LONGFORM CREATIVE NONFICTION
Lessons in Self-Portraiture: Vivian Maier and the Thieving of Self by Beth Kephart
Chasing her apparition. Snapping her own gawp, her glare in the glare of the sun. With her hat on and her hat off. With her eyes on herself or the light. With a compulsion according to wherever a reflection…
Heirlooms by K. A. Jagai
I We are standing in the doorway of our grandparents’ basement apartment, staring straight through the house to the back door. Step outside, and you are at the bottom of a square, concrete pit covered by a black…
Near Erasure by Amber Wong
What’s in a mosquito bite? Unlike Eastern equine encephalitis, the viral strain that sickened people in Massachusetts and New York in August 2024, Western equine encephalitis seems to have gone dormant in the United States. Data from the Centers…
Everything Will Be Fine by Crystal Little
i. denial I can’t admit I’ve fucked up. Not to myself, and certainly not to anyone else. It simply doesn’t track. I’m the responsible one in the family. The reliable one. The sober one. Rock steady, perpetually calm…
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…