Blog
Not That Kind of Royalty
| April 26, 2021 “So, you lost your crown,” the dentist says. “Yes,” I reply. “Down the hatch.” I’ve learned that jokes are the best and maybe only antidote to terror. My daughter often reminds me, “Don’t relive past traumas,” so I won’t describe the horror show of dental malfeasance that got me here. Not to the dentist’s chair—that’s simple: I swallowed a crown while eating a bowl of leftover rice. Here being: imploding dread, the body’s memory of pain.
Resonance
| April 19, 2021 A fifty-something woman, wearing a faded floral dress, showed me the antique pump organ. “No one plays anymore,” she said, her wooden cooking spoon in hand. “And I could use the $150.” She went back to her farmhouse stove to stir a pot that smelled of onion and sage while my new husband and I—some said too young for marriage at only 22—whispered about the price.
"Terrible Sanity" and the Art of Narrative
| April 15, 2021 In “Terrible Sanity” (20.2), Sam Pickering wanders through his own life, lamenting the present and celebrating the past.
Keywords: 20.2
Editor's Notes 22.2
| April 13, 2021 Before writing these editor’s notes on a cold Saturday morning in mid-November 2020, I thought back to the words penned in the editor’s notes of the previous issue by my friend and co-editor Dan Lehman, with the country and the world in the early days of the pandemic.
Keywords: 22-2
River Teeth Journal Issue 22.2
April 13, 2021 River Teeth 22.2 features the writing of: Abigail Thomas, Marianne Jay Erhardt, Greg Bottoms, Nicole Graev Lipson, Richard Goodman, Shamecca Harris, James Brown, Emily Waples, Jason Goldsmith, Jessica Franken, and Rick Rees.
Keywords: 22-2
Urn
| April 12, 2021 “What kind of urn do you have in mind?” “No need,” I tell the funeral director. “My mother was a potter.” In the brownstone where I grew up, mother stashed a potter’s wheel behind a Japanese screen built by my father. When she wasn’t throwing pots, I rode that wheel like a merry-go-round.
Seasonal
| April 5, 2021 In the fall, we rake pecans into piles as most people do with leaves. The tree’s branches extend in every direction over our backyard. Summer thunderstorms shake them loose unripened and encased in a rubbery green skin. They hit the roof with a sharp block, a Louisiana hail.
Walter M. Robinson Wins River Teeth's 2020 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize
| April 2, 2021 We are delighted to announce that Walter M. Robinson is the winner of River Teeth's 2020 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. His winning manuscript, What Cannot Be Undone, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press in Spring 2022.
Exorcising, Freeing, and Healing Trauma
| April 2, 2021 Extreme. That’s one way to describe David Tromblay’s As You Were. Another way is horrific. A memoir that speaks to American Indian art, culture, history, and tradition, is not this one. Instead, Tromblay’s is a discovery of self only after he has lived to tell the tale, centering his trauma and survival as explicit indicators of his character.
Keywords: book review
