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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....
Art Lesson (repeat)
| October 29, 2018 They saved it for Fridays. Every teacher had the same projects. Fall: iron leaves between waxed paper. Winter: chalk snow scenes on black construction paper. Spring: draw daffodils. Except for Miss Malik. She was young, pretty, and not a nun....
The Day to Day (repeat)
| October 22, 2018 Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl. After you died, they said the only thing to do was keep on living....
Maps
| October 15, 2018 Dr. A, my mother's handsome Bolivian neurosurgeon, lost his father on Everest. I pictured whorls of snow, a crumpled map and a man, stepping into thin air....
Window Vent
| October 8, 2018 You take me for a ride in a sixties Oldsmobile. The radio doesn't work and you had to put additive in the gas....
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."
Late
| October 1, 2018 You hoped she wouldn't show up today, the student who scares you. She in her crop tops and lace-up tanks, her camis with labels like Juicy or Nasty Gal that stick up between her thick shoulder blades....
My Grandmother's Pie Plate
| September 24, 2018 I'm the one filling it now, and I've never minded sugar under my fingernails less. Its surface is dark with shine; it's been swallowing butter and heat for two lifetimes at least....
The Band Reunited and We All Bought Tickets
| September 17, 2018 Praise God for a venue with a parking lot....
Vantage Point
| September 10, 2018 Some boys found a little brown bat in the parking lot outside the surgeon's office. Delicate as a tea bag, they poked it with a stick, kicked it....
A Grandmother Listens
| September 3, 2018 She is a bird in song with whole consonants flying out of the cave of her tiny mouth, the tones airborne like a floating leaf. She hands me a block, and with it comes language not yet molded into comprehension, but so sweet, that I listen carefully like one does on a forest walk....
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....
2016 Book Prize Winner a Finalist in WILLA Literary Awards
August 30, 2018 Earlier this month Women Writing the West (WWW) announced the 2018 WILLA Literary Award Winners and Finalists. The 2016 River Teeth book prize winner, Rough Crossing: An Alaskan Fisherwoman’s Memoir by Rosemary McGuire, was one of two finalists in the category of Creative Nonfiction.
Keywords: book prize, contest
A Total Solar Eclipse Is Visible from Any Given Point on Earth Once Every 375 Years, on Average
| August 27, 2018 We'd gone to the lake to watch. We had the special glasses, and I toggled between gaping at the razor-precise disappearing of the sun and looking down at my children to make sure they both had their glasses properly affixed.
Away and Away, Then To: A Memoir
| August 20, 2018 The placenta blocked my exit. I was lifted from my mother just in time. London, 1968—bound for my father's USA. The month between Martin and Bobby; I imagine everyone sad.
In Answer to Fire
| August 13, 2018 For a long time, we could not go back. But once we were done averting our eyes, once we had mourned and banished all smoldering thoughts about the tribe of blackened trees replacing the known world for now and another season, and the last long fingers of smoke were ushered out by wind, a ticking began....
Walking
| August 6, 2018 I do not want to be naked. The thought consumes me to the point of obsession. As we crunch across the luminous blue-gray glacier, as we delicately spear a rack of the best lamb I've ever had in my life, as we drive for hours in the liquid darkness searching for the northern lights, my mind churns over scenarios....
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....
Visitation (rerun)
| July 30, 2018 On the porch, under a Blood Moon, our fire is dying down, so we wear wool blankets over our shoulders. We're drinking cider warmed in a pan on the stove, splashed into mugs with whiskey....
Interruptions (rerun)
| July 23, 2018 Seek stillness. Close your eyes, relax in the lotus position, and breathe deeply. But hold on tight. Search every corner of the cosmos and you find only a universe in motion....
Waiting for Owls (rerun)
| July 16, 2018 Evening returns to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the land cools. Day follows the sun across the valley floor and up into the mountains in the west. Birds settle down for the night.
The Sweetness of Figs
| July 9, 2018 I am at home here like I have not been anywhere else in my life. Home in the heat of dripping fig trees, their treacle tears that drop-by-drop onto the dry ground, the sour smell of wine in the air....
Excalibur
| July 2, 2018 We sprinted by the worn house with the closed blinds that reeked of pot and who knows what else. I gave the leash a short tug and we slowed to a walk again....
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....
Mail Order
| June 25, 2018 You know what I heard, I heard your mother was a mail order briiiiiiide. The girl with a thoroughly sensible name in my first-grade class drew out the last word, and I struggled with the new sentence structure....
Leave-Taking
| June 18, 2018 Sassafras, shagbark hickory, spicebush, paw paws and sycamores marked the descent to the creek. The untillable acres, as they call them. The hills too steep and outcrops too rocky. The forgotten backs of farms....
The Petals of Summer
| June 11, 2018 They lie like bits of tissue on the bathroom floor rug, caught in the fibers; I bend to pick them up and see the yellow and pink threadworn veins, dry and broken and translucent pieces of geranium and nasturtium....
This Is What Men Do
| June 4, 2018 At the tiny Eretz Shalom Cemetery on the mesa south of Taos, I feel like I have stepped into a John Ford Western. The impossibly big New Mexican sky dwarfs the mourners standing in sagebrush around a six-foot-deep hole in the ground....
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....
Wish You Were Here
| May 28, 2018 Our three-year-old sits on my husband's shoulders, bouncing. Red rock and yellow cottonwood trees and blue sky surround us. Fall break in Capitol Reef, Utah, and we’re winding up a trail we’ve never hiked before to see an arch...
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