LONGFORM CREATIVE NONFICTION
Manufactured Landscapes by Erin Langner
Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario. I was searching for an image of mill tailings. Burtynsky, of course, I thought when I found it. The photograph shows black, barren trees, thin and broken like toothpicks that appear to be…
Excerpt from A Mouth Full of Dirt: On Reckoning with Art and Erasure by Rosa Boshier González
Two Thirds Terror, One Third Romance On vacations, my father encouraged me to keep travel diaries. These were less diaries than documents—drawings, descriptions, and artifacts recording our movements each travel day. You’ll treasure them when you’re older, he reasoned.…
Flood Days by May Teng
Kayu Putih, Northeast Jakarta I wake up on New Year’s Day to a world underwater. Or at least it feels that way: the neighborhood has sunken overnight in an opaque brown liquid dotted with moving heads. Two women move…
Holding by Laura Joyce-Hubbard
I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. Every takeoff is the same, but I am always on alert for the one that will be different. In Bosnia or Boston. Panama or Palm Springs. On short…
Excerpt from The Hour of Lost Boys by Matthew Aquilone
Palladium, 1990 At the nightclub with my brothers Michael and Vinny, everything dissolves inside the eruption of sound and light. Whatever membrane that once held my place in the world now dematerializes in the collective rapture of the crowd.…
Split Reel by Gabriella Graceffo
1A I slip into a crowded theater to feel close to people without being seen. My elbow just barely on the armrest, I watch the film color the room yellow then blue, each face in my peripheral blurred by…
Teeth: A Family Portrait by Maggie Thach Morshed
I have been paying close attention to my baby’s mouth to see if he will inherit whatever it is that has allowed me the good fortune of straight teeth. No braces. No retainers. Just a slight overbite when I…
Empty Nest by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
My youngest brother runs away from home again the morning the baby robins fly from the nest. All spring, I watch a mother robin build her nest under my deck. It rests next to the half-dozen hollowed-out husks abandoned…
Of Way Trails and Wolves by Caitlin Scarano
It was a hot August morning in 2017 when I finished packing everything I cared to keep into my blue Forester (including cat, dog, and the few boxes of things I hadn’t sold or given away) and left Milwaukee.…
Lessons in Entomology by Gabriel Holton
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…