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Dinner Talk

The asparagus grew in the Sicilian garden, and my mother made frittata that was sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner, sometimes snack...
This Is It

1998. We stole it at night, one of us running across a lawn we had scoped out beforehand. With a firm kick, I popped it out neatly and ran away with it under my arm like a football, never really breaking my stride. The runaway car was there, waiting...
Happier Than He Has Any Right to Feel

It may seem a foregone conclusion that Should I Still Wish, by John Evans, would make worthwhile reading. Evans is a Stanford University lecturer, memoirist, and winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for Young Widower: A Memoir, in 2014. His writing has set him apart. What is not unique, however, is the subject of this memoir: death. Unfortunately, just about everyone has the misfortune of knowing and loving someone who has died or is dying, and more than a few of us have been compelled to write about our experiences. It’s an arguably over-worn subject, but Evans’s story doesn’t disappear into the middle of the pack.
Shame and Drum

In the Midwestern auditorium, a tired Richard Ford reads a fiction about Grand Central Station to a ticketed crowd as tired and sparse as his scalp. He is old and disappointed, and he is reading about old disappointment...
What Matters

Thursday is "Cosmic Night" at the space centre. I am waiting for three friends by the giant crab outside. The late George Norris designed the twenty-foot sculpture. Stainless steel pincers grasp for the sky.
Yield

Waiting at a red light after dropping off videos. I've nosed my car onto the cross walk, hoping it will trigger the light to change more quickly...
One Era Ends. Another Begins.

When the past doesn’t suit you, from what do you build the future? It’s a question that lumps at the throats of many twenty-somethings who know their lives will not follow those of their parents. Though Leslie Lawrence is well past her twenties, she uses the same question to animate her book of essays, The Death of Fred Astaire, an eclectic collection that ranges over decades of its author’s unexpected life.
YES

Anthony’s text just says, “YES.” I’ve decided to change my flight to Boston, to move it up five days. He’s floundering, just doesn’t sound right; the 25th could be too late. Sooner. Have to get there sooner...
Kinetic Energy

Weeks after California first legalized queer marriages but before the voters snatched them away in 2008, my girlfriend introduced me to the dyke march...
Saturday Night

Every day I flash on scenes and sounds of Fallujah. There are ways of grounding them...
Kerria

“Cheerful!” she said, “What is it?” Then recognizing the compact rows of marigold trophies lining spray upon spray arcing over the yard, “Oh, kerria, that was my mother’s favorite.” A moment of silence for one mother’s mother gone twenty years...
The Kingdom of the Sick

My best childhood friend, Vanessa, suffers from debilitating chronic pain. She has seen multiple specialists, tried numerous treatments, and been diagnosed with a handful of conditions, all of which perhaps come close to naming her experience, but never fully...
River Teeth Journal Issue 18.2

Featuring writing by Zachary F. Gerberick, Lauren Hobson, Brenda Miller, Julie Marie Wade, Michael Downs, E.A. Farro, Thomas Larson, Andre Dubus III, Amanda Bestor-Siegal, Kerry Muir, Reg Darling, Krista Christensen, and Brian Castner.
Keywords: 18.2
Bottled Memories

Golden jars glisten. Forty-nine quarts of autumn ripeness and summer’s bronze made sweet by the kiss of blizzards to come. Like a mother waiting for the reassuring cry of her newborn, I pine for the pop of jars sealing...
River Teeth 2014 Book Contest Winner Receives 2017 PEN Literary Award

In 2014, Angela Morales and her essay collection The Girls in My Town was selected by bestselling author and final judge Cheryl Strayed for the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Award. The collection published by University New Mexico Press in 2016, has now received the 2017 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Art of the Essay as well. This prestigious award was presented at a live awards ceremony on March 27, 2017.
A Dress for the Wedding

You are modeling dresses and your husband votes for the one with the bouncy hem and V-neck. "It shows your nice cleavage!" "Yeah, for everyone." But in fact, you like your cleavage, and it's good to like something about your body...
Brenda Miller

Brenda Miller is the author of An Earlier Life, Who You Will Become, Listening Against the Stone: Selected Essays, Blessing of the Animals, and Season of the Body.
Thomas Larson
March 24, 2017Thomas Larson is the author to The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative and The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s "Adagio for Strings."
Andre Dubus III
March 24, 2017Andre Dubus III is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, and the novels Bluesman, House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, a New York Times bestseller and the memoir, Townie. His work has been included in The Best American Essays of 1994, The Best Spiritual Writing of 1999, and The Best of Hope Magazine. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for fiction, The Pushcart Prize, and was a Finalist for the Rome Prize Fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters.
Editor's Notes, Volume 18, Number 2

Narcissism is much in the news these days, what with the present exemplar-in-chief posing almost daily reminders of the sins of self-absorption and grandiosity. Still, before we dismiss too glibly this comb-over phenomenon, we might as well admit that narcissism can be a charge leveled with some merit at memoir writing and its related nonfiction forms. Memoir or ME-Moir? Guilty or not?
Keywords: 18.2
Amanda Bestor-Siegal
March 24, 2017Amanda Bestor-Siegal is based in Paris, where she is working on a novel. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Threepenny Review and Salon.
Keywords: 18-2
Brian Castner
March 24, 2017Brian Castner is a nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. He is the author of All the Ways We Kill and Die and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into an opera and named an Amazon Best
Keywords: 18-2
Krista Christensen
March 24, 2017Krista Christensen's essays have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Harpur Palate, Hippocampus, Word Riot, and elsewhere.
Keywords: 18-2
Reg Darling
March 24, 2017Reg Darling lives in Vermont with his wife and cats. When he isn’t writing, he paints and wanders in the woods. He was an outdoor writer of sorts in a previous literary incarnation, but has wandered off into the rest of his life.
Keywords: 18-2
Michael Downs
March 24, 2017Michael Downs’s books include House of Good Hope (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, and The Greatest Show (Louisiana State University Press)
Keywords: 18-2
E. A. Farro
March 24, 2017E. A. Farro is a scientist and artist along the Mississippi River in Minnesota. She has a PhD in geology and has spent a lot of time living in the wilderness. She is working on a novel and a weekly online collaboration, Science Love Letters. ​​
Keywords: 18-2
Zachary Gerberick
March 24, 2017Zachary Gerberick is a MFA candidate in creative writing at Florida State University.
Keywords: 18-2
Lauren Hobson
March 24, 2017Lauren Hobson is a graduate of Tulane University. She lives, works, and writes in Portland, Oregon.
Keywords: 18-2
Kerry Muir
March 24, 2017Kerry Muir holds an MFA from Vermont College of the Fine Arts, where she studied with Robin Hemley, Philip Graham, and Brett Lott. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Quarter After Eight, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.
Keywords: 18-2
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