Blog
Bathing (Again) at 9600 Feet
| September 2, 2020 Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children has a sub-subtitle that appears only on the title page: Essays from 9600 feet, an ascension to yet another layer, so Winograd. I will begin at that altitude, in the Colorado cabin Winograd built with her husband Leonard—who features frequently in these pages as voice of reason, asker of crucial questions (“Where are the bees?”), cracker of jokes, watcher of sky, and bearer of arachnid mercy in the form of an oft-used spider jar.
Keywords: book review
The Greatest Unease
| August 31, 2020 Flying over deep water in the inscrutable dark. We are doomed. I hear the pilot slur his words. My neck is stiff. I feel a headache coming on. My legs begin to cramp. The anxiety pills make me nauseous. The line for the loo snakes down the aisle. The plane begins to jerk.
He Gave Her the Honey-Sweet Berry of the Pomegranate to Eat
| August 24, 2020 In the produce aisle, I consider genetically modified pomegranates: ruby globes that overflow my palms cupped together. But the one I choose to bring home I pluck with my thumb and forefinger. Pitted and tawny, my pomegranate looks like what it is: a seed pod . . .
Your Dad's Not Here
| August 17, 2020 “You don’t have to go in, Mom,” my son said through the phone. I was standing on the porch, holding the phone, and knocking on his dad’s door.
Fog
| August 10, 2020 Low-slung fog canvasses our narrow valley. The film of haze blurs the trees, rubbing out their distinct edges. As if the forest is fine print and I am trying to read it without my glasses. This morning I awoke thinking of my old brown mare . . .
Relighting the Candle
| August 3, 2020 In Sonja Livingston’s The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, the author is drawn to explore her youth in the Catholic Church. She longs to return to the intertwined experience of childhood and faith when the two were inseparable.
Keywords: book review
Footfall
| August 3, 2020 The black, four-inch stilettos with pointed toes were a gift, so I tried to be polite as I thought of a kind way to say: Hell no. Then I looked at his happy, hopeful face and knew I would learn to wear them.
Convergence
| July 27, 2020 Rain falling on the cabin roof isn't music or balm or metaphor. For two days and two nights, it's nothing but water saturating the stairs I descend in the dark to go to the outhouse while my husband sleeps.
False Spring
| July 20, 2020 Fourteen cedar waxwings cluster in the apple tree. The bright February sun sharpens their dark masks and perky crests as they bounce from branch to branch devouring the rotted fruit beakful by beakful until the apples hang in tatters.
Two Forms
| July 13, 2020 Henry Moore's bronze sculpture Large Two Forms sits like a pair of discarded vertebrae on the pavement outside the art gallery, where small children clamber and slide through its round openings on their bellies and backsides. Teenagers, too, are drawn to these primal shapes.
How to Save Yourself in Nine Steps
| July 9, 2020 I was so immersed in Judith Sara Gelt’s memoir Reckless Steps Toward Sanity about her life growing up in a Denver neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s that I kept entering a time warp. It’s not fair to Gelt’s story that my own memories of living during the same era kept flashing through. Gelt sent my senses hurdling back in time with the mention of TV shows or magazines, filling my head with jingles and laugh tracks and the sound of Stevie Wonder’s voice.
Keywords: book review
Stream
| July 6, 2020 I want to believe that the first song I heard came from my mother. She sang "Moon River" while putting me to bed. I'm crossing you in style someday. What was that river of the moon?
Airview
| June 29, 2020 My father decided he wanted an airview, a photograph of our summer home taken from a tiny plane on a clear, bright day. In these pictures, the skies are always blue and the houses have been carefully groomed like children for class pictures . . .
Fear of Poetry
| June 22, 2020 My beloved friend dying of cancer said she’d been afraid of poetry for too long. I suggested a poetry party. A university lecturer, Susan was inspirational whether she was talking Jane Austen or freshman composition.
Electric
| June 15, 2020 I try not to give too much power to what some call signs. Sure, when my mother was dying there was that thing with the poem I'd written about lightning, followed by the plane ride I took to her deathbed in the lightning storm . . .
Liz Prato
June 8, 2020Liz Prato's most recent book, Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai'i (Overcup Press, 2019), is an Oregon Book Award finalist.
Keywords: 21-2
River Teeth Journal Issue 21.2
June 8, 2020 River Teeth Issue 21.2 features the writing of: Rebecca McClanahan, Phillip Hurst, Wendy Bilen, Mary Grimm, Kevin Honold, Camellia Freeman, Liz Prato, Tim Bascom, Kelle Groom, James Ellenberger, Kelly Fordon, and Nicole Graev Lipson.
Keywords: 21-2
Editor's Notes 21.2
| June 8, 2020 In the fall of 2018, Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman wrote to us to say that River Teeth needed a new home. They wanted to know whether we would consider joining them on the masthead and making Ball State University the magazine’s institutional headquarters.
Keywords: 21-2
Kelly Fordon
June 8, 2020Kelly Fordon's work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review (KRO), Rattle, and various other journals.
Keywords: 21-2
Tim Bascom
June 8, 2020Tim Bascom's newest book, Climbing Lessons, is a collection of 40 brief personal narratives about fathers and sons in his own Midwestern clan.
Keywords: 21-2
Wendy Bilen
June 8, 2020Wendy Bilen usually has a few productive hours in the middle of the day, in her office, or in a coffee shop, anywhere but home, where her two middle schoolers and her pug can do nothing without her.
Keywords: 21-2
Mary Grimm
June 8, 2020Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection).
Keywords: 21-2
James Ellenberger
June 8, 2020James Ellenberger was born and raised in Chicora, a small town in western Pennsylvania.
Keywords: 21-2
Kelle Groom
June 8, 2020Kelle Groom is the author of a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice.
Keywords: 21-2
Rebecca McClanahan
June 8, 2020Rebecca McClanahan's eleventh book, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in September 2020.
Keywords: 21-2
Nicole Graev Lipson
June 8, 2020Nicole Graev Lipson's essays and journalism have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Hudson Review, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe Magazine, among other publications.
Keywords: 21-2
Enigma
| June 8, 2020 My father's face could accommodate almost any emotion but disappointment. There were times it was called for, certainly, but it just couldn't get any purchase. It would pass like a stab of indigestion, visible for only an instant...
