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…
Memoir asks writers to transform the messy materials of lived experience into structured stories that illuminate larger questions of identity, loss, resilience, and meaning. In this conversation, Renee Gilmore (Wayfinding(opens in new tab), Trio House Press, 2025) and Kelly…
A few years ago, when I was developing a graduate course on flash writing, I knew that I wanted to include Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (2017) because it showed how brevity helps language to draw…
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…
This excerpt is from a longer in-progress dreamoir, tentatively titled Window. Overall, the project seeks to make sense of the beauties and tragedies of living and reconciliation of trauma through a lens of C-PTSD, looking to the natural world, semantics of diction, and the reader to understand the mirrored occurrences in the speaker’s life. Operating in fragments shattered across the page, the piece speaks to itself and the reader begging for a different possible ending. I wrote this piece in honesty—facing times when I could not tell dream from reality, song from silence, pain from love—or whether they are even separate.
This excerpt sits on the foundation of my wound—the wounds that came before me, that built the context upon which I was formed. Intergenerational trauma is written into the genetic code. The wounds of your mother, her mother, wounds of your father and his, etched into you to hold. Your family histories are not impersonal—they did not happen to someone else only. They also happened to you—an echo into dark where your shadow had yet to cast. I had to learn how to include myself into that word family, since often it can seem so distant. But yes—what happens to me also happens to my family. Loss from me, loss from my life, it wounds my family too. Interconnectivity, tree roots holding tightly beneath the surface where even a tremoring earth can’t dislodge us—our bones are stitched together. What beauty—what pain.
Writing from the diptych, writing from the archive and pre-memory, writing across time, this portion of the longer story speaks to embodiment and embeddedness—can we separate our bodies from inherited and experienced pain? What types of grief can the body endure before it breaks? And what of love—the craving of it, the pre- and post-grief of losing it? When we anticipate the loss of the closest people to us, what becomes of the self if not a contortion into the absence they leave in this world? How do we live afterward and through it? How do nonhumans do it? How do you? Dear reader, help me answer these questions. I keep writing and the words keep falling into an open fault line.
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 Brown University. Their work has been published in magazines such as Lantern Review, Zone 3, Joyland, Tupelo Quarterly, and more. In their free time, they can be found in conversation with the local sunflowers, contortionist trees, and their resident gargoyle (cat). Find them on Instagram @eating.shadows.
