genre: Nonfiction

Karl Will Bring A Picnic

By Leslie Lawrence   

A week or two into our son’s first summer at overnight camp, I got a call from my Uncle Karl.

Between Brie and Cheddar

By Ellen Goldstein   

My father could be loving. When I got ready to go back to college, he would look at me and say, “Ah, Ellen, I miss you already.”

Grown Children:
the water will hold us

By Michelle Blake   

On a perfect summer afternoon in the hills of Bath County, Virginia, I find myself walking down a shaded grass path that winds along past an ice-cold pond and dead-ends at a broad, cool river.

Mind Riot

By Gail Waldstein   

You could say it started when I was seven, looking through slats on the venetian blinds from my bed at sunset.

Eggplant

By Sven Birkerts   

It’s my night to make something, not that it was assigned to me but it’s one of those things that’s part of the knowing portion of a marriage, all to do with the subtle, sometimes not so subtle,

A Gift from Prison

By Jean Trounstine   

When Dolly died this year, grief caught me by the throat.  “Mother and daughter,” people used to say when they passed us on the street; me pushing her wheelchair down an uneven sidewalk; her cursing skateboarders whizzing by. At the community college, she’d been a speaker in my classroom.  No one imagined we’d met behind… Read more »

Studying Innocence

By Roland Merullo   

Though I no longer teach, I am still fascinated by the spiritual aspect of the relationship between teacher and student. By “spiritual”–a word polluted by overuse– I mean only the mysterious aspect of the teacher-student relationship that stands outside the boundaries of science and measurement. Beyond pedagogy. Beyond psychology. What is it that passes between teacher and student, in both directions? If we look through the widest lens, beyond subject matter, beyond personality, what is it that rides back and forth, invisible, in the air of the classroom? These questions have a certain moral weight to them. Those of us who have taught, at whatever level, may have become mired in the routine, or partially blinded by our own workload, our passion for the research or artistry that consumes much of our out-of-classroom lives. We may have stopped asking such questions, preferring to busy ourselves with more practical concerns. We may never have asked them at all.

The Cumulative Shrinking Effect of Explanation

By Dawn Potter   

“Yo, Shakespeare,” said my friend Angela. “Write about unrequited love, false promises, fake IDs, blown head gaskets, radio late at night, sex with the same man after twenty-five years… you know.”

1. Unrequited Love

All of my loves have been unrequited, for I consistently fall in love with men who are less excited about loving me than I am about loving them. Of course, the accuracy of this claim depends on how one defines love—a word that, in my case, has perpetually adolescent overtones and that, when mixed with graying hair and housework, creates a kind of melancholy oldies-station uproar—those oldies that I can’t believe are old, those songs with the embarrassing end rhymes and predictable guitar sobs that I know I ought to despise but that keep making my eyes prickle and my throat swell shut.

Am I Ugly?

By Terri Sutton   

It was Tuesday, my regular day to pick up my nine-year-old niece from school. This was a routine I’d started when Myesha was still in day care, a guarantee of spending at least one afternoon a week with her. Over the years, the basics of our afternoons had changed only slightly. There was food, talk, and an activity we could do together. When Myesha was younger, the activity was usually snuggling on the couch, where I would read to her until she drifted off into a nap. In more recent years, our activity time had led me to explore the woody trails of my neighborhood park and, after much practice, to learn the latest clapping games that girls invariably perform on playgrounds.

ROOM FOR WONDER

By Michelle Blake   

Last fall our town church had its annual fair, and as usual the library held its book sale on the same day. The weather stayed warm and dry, so we ate barbecue chicken and potato salad, seated at long tables next to the white wall of the church, which reflected the sunlight and made the air feel even brighter and warmer; shopped at the White Elephant sale, where I found a pair of giant felt slippers to slide over my boots when I bring in wood during the winter; and wandered down to the library to buy used books.

An Open Letter to Afghanistan and Iraq War Vets

By Everett Cox   

Dear Brothers & Sisters of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
Please don’t kill yourselves. Don’t do it. The suicide rate for Afghan/Iraq War vets is five times the numbers that die in the war, now about one an hour or 24 a day.

Shamrocks and Salad Days

By DeWitt Henry   

Seamus Heaney is a generous man by nature and by principle; perhaps sometimes too much so for his own good. He has written a humorous, yet wrenching poem about divided domestic and professional responsibilities, “An Afterwards.”

It’s Complicated

By Alejandro Ramirez   

“Where are you from?”
“Lawrence, Massachusetts.”
“No, like, where’s your family from? Y’know, what are you?”

In Praise of Quentin Anderson

By Baron Wormser   

Writing of Hawthorne, Cooper, Melville and Twain, Quentin Anderson posed the following question in his book The Imperial Self: an Essay in American Literary and Cultural History: “Their struggles do indeed attest to the difficulty of growing up in this country—but what nation had ever gone so far toward dissolving social ties as this one?”

Hair

By Michele Cacho-Negrete   

One Saturday a month, for twenty-five years, my mother and the upstairs neighbor, Frances, dyed each other’s hair. The two would chat and gossip over a growing mound of lipstick-tipped cigarettes and endless cups of coffee as they “partook of the fountain of youth,” their euphemism for this process.

Destiny’s Lady

By Julee Newberger   

I met her for the first time at her father’s apartment just outside Washington, DC.

Hamlet in the Hood

By Leslie Lawrence   

“Should Ophelia trust Hamlet’s expressions of love?” Ms. Baker asked.
“No way!” Keena called out. Several others also shook their heads.
“Why not?” Ms. Baker pressed. “Mavis…? Are you with us? No? Tran? Don’t look at me. Look at the text.”

Hated By Literature

By Dawn Potter   

I was in my early teens when I met, for the first time, a book that didn’t like me.

My Caller

By Donna Steiner   

Phone. 4:45 a.m. Still dark out. Nobody calls with good news at this hour. Maybe somebody back east… Maybe something really great happened, so they know it’s okay to wake me up… Hope nobody died…

Broken Dreams in a Promised Land

By Arya-Francesca Jenkins   

They say home is what your heart keeps returning to. But for some it’s an accidental place, an extension of someone else, not yourself, something you arrive to by association. That’s how it was for me.

When You Write about Murder

By Joe Mackall   

When you write about murder it’s best to start with a few facts. The first one is this:

Thanksgiving, 2004

By Laurie Stone   

I went to lunch with a man I was getting to know who suffered from depression but was disciplined and productive.

Sifting Through the Ashes

By Richard Wile   

After twenty years, what remains of my father? I have a wooden platter on the wall

Chalk

By Anthony D'Aries   

Billy Baker lived down the street from me, near the dead end. I was ten and he was eight, but he had a way about him that made him seem older.

From: Staying In The Game: a memoir excerpt

By Michael Steinberg   

I’m behind the wheel of my beat up Chevy Blazer, wearing a red and grey-striped softball jersey, with “Holden Electric” scripted in crimson across the chest…

Memoir of Three Islands: a memoir excerpt

By Millicent Monks   

People told me my mother was beautiful. By the time I was able to perceive her face, I only saw the mouth turned sharply down at the edges and a glimpse of wildness in her eyes…

Stealing

By Michele Cacho-Negrete   

The day I decided to again steal food I instituted three simple rules: Steal only essentials, only from big chains, never brag.

Perspectives

By DeWitt Henry   

I know that there is a wholeness to the landscape in which I live. I know this as common sense, as experience, and by documentation and report.

Meeting Karter

By Jean Trounstine   

First, I remember his hand. Warm — like blood, like loss.

Moon Water

By Damien Echols   

A person can starve to death in prison. By starving I don’t mean death through lack of food.

Claiming Kin

By Gerald Duff   

(Excerpt from Home Truths)   Dreams are a subset of lies, the way the unconscious mind works to make it possible for us to keep living with ourselves.

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

By Marie Myung-Ok Lee   

The beaming portrait of Kim Il Sung on the roof of the Pyongyang Airport was the first thing that greeted us when we emerged from our plane

Memory, Fact, Imagination, Research: Memoir’s Hybrid Personality

By Michael Steinberg   

At a writers’ conference not long ago, I gave a public reading from “Trading Off,” a memoir that for the most part dramatizes a turbulent relationship I’d had with an old high school baseball coach. During the q and a, I was asked the usual questions: “Did it really happen the way you wrote it?”

An Elongated Tear: Culebra

By Anne-Marie Oomen   

Culebra is an American Virgin island with a fierce sound for a past, a sound that still hollows it out and leaves it damaged…

¡AY, MADRE!

By Pablo Medina   

The culture of exile is the culture of loss…