Blog : Articles
Blamed No More
| February 7, 2019 Heartland, by journalist Sarah Smarsh, already a nonfiction finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, is a multigenerational account of a hardworking family caught in the systemic forces that perpetuate the unknown and disdained Americans who are sometimes called "white trash."
It's Not Marriage. It's the Husbands.
| January 2, 2019 In her debut memoir, For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors, Laura Esther Wolfson, an American essayist and Russian translator for the PEN World Voices Festival, has written a complex book about three interacting subjects: her Jewish heritage, marriages to two Russian men, and her difficulties as a translator of Russian literature....
Editor's Notes 20.1
| November 20, 2018 A few issues ago, this space discussed the dangers of what some have termed "me-moir": nonfictional self-absorption in an era increasingly dominated by noisy narcissism. We suggested that genuine empathy is a ready antidote and and that such other-centeredness might help us not only reach outward for our topics, but even more importantly, help to coax deeply personal stories toward genuine connection. The secret, we suggested, was...
Keywords: 20.1
The Thrill of Narrative Incompleteness
| November 1, 2018 At first glance, the photographic record of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, shows an average town for the time, from 1890 to 1910....
Chucking Hail Marys from the Throw Line: On Failing to Define the CNF Chapbook
| October 4, 2018 I'm pretty sure that the day Thomas Larson asked me to write a review of creative nonfiction chapbooks was the same day I said to a room full of people at AWP, "I don't know what a chapbook is."
A Failing Body Summons a Restless Mind: A Polio Memoir
| September 1, 2018 Sandra Gail Lambert is not interested in being anyone's inspiration. If this review called her memoir in essays, A Certain Loneliness, inspiring, the author would recoil....
One Reader's Homage to Two Dogeared Authors
| August 1, 2018 The next time you stop by my house, ask to see my copy of Patricia Hampl's The Art of the Wasted Day, her most recent book. You may not know that long ago, feeling guilty about writing in the margins of books, I began dogearing pages where the author wrote something I hoped to remember....
A Mother's Tale, An Enabled Son, The Damage Done
| July 1, 2018 Meg McGuire's memoir explores addiction, mental disorder, denial, guilt, and the destructive effects of a parent's love....
Rooted and Reaching
| June 1, 2018 My yoga instructor calls it “rooted and reaching,” that connection between the earthly and the sacred. I am here, even though somewhere in the past, if you’d asked me to shift into downward dog, I would have warned of some foreign demon taking residence in this Christ-saved jar of clay....
Art and National Identity
| May 2, 2018 As her title confirms, Vigderman’s primary concern is the Parthenon. The history she offers of this culturally significant site is enlightening.
Editor's Notes 19.2
April 3, 2018 Spread the word and shop for the birthday gifts! River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative is a teenager no longer! Our nineteenth volume closes with the issue you hold or are reading onscreen...
Houses of Injury and Healing
| April 1, 2018 As the curator of Beautiful Flesh, G'Schwind’s self-proclaimed mission is "to create a body" that weaves individual stories together, forming a larger narrative.
Keywords: book review
The Heart He Hearts Aching Inside Him
| March 7, 2018 A hybrid of poetry and prose, Lemon’s Feverland reads nothing like a chronological narrative. Rather, it’s a fully choreographed set of movements that, in their abrupt turns, mimic the abrupt moments, episodes, and periods of Lemon’s life.
Of Poets, Police Dogs, and Their Handlers
| February 6, 2018 In a journey through four countries, pursuing canine law enforcement units and their stories, Rose delivers a multi-faceted immersion memoir: observations, interviews, analysis, criticisms, and praise of how different nations approach policing with and without dogs.
Keywords: book review, rachel rose
The Country Cousin to Love
| January 9, 2018 When a friend of Kate Carroll de Gutes remarked about how often the positive aspects of others' lives are mentioned on Facebook, as opposed to the negative, de Gutes, in the essayist's quintessential way, got to thinking. What her musings sparked is The Authenticity Experiment...
Keywords: book review, kate carroll de gutes
Slim & Sublime
| December 1, 2017 In On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, William Zinsser extols the memoir form: "For me, no other nonfiction form goes so deeply to the roots of personal experience--to all the drama and pain and humor and unexpectedness of life."
The Dead Baby Lives
| November 9, 2017 Jennifer Sinor's birth, which is anything but ordinary, sets up the thematic trajectory of Ordinary Trauma, a coming-of-age memoir that doubles as a father-daughter story...
Words and Their Users: Wrestling with John D'Agata's Canonry
| October 4, 2017 I suppose it was inevitable. The age of self-disclosure-memoir writing, celebrity tweets, one-person Broadway shows, jihadist pre-bomb goodbye videos-would give way to one editor's need to order up a new hegemony for that intractable thing we call the essay...
Keywords: a new history of the essay, book review
Editor's Notes, Volume 19, Number 1
| October 3, 2017 Remembering Brian Doyle and Nancy Mairs
Keywords: 19.1
The Art of Voids
| September 1, 2017 Sinor apprentices herself to O'Keeffe’s artistry. By doing so, Sinor examines the reaches of art itself, what art does, or what art should do. She pushes the stories onto the page as O'Keeffe "pushed paint on the canvas"...
Keywords: book review, jennifer sinor
What Also Matters? The Voices of Women of Color.
| August 7, 2017 The Crunk Feminist Collection is a much-needed anthology of short essays written by black women and women of color. Its narratives center on race, gender, pop culture and current events. The collection blends writers who specialize in personal anecdote with razor-sharp critique and who employ a conversational tone as complex issues are carefully dissected and taken to task.
Must Hard Stories Be So Hard?
| July 1, 2017 Book Review of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma by N. West Moss
Happier Than He Has Any Right to Feel
| June 1, 2017 It may seem a foregone conclusion that Should I Still Wish, by John Evans, would make worthwhile reading. Evans is a Stanford University lecturer, memoirist, and winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for Young Widower: A Memoir, in 2014. His writing has set him apart. What is not unique, however, is the subject of this memoir: death. Unfortunately, just about everyone has the misfortune of knowing and loving someone who has died or is dying, and more than a few of us have been compelled to write about our experiences. It’s an arguably over-worn subject, but Evans’s story doesn’t disappear into the middle of the pack.
One Era Ends. Another Begins.
| May 5, 2017 When the past doesn’t suit you, from what do you build the future? It’s a question that lumps at the throats of many twenty-somethings who know their lives will not follow those of their parents. Though Leslie Lawrence is well past her twenties, she uses the same question to animate her book of essays, The Death of Fred Astaire, an eclectic collection that ranges over decades of its author’s unexpected life.
The Kingdom of the Sick
| April 7, 2017 My best childhood friend, Vanessa, suffers from debilitating chronic pain. She has seen multiple specialists, tried numerous treatments, and been diagnosed with a handful of conditions, all of which perhaps come close to naming her experience, but never fully...
Editor's Notes, Volume 18, Number 2
| March 24, 2017 Narcissism is much in the news these days, what with the present exemplar-in-chief posing almost daily reminders of the sins of self-absorption and grandiosity. Still, before we dismiss too glibly this comb-over phenomenon, we might as well admit that narcissism can be a charge leveled with some merit at memoir writing and its related nonfiction forms. Memoir or ME-Moir? Guilty or not?
Keywords: 18.2
A Life Story, Buried and Unburied
| March 2, 2017 I seek out some nonfiction knowing I will find the author's train of mind as compelling as his subject. This was certainly true with John Edgar Wideman's latest book, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File.
Why We Need Literature More Than Ever
| February 7, 2017 Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World by Jan Shoemaker
Keywords: book review
Stitched Together
| January 13, 2017 Body Memory is comprised of five, intimately connected essays. All of the essays, together, weave a story, simultaneously sad and expectant, of a man bereft.
Keywords: book review
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