Nonfiction

                                                                                                              “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2   I swirl my Sonicare in small circles to remove the invisible plaque the dentist assures me is there. Diligent dental hygiene practices seem a small price to pay to have my natural teeth for the rest of my

‘–LGBT civil rights lawyer and environmental activist David Buckel engaged in self-immolation to protest using fossil fuels for their destruction of global welfare. I dream of sounds: a body burning in the middle of Brooklyn Park, gasoline dousing the body of a man, the light, the flame, the drop of a plastic Ziploc bag on

ἀλκὴν δ’ εὐδόκιμον Μαραθώνιον ἄλσος ἂν εἴποι   The last time I spoke to my uncle Lary was on January 19, 1992, the day before he was to go into surgery. It was an operation he wouldn’t wake up from. He was having his hip replaced, one of a series of surgeries he’d had. He

Dear One, In the first hours after you were born in a small hospital on the coast of Maine, I traced my fingers around the gray-blue birthmark that looked like a map of America bleeding into your back. I felt your cheek and puckered lips on my naked chest and all I once knew dissolved

1. A cousin second-removed asks me to pray for her in a Facebook comment, and I nurse indignation for days. She reaches out kindly enough, to express support for my youngest son whose Zoom-accessible play I’ve advertised on social media. She says she’d love to watch, asks me how I am (It’s been years!) and

My mom just called me to remind me I have a big birthday coming up. I said, “Let’s celebrate in Mexico.” If you turn an age in a country in which you were not born, it does not count just as when a forest that has been clear cut down to the earth’s skin doesn’t

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is…                                                                                     T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”   Hurrying to the Quad in the cold, almost late, I was overtaken by a man walking swiftly and determinedly, exhaling white gusts into the November

In the 60s I took the Orient Express from Paris to Athens, sitting up in a compartment for six days while people got on the train in Italy, heading home to Yugoslavia with livestock. I have ridden the Shinkansen at 220 miles per hour from Hiroshima to Tokyo with splendid views of Mt Fuji out

Not too long ago, the field behind our home was planted every spring with industrial corn. Year after year, the tired soils, loaded with chemical fertilizers and liquid manure, produced their truckloads of number two corn. Now and then a tractor would pass over the land, spreading its gossamer wings of poison, but I almost

What does it mean to see your childhood behind a wall? To know that you left behind what you love for a chance at freedom. What does it mean to be free? Over two years ago I walked along the border wall at the Reynosa-Hidalgo cross point. I was invited to participate as a student

Sing to me of the man, muse, the man of twists and turns. —The Odyssey by Homer, trans. by Robert Fagles   Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936, a tornado roared through Tupelo, a town in northern Mississippi of approximately 7,350 people. There were no early warning systems. The black cloud sudden on the horizon. No

Fight or flight, I knew about those options. Fight like my father, who waved his beer and shouted, his face bright red. Flight, like my mother, who left the house for long stretches of time. It turns out there’s another option:  Freeze. Early in the morning one high school summer I woke to loud wheezing

Sometime after I turned sixteen, sometime around the late 60s, I started hanging out at Little Ed’s, a clapboard house in blue-collar Queens, where we could get high without hiding it, listening to music as loud as we liked, singing, shouting, nodding out, luxuriating in a kind of easy, indolent, beautiful oblivion. And yet, even

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

Among the Maya, four gods of the winds and of the directions who hold up the four corners of the world.   1. Little Estefania wiggles her butt into place on a bench in the open-air cafeteria, empty of children for this hour, wiggles into place in this wide room where the wind rushes through carrying the dust-laden

Kindergarten classroom was covered with pictures and decorations that were much brighter than those of my nursery school. Big windows let in the sunlight. I remember pictures of owls, bunnies, and butterflies everywhere. There was a rainbow painted across one of the walls along with a sun that had a smiling face. It was a

Jean Valentine is small and white-haired. When she greets me at the elevator, she is full of an energy that shines in the dim hallway. Inside her three-room apartment, a woman is there helping out, Christine, who comes from nine to one every weekday. After she has introduced us, Jean says, “I’ve lost most of

Twenty years after a gay bashing, I wrote an essay about the incident.  It was published.  It revolved around a simple happening.  This is what occurred: During my graduate school years, three men dragged my friend into the middle of the road, hitting him with a baseball bat.  From a short distance, I saw this

I was in the middle of a challenging year-long internship position in Washington, DC and earning the princely sum of $12.00 per week when a couple friends offered to treat me to a movie. The work—resident manager of a house for homeless, pregnant and addicted women—was requiring the last shred of my emotional resources. Feeling

The nurses in the Pinecrest Neurology IV suite, including Maya, Nicole, and Karen, my favorites, usually glided among patients on rolling stools but the one assigned to me today came springing over like a gazelle. As her tawny curls flew through the air, she knocked against my knees. “I’m so sorry,” she said, blushing. “My

I locate two seats in our local movie theater and wait for The Gentlemen to begin. The sconce lighting permits slow and small movements, navigating the stadium seating a journey of numerous pitfalls; there are about ten of us, which is more than I thought there’d be considering the director. I know what to expect:

“I want you to move to class with all deliberate speed!” This sentence boomed over the loudspeaker each day at my first teaching job. The principal meant to discourage stragglers, sometimes several hundred of them, from ending up in the tardy room, a morning euphemism for the cafeteria. My homeroom students ignored him, applying mascara

By the McDonald’s there’s a prison. When we walk the 15 minutes or so from our section-8 brownstone to the golden arches, I look at the prison windows. Glossy, yet dark. Enchanting because I can’t see inside. I wonder how many people are staring back at me. I am craning my neck up while my

After being hospitalized for stroke-related complications, my wheelchair-bound grandmother was transitioned into an inpatient rehabilitation facility to help her get back on her feet. That’s why we showed up at a sprawling brick building in one the most affluent suburbs outside Boston with a Popeyes’ family meal deal and a birthday cake in tow the

1. They met in the pit of despair. They didn’t know it then. They couldn’t see outside of the context they lived in. Context is an interesting word for drugs and alcohol and sickness. He bought her roses on Valentine’s Day, but she didn’t know they were dating. She went out drinking and saw his

Walking into the lake, I wince as the water rises to the tops of my thighs. It inches up over my stomach, over my ribs, and when it reaches my chest, I’m cold enough that I dive under, just to be done with it. Early Spring in New England is cold. When I surface, my

Warmth purrs through the heat registers. These dark mornings while my children still sleep, I hear the sounds usually masked by a busy household: from the back bathroom, the cascade of water as my husband takes his shower; from the kitchen, a slow drip, coming not from the faucet but from a steady Oregon rain

A handful of swans eat like pigs across wet fields under clouds dragging hills and border trees. These big white transients tread stubble off Route 9, south of Nooksack Valley High School in the northwest corner of Washington State, just a couple of miles below the Canadian border. I drive off onto the shoulder to

I’ve got to get this letter off, certified, today, and the P.O. closes in an hour. It isn’t a pretty walk– two- and three- family houses with postage-stamp yards, a laundromat, bus stops I’ve passed a thousand times. I could drive, skipping the in-between, but the short walk always feels like a little adventure, a

    Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. –Herman Melville   We’d grown accustomed to the cop car parked in front of school. Unmanned, it was meant to be a deterrent, though we weren’t sure for what—a possible school shooter, or the speeding cars that

She was a big girl. Over six feet with enormous hands. She wore a skirt, silk blouse, and oversized pumps. Black hair framed her face like curtains. It was 1994, long before Caitlyn Jenner put a famous face on the puzzle my English class was trying to solve. The library was transitioning to a computerized

America’s current obsession with veterans and supporting them has seeped into our daily routines since the initial invasion of Afghanistan almost twenty years ago. Eateries and oil change shops offer discounts; furniture stores back their commercials with rippling red, white, and blue graphics; and there is always a pro-military bumper sticker in the afternoon rush

“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hail souls out of men’s bodies?” Benedick asks as he listens to Balthasar sing and play his lute in Much Ado about Nothing.  “There’s part of me, lying on a page,” I sometimes think reading a poem, feeling delight, wonder, and perhaps a touch of envy. “Why

On the way to the demonstration to protest the big-business theft of water from indigenous peoples, I passed by a crowded bus stop and noticed in the clutch of waiting commuters a grimy, disheveled man carrying a magnificent russet and black rooster perched on his forearm, a bird of tremendous dignity and aplomb. A bus

“This hospital would be impossible for anyone with a normal brain to navigate,” Barbara says, eyes flashing anxiously. We stand arm in arm, staring at the colored squares and rectangles on the wall map that shows Building A connecting to Building C via hallways called B. I’ve never looked at a hospital floor plan before

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

  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

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

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

“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

  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

“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

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

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

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

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

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

“He raped that girl,” said the old man with a snarl.
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.

She has witnessed rant that silenced every reproof. She has waited for some larger affirmation to arise, the vision of decency, but none came

RICHARD HOFFMANauthor of Love & Fury Interviewed by Amy GrierAll-Interview Issue Editorand 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 find it an

RANDALL HORTONauthor of Hook Interviewed by Lee HopeSolstice Editor-in-Chiefand 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 did you come

J.D. SCRIMGEOURauthor of Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education Interviewed by Amy YelinSolstice 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 was five,

JEAN TROUNSTINEauthor ofBoy With a Knife: A Story of Murder, Remorse, and a Prisoner’s Fight for Justice Interviewed by Cassandra GoldwaterSolstice 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 corresponded with him