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Haunted by Sandy Hook

Carol Ann Davis’s collection of nine essays is a memoir, a treatise on aesthetic expression, and a philosophical journey through the aftermath of what was, in 2012, the deadliest school shooting in American history. Her son Willem, seven at the time, was at Hawley Elementary, one mile away from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Keywords: book review
Kevin Honold Wins 2019 River Teeth Book Prize

We are thrilled to announce that Kevin Honold is the winner of this year’s River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. His winning manuscript, The Rock Cycle, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press in Spring 2021.
Scholar’s Sensibility, Poet’s Eye

Since 1926 the John Burroughs Association has awarded its medal to nature writers, many of whom I’ve heard of (Carson, Eiseley, Zwinger, Leopold, Lopez, and McPhee for starters) and many others I haven’t but might want to look up. Having read both Sightlines and Surfacing, her 2019 collection of essays, I readily include Jamie among those we most need to be reading.
Keywords: book review
A Tragic History. Its Legacy Still Troubled.

Imagine my delight in finding that Siberian Exile, by Julija Šukys, about the search for her grandparents’ past, weighs in at a mere 166 pages. What I didn’t know was that even in such a brief book about her grandparents’ fates in war-torn Lithuania and Siberia, there is a Gordian knot of drama, pain, loss, and speculation. I don’t think 166 pages can be more complex than they are in Siberian Exile. This is both exciting, enlightening, harrowing, and frustrating for the reader.
Their Home Is Not Here

The Ungrateful Refugee is a perfect title; readers may feel Nayeri’s inner demons waging a war of gratefulness for the endless opportunities her citizenship in the United States has brought her as well as for the memories, roots, and customs her new status has taken away, particularly a close relationship with her father in Iran.
Keywords: book review
Make Present the Experience of the Other: Three Memoirs of Political Witness

Memoir has, of course, never carried the cachet of poetry. Yet like the poetry or fiction of witness, the outward-looking, politically engaged memoir and essay have a rich and respected literary pedigree, including slave narratives (the predominant form of African-American literature until the twentieth century); Mark Twain’s pamphlet about the genocide in the Congo Free State; James Baldwin’s and George Orwell’s searing dissections of racism and colonialism; Ivan Turgenev’s descriptions of Jean-Baptiste Tropmann’s execution; and Mary McCarthy’s brilliant denunciations of American Stalinism, to name just a few.
Michael Steinberg: A Remembrance and a Review

In December 2019, in a country torn apart by Donald Trump’s bullying and Fox News’ Pravda-like misinformation, in congressional hearings that traded in the ridiculous and the profound, in a democracy under such partisan assault it seemed to buckle before our eyes, and in the month of Trump’s impeachment, we were hit with grave news of another sort: creative nonfiction’s (and my) beloved colleague, mentor, and friend, Mike Steinberg, 79, died from pancreatic cancer, undiscovered until a week before he passed.
Keywords: book review
Feral Youth, Fast Cars, and Fraught Love

While billed as a memoir, Knock Wood, winner of the 2018 Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, is more akin to a theme-and-variations composition: Think love-child of early Bruce Springsteen and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. An acclaimed poet, Militello tells her story in twenty-nine discrete essays that mostly eschew chronology.
Keywords: book review
The Biology of Flesh and Bone

In To Float in the Space Between, Terrance Hayes writes, “One’s poetics should be liquid.” Before grabbing hold of that line, I had already dipped into this book’s structure, a dialogue between Hayes, Etheridge Knight’s life and his poetry, and interviews and stories by writers acquainted with Knight’s work.
Keywords: book review
Many Lives, Many Bodies

Noble’s slim collection is teeming with ghosts of all shapes and sizes. However absent the hauntings therein may feel to her, to this reader they are vivid and immediate and bold, nestled in dreamlike prose.
Keywords: book review
One Word Says It All

Where—or what—is your hearth of hearths? Where is the place you feel most alive or connected? What is the thing that reminds you who you are and to what (or whom) you belong? In all the world, what do you call home? These are some of the questions that Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor pondered as they edited Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place.
Keywords: book review
Shapes Shifted, Senses Altered, Values Freely Wheeled

There may be no more startling way to bait readers into an essay than this: “Is there a word for the unsettling sensation of sitting down on an unexpectedly warm toilet seat, because someone used it just before you and sat there for a good long while? Maybe something in German?” The author titles it: “FREUDENSCHANDE: PRIV(AC)Y,” that is “joyful-shame.” Using wilder “made-up” German compounds as section titles, she compares the “bowel mover” in the “public privy” to the commodious confessions of personal nonfiction, the emotional “shitshow” so many memoirists and essayists insist readers must sit with.
Keywords: book review
Evan Reibsome
July 20, 2019Evan Reibsome is a veteran of the Iraq War, an Assistant Professor of American literature at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, and the Director of the Veterans Empathy Project.
Keywords: 20-2
Grounded and Discomfited: Women in the West

Visit Whitman Mission National Historic Site outside of Walla Walla, Washington, on a fall day, and you see golden rolling hills against rich blue sky. Bright clouds float toward flat-topped ridges lined with windmills. The scenery stretches spacious and bucolic and belies the bloody past. Here, on November 29, 1847, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, a doctor and his missionary wife, and eleven others were famously massacred. Five Cayuse Indian men were accused of the crime and hanged. News of the violence caused legislators in Washington D.C. to give the territory an official name, Oregon, and to assign a provisional governor who immediately declared war on the Cayuse Nation. In I Am a Stranger Here Myself, winner of the 2017 River Teeth book prize, Debra Gwartney revisits this history.
Keywords: book review
Keeping Connected to the Natural World

Most days my wife and I read a book aloud at dinnertime and we each read a book silently at bedtime. Sometimes one book reverberates with the other, cumulatively expanding our consciousness. That happened when we read Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl together and I read Elizabeth Rush’s Rising over the same period.
Keywords: book review
Every Time I Read Him, I Feel Smarter

"Rather than clone what has already been documented—tweets and news reports, from right-leaning and left-leaning sources—Shields racks up an alternative collection of sources to support his thesis. This wide range of quotable material is, in part, what has me turning the pages..."
Keywords: book review
Resisting the Bright Shining Epiphany

Karen Babine's All the Wild Hungers captures the disorientation we feel when faced with this most ordinary, yet extraordinary, of shocks: the mortality of those dearest to us. These short, meditative essays span the eight months of her mother’s recovery from embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare cancer.
Keywords: book review
Editor's Notes 20.2

When my children turned twenty-one, I wrote each of them a letter.... I knew that although my children were still mine and, of course, always would be, they were entering the world as adults; and forevermore I would have to share them with the world in a way that left me excited and proud, but also anxious and wary. This moment in the life of River Teeth feels a bit like that...
The Limits of Ownership, The Vagaries of Possession

Sarah Viren's debut collection explores the concept of ownership. It begins with an essay on the ownership of material goods--the narrator's landlord lends her the furniture that belongs to a man on trial for murder. The essays that follow ask what it means to own one's body, one's family members, one's language, even one's story that is inextricably intertwined with the stories of others.
Keywords: book review
Blamed No More

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meg McGuire's memoir explores addiction, mental disorder, denial, guilt, and the destructive effects of a parent's love....
Rooted and Reaching

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

As her title confirms, Vigderman’s primary concern is the Parthenon. The history she offers of this culturally significant site is enlightening.
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