Blog

What It Means to Bless

By Debbie Hagan   |  November 2, 2020
In 1959, twelve-year-old Orr rises early with his three brothers, heads to the field with their father. They shoot their rifles and kill a deer. Just as they celebrate, Orr’s gun goes off again, this time killing his eight-year-old brother, Peter.

The Cadence of an Individual Heartbeat

By Tarn Wilson   |  October 2, 2020
“I’ve always been a hungry reader,” Rebecca McClanahan writes in her newest collection In the Key of New York. Me too. And I often read as I eat: I gobble. But, as with certain transcendent meals, there are books that, from the first page, ask that I slow down and savor: hold the book carefully, turn the pages mindfully. McClanahan’s memoir-in-essays is just such a book. As I read, I found myself asking what qualities define writing that both enlivens and stills the reader.

Bathing (Again) at 9600 Feet

By Jill Christman   |  September 2, 2020
Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children has a sub-subtitle that appears only on the title page: Essays from 9600 feet, an ascension to yet another layer, so Winograd. I will begin at that altitude, in the Colorado cabin Winograd built with her husband Leonard—who features frequently in these pages as voice of reason, asker of crucial questions (“Where are the bees?”), cracker of jokes, watcher of sky, and bearer of arachnid mercy in the form of an oft-used spider jar.

Relighting the Candle

By Renée E. D’Aoust   |  August 3, 2020
In Sonja Livingston’s The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, the author is drawn to explore her youth in the Catholic Church. She longs to return to the intertwined experience of childhood and faith when the two were inseparable.

How to Save Yourself in Nine Steps

By Deborah L. Hall   |  July 9, 2020
I was so immersed in Judith Sara Gelt’s memoir Reckless Steps Toward Sanity about her life growing up in a Denver neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s that I kept entering a time warp. It’s not fair to Gelt’s story that my own memories of living during the same era kept flashing through. Gelt sent my senses hurdling back in time with the mention of TV shows or magazines, filling my head with jingles and laugh tracks and the sound of Stevie Wonder’s voice.

Haunted by Sandy Hook

By Joy Gaines-Friedler   |  June 3, 2020
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.

Scholar’s Sensibility, Poet’s Eye

By Robert Root   |  May 1, 2020
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.

A Tragic History. Its Legacy Still Troubled.

By Richard Goodman   |  April 1, 2020
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

By Lindsay Hickman   |  March 2, 2020
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.

Make Present the Experience of the Other: Three Memoirs of Political Witness

By Glen Retief   |  February 9, 2020
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

By   |  January 3, 2020
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.

Feral Youth, Fast Cars, and Fraught Love

By Brandel France de Bravo   |  December 2, 2019
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.

The Biology of Flesh and Bone

By Detrick Hughes   |  November 1, 2019
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.

Many Lives, Many Bodies

By Katy Major   |  October 7, 2019
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.

One Word Says It All

By Jenna McGuiggan   |  September 7, 2019
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.

Shapes Shifted, Senses Altered, Values Freely Wheeled

By Thomas Larson   |  August 2, 2019
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.

Grounded and Discomfited: Women in the West

By Ana Maria Spagna   |  July 2, 2019
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.

Keeping Connected to the Natural World

By   |  June 3, 2019
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.

Every Time I Read Him, I Feel Smarter

By Judith Sara Gelt   |  May 4, 2019
"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..."

Resisting the Bright Shining Epiphany

By Tarn Wilson   |  April 1, 2019
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.

The Limits of Ownership, The Vagaries of Possession

By Jessie van Eerden   |  March 1, 2019
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.

Blamed No More

By Ann Piper   |  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.

By Eric Farwell   |  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....

Making Violence Holy

By Thomas Larson   |  December 3, 2018
A dialogue review by Renee E. D'Aoust and Thomas Larson...

The Thrill of Narrative Incompleteness

By Jessica Handler   |  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

By Penny Guisinger   |  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

By Katharine Coldiron   |  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

By   |  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

By David MacWilliams   |  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

By   |  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....

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