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Last Christmas
Creative Nonfiction by Lina Lau 2022 This Christmas, Mom is bedridden. Bundled in blankets, propped up by pillows. Railings keep her contained. Dad bought a hospital bed after her most recent fall, knowing once her broken ankle healed, she would no longer be able to support herself. The hospital bed and a single bed for…
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Keep Swinging: Golf and Writing
By Brett Lovell I have an eight-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son which means I don’t have time for hobbies. I especially don’t have time for a hobby, like golf, that can consume up to four or five hours of my day; driving to the course, warming up, and playing eighteen holes means it takes…
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Turning a Hobby into a Profession
by M. Scott Douglass As a young man in the 1960s and 70s, my whole world was wrapped around sports, especially baseball. That kind of youthful infatuation could be considered as a hobby, but it was something I took seriously, especially since those who are good enough became professionals and got paid to play the…
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Fly and Fly
Creative Nonfiction by Miriam Gershow I am six and don’t know how to ride a bike. I won’t know how for seven more years. Children will call out names as they pass my mother holding onto the back of my banana seat, me wobbly and long-limbed, hunched over handlebars on the sidewalk in front of…
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Soundscapes: Word Treasure
By Erin Calabria I am fifteen, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom with a book of poems in my hands. Because I am fifteen, I don’t talk to anyone. I spend much of my time alone in this room, but then again, I am not really there either. Instead, I am traveling between…
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My Rugby Life. My Writing Life.
By Chris McGinley I should’ve started earlier. I didn’t begin writing fiction until I was fifty. Yes, I’m pleased with what I’ve achieved so far. I’m thrilled to be included in writerly events, to exchange rejoinders with people way more talented than me–Bonnie Jo Campbell, Chris Offutt, Julia Franks, Silas House. And I’m over the…
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Seventeen, locked up again
Creative Nonfiction by Carrie Lynn Hawthorne 1998 – Northridge Adolescent Psych Ward. Woke up in a Pepto Bismol pink room. The day before, my hospital roommate, Lucy, had found out she was pregnant. By her dad. When Lucy slept, she looked so much younger than fourteen. Too young to be motherless, with no home to…
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Heatwave
Nonfiction by Elizabeth Enochs The heat index is 113 when I take my lunch break and even on full blast my car’s AC is no match, and it’s not like I’m unaccustomed to heat — southeast Missouri rarely does “mild;” summers swelter and winters bite — but I’m thinking of those who don’t have AC,…
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The Trophy on My Wall
Creative Nonfiction by Don Alexander I was sitting on a log behind a makeshift blind I had fashioned out of dead limbs and brush. My Winchester 30/30 was resting on a horizontal limb just in front of me. This deer stand was thirty yards above a heavily used game trail in a little mountain hollow…