CREATIVE NONFICTION
Father/Figure by Andrea Avery
1. Ambigram In isolation, I mark time by the movement of sunlight across my walls and floors. I awake each morning to the desert sun blazing through the east-facing back door. The sun conspires with the automatic pool cleaner…
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Dash by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
At dusk the light goes diffuse, like slow motion, like simple. The backyard trees are velvet; cirrus swift brushstrokes make the sky seem safe. The railroad rattling through the front yard slows too, whistle filtered through the gloaming until…
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Stumbling over History by Kenny Fries
In May 1939, Adolf Hitler received a request from the parents of Gerhard Kretschmar, who was born blind and missing limbs. The Kretschmars wanted to kill their child. Hitler authorized his personal physician, SS officer Dr. Karl Brandt, to…
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Roadways by Virginia Watts
Along Route 322, an often-traveled roadway of my childhood, past the turnoffs for Annville, Cleona, and Quentin, a thing of exquisite and recurring beauty—an automobile salvage yard that everyone simply called “the junkyard.” Cars dumped and clumped, leaning affectionately…
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Catalogue for a Coming of Age by Liz Harmer
000 Generalities In 1999, I worked two jobs and had just gotten out of the hospital. A few afternoons a week and on Saturdays I shelved books at a small branch of the public library, as I had been…
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What You Don’t Know by Clare Fielder
I started boxing because of writing. I was working on a novel about young queer women being angry and boxing their way out of their small town. I needed terminology, so I went to a boxing training class. I…
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The Ties that Bind by Tammy Delatorre
On the Big Island of Hawai‘i, Honokaa is the town tourists drive through to get to Waipi‘o Valley. At the top of the valley is a scenic overlook, which provides an unobstructed view to the black sand beach, river,…
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Face, Velvet, Church, Daisy, Red by Marilyn Hope
A woman in a spruce-blue tracksuit enters my bedroom with a pickax and chips a hole in my wall. She collects smooth, fist-sized rubies from between the studs and places them in a music box, ribboned with dark grain,…
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The Untimely Collaborators by Sara Davis
There are mornings we just manage it. We rise in the weak gray light and take our coffee with our notebooks open. A sliver of meditative silence. Are you writing about me? you ask. No, I lie. Are you…
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Cities and Desire by Hart L’Ecuyer
Inspired by Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino—a story of my life Perhaps the farmland becomes industrial yards with barbed wire fences, and then the barbed wire fences become concrete retaining walls covered in graffiti, and you are there.…
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