CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Ingrid Rojas Contreras as guest judge for our 2022 Creative Nonfiction Award. Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Hailed as “original, politically daring, and passionately written” by Vogue, her first novel, Fruit of…
My father, after slipping backward on a stretch of rooted Alaskan ice and hitting his head, miraculously walks the three miles to get back home—heavily concussed and alone—with our two unleashed labs directing him in the winter dark. He…
When you were three years old, you climbed up your Ma’s massive mahogany bed, you poked her gently, then shoved, and when she still didn’t move, you tried to pry open her eyes with your fingers because you didn’t…
1. I’m on the 7 train on my way to Manhattan from Queens. My AirPods blast Cardi B’s “I Like It” as I squeeze my way through the crowded car, not liking the pushing and the pulling as I…
The day I discovered pleasure was the day I lost my mother. It happened in the fall of 1995 when I was eleven years old. That afternoon I was standing naked on the balcony of our apartment, my skin…
Essay by Tyler Barton • Someone recently asked me why I set many short stories in the aughts. It’s true that I have a fascination with those years because they were my formative ones, ones in which I was not…
By Katy Scarlett • In 1979, Rosalind Krauss published her now-famous essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which explored how new forms of three-dimensional art-making borrowed from sculpture, monument, architecture, interior and landscape design. She writes, “as the 1960s began…
Content Warnings—death by suicide, gun violence One morning a science teacher at the high school found the window of his lab smashed and a dead possum on the floor. In my memory, the teacher is all gray: gray pants…
My wife wants to know what my new job is, the title, so I tell her what the woman at dispatch told me, that I’m a nonemergency medical driver, which means I’m there when the situation isn’t dire, when…
You came and I was longing for you You cooled my heart burning with desire. — Sappho, fr. 48 The days run together now Monday is a Wednesday is a Saturday is a Thursday and most days I…
The night before I drafted this piece in a workshop, I had been reading A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes and sharing sections such as “The Orange” and “Blue Coat and Yellow Vest” with John, my husband, the unnamed lover in “Like Water Flowing.” If you haven’t read this particular book by Barthes, I can’t recommend at this moment a more tender and empathetic meditation on love and desire. I lingered on “Love’s Languor,” the “subtle state of amorous desire, experienced in its dearth, outside of any will-to-possess,” where Barthes quotes a beautiful and evocative translation of Sappho’s fragment 31. When Kathy Fish directed the workshop participants the following day to write with an intentional scaffolding of structure, I immediately reached for Sappho to capture the emotional experience of desire for John in the context of the overwhelming blursday sense of existence that had become texturized and demarcated by our lovemaking.
Only, the draft veered away from passion toward wearying and quotidian concerns—the unrelenting pressure of the pandemic, our mutual and divergent pasts, what we each bring to a new, second marriage, the noise and distractions of other people, parenting under tremendous stress. Life, the living, and loss perpetually intrude upon lovers living in time. And so, the temporal setting of this storied piece of creative nonfiction is one year into the global pandemic, a glimpse of when I became grounded and isolated at the home I share with John and his children—my stepchildren—in Durham, North Carolina, along with the strangeness and panic of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the fear and ache of living away from my young adult daughter for the first time, and the inevitable unraveling of our lives.
If there is a particular reader, it is John, except that I invite others in, don’t I?
I’m sharing our love story.
APRIL BRADLEY is a Durham, North Carolina-based writer and editor. Her work appears in such publications as CHEAP POP, JMWW, Heavy Feather Review, Narratively, New Flash Fiction Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. She is the publisher and editor of Ruby and serves as an associate editor for fiction at Pidgeonholes and as a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. April is a Best American Essays, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions nominee and a graduate of Yale Divinity School. Find her on Twitter @april_bradley.
