I first met Marty Ross-Dolen in spring of 2020 at an online introductory event for Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) MFA in Writing program. We’d each been accepted into VCFA’s Creative Nonfiction program, with goals of working on…
Grant Faulkner, who will serve as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2025 Flash Prose Prize, recently told me that he dislikes conventional bios and prefers to find something odd on the internet about writers he’s asked to introduce.…
Memoirist Jeannie Vanasco’s third book, A Silent Treatment, will be released by Tin House on September 9. Jeannie’s mother starts using the silent treatment shortly after she moves into a renovated apartment in Jeannie’s home. Over the five years…
Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is exactly what its subtitle promises: “42 Years in 42 Essays.” Of course, what makes it literary; what makes it a hypnotic, engaging, magical read; what makes it one of my favorite books…
Essay by Abby Manzella • In Karen Babine’s latest memoir, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo (Milkweed 2025), the author preps her Scamp camper and drives from her home in Minnesota to the Acadian coast of…
On an early spring day in Flatbush, I sat down with my friend and neighbor, Shayne Terry. Our five-year-olds went out with their fathers while we talked about Terry’s debut book, Leave: A Postpartum Account, which came out this…
SLOAN ASAKURA (she/he/they) is a poet and memoirist from Los Angeles. They are a 2022 Periplus Fellow, a 2023 Tin House Resident, an upcoming 2025 Tin House Workshop participant, and a 2026 candidate for an MFA in literary arts at…
Content Warning: This piece of creative nonfiction includes the use of a slur and its use reclaimed, as well as a brief scene involving the threat of violence. Act I My mother always said, borrowing from Lois McMaster…
“Mijo. Venga. Ayúdeme.” I rouse myself out of bed at two in the morning. “Mijo, lléveme a El Salto,” he tells me as I enter his bedroom. I sit by his bed, reach over the railing, release his grip.…
Somehow, here—before the picnic ramadas and megaplayground and volley and basketball courts near a man-made lake with knolls bristled with grass—stood, for ninety-nine years, a residential boarding school named Phoenix Indian School. But no more. This acreage is now…
“Residential School Requiem” is an excerpted chapter from my memoir-in-progress One Pima Pilgrim, which follows my turbulent yearlong journey to my reservation—the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona—as I confront the memory of my flawed, blue-collar father. One Pima Pilgrim bridges the emotional void between eccentric sons and their imperfect fathers and confronts postcolonial hardships of Native addiction, homophobia, and grief.
My memoir draws from other literary pilgrimages similar to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And like those titles, my knack for nature and lyrical writing allows me to tell a “holy journey” set on an Indian reservation—including at a former Indian boarding school where “Residential School Requiem” is set—but as I explored the seasons, it was as if the landscape was exploring me, resulting in this chapter (and my entire memoir) written without the pronoun “I” (save for direct quotes of others) to represent a sacred but flawed tribal norm that the village is more important than the individual. The removal of “I” exemplifies the tension between tribal expectations and my own needs—emotional, intellectual, sexual—that the reservation and my family were unable to meet.
“Residential School Requiem” is how culture, memory, and desire ping-pong off each other, or as I interrogate in the essay: “Hear it—history?” Listen closely. Otherwise, the story withers, and thus the arid desert wins—again.
D. A. NAVOTI is a multidisciplinary storyteller, composer, and writer of the Gila River Indian Community. He won the 2025 Nonfiction Literary Award from the Tucson Festival of Books and was the 2023–25 Indigenous Community Liaison for 4Culture’s Poetry in Public program.
