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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.

Playboy (repeat)

By Steven Harvey   |  July 29, 2019
When my mother caught Chris and me looking at Playboy, we knew we were in trouble, but to my surprise she did not get angry. She took me into the house and pulled out the large glossy art books with paintings by the Impressionists.

Stand Up Tall

By Allen M. Price   |  July 22, 2019
My father turns his head, puts me on the floor, opens the screen, and walks out the back door. Just the silhouette of the bare trees shadowing night's sky is all I can see. I stand there for long minutes listening as night whispers peace.

Chris Siteman

July 20, 2019
Chris Siteman lives in Massachusetts. He teaches in the English departments at Suffolk University and Bridgewater State University. His chapbook, PART X of ME, is forthcoming from Pen & Anvil Press.

Jill Talbot

July 20, 2019
Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir (Soft Skull, 2015) and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (Iowa, 2012). Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Longreads, The Normal School, Paris Review Daily, and Slice Magazine, among others.

Sam Pickering

July 20, 2019
Sam Pickering grew up in Tennessee and has spent the past fifty years in New England, where he taught English at the University of Connecticut. He has written some thirty books and hundreds of articles entertaining himself and the occasional general reader.

E. J. Myers

July 20, 2019
E. J. Myers was born in Denver and raised in Colorado, Mexico, and Peru. He has worked in a wide variety of professions and trades, including inpatient health care, emergency medical services, carpentry, cabinetmaking, and freelance writing.

Elizabeth Miki Brina

July 20, 2019
Elizabeth Miki Brina is a writer of literary nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Hyphen, New Delta Review, and Under the Gum Tree, among others. Her first book, a memoir, is under contract with Knopf.

Evan Reibsome

July 20, 2019
Evan 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.

Rachel Weaver

July 20, 2019
Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now. Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014 and won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction.

Jeff Gundy

July 20, 2019
Jeff Gundy’s eighth book of poems, Without a Plea, is just out from Bottom Dog Press. Recent essays and poems are in Cincinnati Review, Artful Dodge, and Terrain.

Anne McGrath

July 20, 2019
Anne McGrath’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ruminate, Lunch Ticket, Brevity Blog, and other publications. Her audio stories have aired on National Public Radio, the Brevity Podcast, and Petrichor Audio Magazine.

EmmaJean Holley

July 20, 2019
EmmaJean Holley is an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. Her work has been published in Columbia Journal, among other places.

Rosanna N. Henderson

July 20, 2019
Rosanna N. Henderson’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Salt Hill, Fourth Genre, and West Branch. She grew up in both Virginias and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Fleda Brown

July 20, 2019
Fleda Brown’s collection of essays with Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry (Green Writers Press), came out in 2018. The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2017. Her eighth collection of poems, No Need of Sympathy (BOA Editions, Ltd.) came out in 2013. Her memoir is Driving With Dvorak (University of Nebraska Press, 2010).

J. David Stevens

July 20, 2019
J. David Stevens teaches English at the University of Richmond. Recent essays appear or are forthcoming in Post Road, Sonora Review, and The Gettysburg Review. His most recent book is I and You, a story collection from Arc Pair Press.

Those Days

By Nikki Hardin   |  July 15, 2019
In 1976, when you were still alive, I wrecked my car on 14th Street in D.C. on our first date.

Rocks

By Emily James   |  July 8, 2019
Gravel dots her fingertips, her knees, the edges of her yellow dress. She runs along the parked RV, the sun hanging low above its roof. She bends and picks up a pebble; it stretches along the small of her hands. Her arm cocks back as she eyes me, smiles.

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.

His Pockets (repeat)

By Deborah Nedelman   |  July 1, 2019
At four he is an earnest collector. He keeps his secrets in his pockets and leaves them for me in the laundry basket. As I unroll the cuffs of his too-long-yet pants, sand dribbles out, a clump of mud caking the cloth. Even if all is quiet, I remain cautious.

Lightening Up (repeat)

By Laurie Granieri   |  June 24, 2019
My brother and I grab hold of dangling metal chains fastened to schoolyard swings in this expanse of crabgrass, red dirt, goalposts, and hard bleachers, where he'd slapped the face of the sky with baseballs all those years ago, where I'd ducked every flying thing....

Rocket Scientist (repeat)

By Andrea Caswell   |  June 17, 2019
As a child, when adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had plenty of answers, but they all sounded like Halloween costumes. Race-car driver. Astronaut. Olympic track star....

Missing (repeat)

By Riane Konc   |  June 11, 2019
You have been ours for ten months, and tomorrow, the state will return you to your mother.

Keeping Connected to the Natural World

By Robert Root   |  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.

Kinetic Energy (repeat)

By Sam Brighton   |  June 3, 2019
Blankets and coolers and lesbians covered every inch across an entire city block. We idled atop dense grass, my head resting in her lap as she leaned back on her palms...

The Dying Room

By Abigail Thomas   |  May 27, 2019
When he woke again he questioned how had he come to be here in this terrible room, who had allowed it to happen?

A Perceivable Soul

By Robert Root   |  May 20, 2019
The last time we saw her, two weeks before she died, her dementia seemed to have taken everything from her. The traits we thought particularly hers were no longer visible to us.

Like Breath, Like Doors

By Anne McGrath   |  May 13, 2019
I woke at 3 a.m. to what sounded like a barking seal. It was my husband—teeth chattering, too weak to stand, and too confused to speak.

How to Leave Without Saying Goodbye

By Kristin Tenor   |  May 6, 2019
Remember that afternoon you asked me to be your accomplice, your getaway driver, your ticket to freedom?

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..."

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