jean Trounstine Interview
Bridge of Cards
Dysfunction
The Third Eye
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