Blog
Rocks
| 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
| 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.
Keywords: book review
His Pockets (repeat)
| 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)
| 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)
| 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)
| 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
| 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.
Keywords: book review
Kinetic Energy (repeat)
| 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
| 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
| 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
| 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
| 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
| 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..."
Keywords: book review
The Art of Icebergs
| April 29, 2019 In Jokusarlon Lagoon, at the edge of Vatnajokull, Iceland's largest glacier, ten of us and Erik, our guide, bounce bounce bounce in a Zodiac boat. We are here to see icebergs, calves of the glacier, chunks that break off and fall into the water.
What Dreams May Come
| April 22, 2019 If it wasn't for me, maybe he'd still be dreaming. When I told my Dad I wanted to live forever, he said, "Just wait 'till you get to be my age, then you'll wish you were dead." I was eight. He was twenty-eight. He was always joking, never kidding.
Family Portrait
| April 15, 2019 Yesterday, when I was riding the train north from Chicago, back to the suburb where I live, I happened to look up from the newspaper I was reading just as the tracks veered up alongside the back of a faded brown brick building, where I saw two children seated at a kitchen table in one of its windows....
Cold (repeat)
| April 8, 2019 On the hottest days in San Vicente, I sit on the front porch of my host family's house, sweat dripping from under my arms, dust turning to mud on my salt-streaked legs.
Peaches (repeat)
| April 1, 2019 The peach's soft flesh is so barely protected by its thin and fuzzy skin that I think it can't possibly be serious, but rather a jubilant sunburst, radiant and unworried in the brief noon of its summered existence, simply satisfied with the bright sweetness of its being....
Resisting the Bright Shining Epiphany
| 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.
Keywords: book review
Jesus, the Wonder Bread of Life
| March 25, 2019 Mom gave me the idea, an object lesson given to her as a girl. "Pass it around," I said to my Mormon Bible study class. After a pause, the other preteens passed around the slice of Wonder Bread....
Editor's Notes 20.2
| March 20, 2019 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...
River Teeth part of a 4-journal CNF reading during Portland AWP Writers Conference
March 20, 2019 Join Under the Gum Tree, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, and River Teeth for an AWP happy hour of telling true stories: Friday, March 29, 5:30-7 p.m. at the White Owl Social Club in Portland, OR.
Perennial
| March 18, 2019 Yesterday my uncle Russ, my dad's older brother, texted me a video of a peony bush in bloom. The plant isn't his—he left the farm where it grows, in the remains of his mother's garden, to become a middle-school band director a half-century ago. But he can't stop tending things, a dogged farmer....
Very Large Array
| March 11, 2019 While traveling in New Mexico, I made a pilgrimage to the high desert to see the Karl G. Jansky Array, curious to witness a telescope as big as a valley....
Essay Collection by Joan Frank Wins 2018 River Teeth Book Prize
March 8, 2019 Congratulations to Joan Frank, the winner of the 2018 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. Her winning manuscript Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place is focused, most broadly, upon travel and place--but also and equally, popular culture and, by default, autobiography.
Midnight Feedings
| March 4, 2019 We are limbs, braided and heavy, under sheets reluctant to release us. We are dreams interrupted, sleep sliced away like an appendage, the knife a familiar siren, filling the space between walls. We are silhouettes, faceless shapes against muted window glow....
The Limits of Ownership, The Vagaries of Possession
| 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.
Keywords: book review
Young Moons
| February 25, 2019 The moon drifts in the west, too thin to be called a crescent, Venus above like a sleeping child lowered by invisible hands into a cradle. It's a glimmer in the sunset sky above a skyline of pine, a sweep of summer grass....
October
| February 18, 2019 October light leaks between slats of graying barn wood. A yellow stripe marks Craig's cheek, his shoulder. I taste salt and smell sun on skin and in the hay beneath me that makes our bed in the neighbor’s old hay barn, a place we run to in daylight....
Powerless
| February 11, 2019 Our off-the-grid neighbors say that they know when the power has gone out because a chorus of hums rises from the generators in the valley. Now, our house has joined that choir....
