Blog

The Drive Home

By Kimberly Goode   |  May 17, 2021
We pulled out of the driveway. Our destination: Newark International Airport for a pre-dawn flight back to Seattle. My father drove his Ford Taurus just below the speed limit. Staring out the window, I thought of all the times we'd travelled this road together before.

Reading

By Susan Hodara   |  May 10, 2021
I am reading. I have spun into the writer's words, how his grandmother curled and uncurled the telephone cord around her fingers. I remember those curly cords, how the coils unspooled when you walked around, and then jumped back, spiraling in on themselves, hanging like a wonky rubber ringlet.

Essays All: However We Decide to Collect Them

By Beth Alvarado   |  May 4, 2021
When I was sending out an early version of my manuscript, Anxious Attachments (2019), several agents, who were all interested in the book, asked me to revise it so it would be a “memoir in essays” and not an essay collection, as I thought of the book.

On the Afternoon I Write My Husband Another Note

By Amanda Yanowski   |  May 3, 2021
I sit in my gray office and scribble words onto a piece of stationary I wish I could remember picking out, yellow flowers wrapping around the edges. Believe me when I say I do not have a choice. And I am so sorry. And I tried to fix myself.

Not That Kind of Royalty

By Lea Page   |  April 26, 2021
“So, you lost your crown,” the dentist says. “Yes,” I reply. “Down the hatch.” I’ve learned that jokes are the best and maybe only antidote to terror. My daughter often reminds me, “Don’t relive past traumas,” so I won’t describe the horror show of dental malfeasance that got me here. Not to the dentist’s chair—that’s simple: I swallowed a crown while eating a bowl of leftover rice. Here being: imploding dread, the body’s memory of pain.

Resonance

By Nancy Jorgensen   |  April 19, 2021
A fifty-something woman, wearing a faded floral dress, showed me the antique pump organ. “No one plays anymore,” she said, her wooden cooking spoon in hand. “And I could use the $150.” She went back to her farmhouse stove to stir a pot that smelled of onion and sage while my new husband and I—some said too young for marriage at only 22—whispered about the price.

"Terrible Sanity" and the Art of Narrative

By Jake Demers   |  April 15, 2021
In “Terrible Sanity” (20.2), Sam Pickering wanders through his own life, lamenting the present and celebrating the past.

Editor's Notes 22.2

By Joe Mackall   |  April 13, 2021
Before writing these editor’s notes on a cold Saturday morning in mid-November 2020, I thought back to the words penned in the editor’s notes of the previous issue by my friend and co-editor Dan Lehman, with the country and the world in the early days of the pandemic.

River Teeth Journal Issue 22.2

April 13, 2021
River Teeth 22.2 features the writing of: Abigail Thomas, Marianne Jay Erhardt, Greg Bottoms, Nicole Graev Lipson, Richard Goodman, Shamecca Harris, James Brown, Emily Waples, Jason Goldsmith, Jessica Franken, and Rick Rees.

Urn

By Jenny Apostol   |  April 12, 2021
“What kind of urn do you have in mind?” “No need,” I tell the funeral director. “My mother was a potter.” In the brownstone where I grew up, mother stashed a potter’s wheel behind a Japanese screen built by my father. When she wasn’t throwing pots, I rode that wheel like a merry-go-round.

Seasonal

By Laura Marshall   |  April 5, 2021
In the fall, we rake pecans into piles as most people do with leaves. The tree’s branches extend in every direction over our backyard. Summer thunderstorms shake them loose unripened and encased in a rubbery green skin. They hit the roof with a sharp block, a Louisiana hail.

Walter M. Robinson Wins River Teeth's 2020 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize

By Jill Christman   |  April 2, 2021
We are delighted to announce that Walter M. Robinson is the winner of River Teeth's 2020 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. His winning manuscript, What Cannot Be Undone, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press in Spring 2022.

Exorcising, Freeing, and Healing Trauma

By Krystal Sierra   |  April 2, 2021
Extreme. That’s one way to describe David Tromblay’s As You Were. Another way is horrific. A memoir that speaks to American Indian art, culture, history, and tradition, is not this one. Instead, Tromblay’s is a discovery of self only after he has lived to tell the tale, centering his trauma and survival as explicit indicators of his character.

James Brown

March 30, 2021
James Brown is the author of several books, including the memoirs Apology to the Young Addict and The Los Angeles Diaries.

Mist

By Courtney Hill Gulbro   |  March 29, 2021
A wisp of perfume accompanied my mother. Like her, it was elegant and subtle. The fragrance softly followed her up the hall, her heels clicking, her skirt rustling. Late to somewhere.

The Bends of the Kickapoo

By Craig Holt Segall   |  March 22, 2021
The Kickapoo doubles back on itself. Cutting its way through the billion-year old hummocks of the Driftless Region, the river winds in tight knots and bends. In the high blue Wisconsin summers, ferns and orchids grow on the banded cliffs above the water.

Anchoring and Questioning: Tracing Research and Reflection in Leonard Winograd’s “The Physics of Sorrow”

By Jessie Ferree   |  March 16, 2021
Leonard Winograd’s essay “The Physics of Sorrow,” found in River Teeth 21.1, provides a perfect example of the proper roles of research and reflective questioning.

This is Orange

By Jill Kolongowski   |  March 15, 2021
Around 10:30 this morning the world is orange. The sky, the houses, the air. Inside, my new baby is trying to roll over. She wants to do it so badly she tries to do it in her crib instead of sleeping. She is hopeful. She is determined.

Red Talisman

By Christina Rivera Cogswell   |  March 8, 2021
In sepia photos of the flower market, I picture my father with bundles of pearl chrysanthemums or peach carnations in his brown boy arms. A child with the lodgepole-spine of knowing pride can mean the difference between survival or not under the street-corner eyes of the City of Angels.

Richard Goodman

March 4, 2021
Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, The Soul of Creative Writing, A New York Memoir, and The Bicycle Diaries: One New Yorker's Journey Through 9/11.

Emily Waples

March 4, 2021
Emily Waples lives in Northeast Ohio, where she is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Humanities and Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College.

Nicole Graev Lipson

March 4, 2021
Nicole Graev Lipson's essays and journalism have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Hudson Review, Hippocampus, Crab Creek Review, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other publications.

Abigail Thomas

March 4, 2021
Abigail Thomas has four children, twelve grandchildren, and one great grandchild. Her books include Safekeeping; A Three Dog Life; and What Comes Next and How to Like It.

Greg Bottoms

March 4, 2021
Greg Bottoms is an essayist and story writer. He is the author of two memoirs, Lowest White Boy (2019) and Angelhead (2000), an Esquire Magazine "Book of the Year"; two books of essays about American outsider artists, The Colorful Apocalypse (2007) and Spiritual American Trash (2013); and four prose collections, Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks (2001), Fight Scenes (2008), Swallowing the Past (2011), and Pitiful Criminals (2014).

Marianne Jay Erhardt

March 4, 2021
Marianne Jay Erhardt teaches writing at Wake Forest University. Her work appears in Oxford American, Michigan Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, phoebe, and Ninth Letter.

Shamecca Harris

March 4, 2021
Shamecca Harris is a New York-based creative writer and teaching artist.

Jessica Franken

March 4, 2021
Jessica Franken is an essayist and poet living in Minneapolis. Her nonfiction is published or forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction Sunday Short Reads, phoebe, under the gum tree, The Cincinnati Review, Complete Sentence, and elsewhere.

Rick Rees

March 4, 2021
Rick Rees currently lives and writes in Portland, Oregon, though Georgia is often on his mind.

Jason Goldsmith

March 4, 2021
Jason Goldsmith is Associate Professor of English and program director of the Visiting Writers Series at Butler University in Indianapolis.

Next Stop, Middle-Aged Fatherhood

By Cyndie Zikmund   |  March 2, 2021
Franklin, the author of another University of Nebraska collection, My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married, is the father of three boys and is about to turn forty. He has challenges teaching his children how to become good men while he struggles with more global concerns such as social injustice, the meaning of life, and the American mythologies we impart to our children.

20.2 (2)

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22-2 (13)

book prize (6)

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literary nonfiction (3)

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