-
Changing the Story of Rejection
Creative Nonfiction By Megan E. O’Laughlin Many years ago, I gave up on writing. I was only 25, floundering after years of travel post-college, and decided to get an MFA. After receiving a small pile of envelopes from various graduate schools, I quickly gave up. I shuffled the rejection letters into a little pile in…
-
Ten Minutes of Pride
Creative Nonfiction by Alina Zollfrank Saturday, 11:03 am: We could frame this moment. It’s the best humanity has to offer. A loud procession, planned and jumbled, approaches from downtown. On the sidelines, acquaintances hug and hand each other multicolored flags and homemade buttons. Strangers nod amiably, raise optimistic thumbs, smile gently with their eyes. A…
-
Calling Card
By Sean Jacques Doe Run was supposed to be a movie. My movie. My meal ticket into Hollywood glamor and fame. You’ve heard the story: the long dark walk down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I. EXPOSTION: I grow up as a rowdy country kid in the Missouri Ozarks, flunk out of state college, migrate…
-
Sometimes when I’m driving I get a call
Creative Nonfiction by Pat Foran and I don’t pick up. Not when I’m driving. I don’t look at the phone. Not when I’m driving. If they want to reach me they’ll leave a message, I sometimes think. So I let it ring. I let the ring fall I let it fall down this ring it…
-
The Pie Was a Final Draft: Holding Up the Mirror
By Michaella Thornton At the end of May, I traveled to Hermann, Missouri to hang out with three of my closest girlfriends, women I’ve known since I was a teenager. Somehow I’ve kept these friends for almost 30 years. One of us lives near Portland, Maine. The rest of us reside in or near Kansas…
-
Fiction is Trouble
By Jim Roberts The late Chuck Kinder1—creative writing teacher to Michael Chabon and close friend to Raymond Carver—once told me that “fiction is trouble.” This was sometime around 1990 when I was just starting to write seriously, having fantasized about it for over twenty years, imagining myself vaulting the wall of my gray corporate cubicle…
-
Country Craft: Parking Your Writing
By Stuart Phillips My friend, Susan Muaddi Darraj, is a proselytizing member of the five a.m. writers’ club. Frankly, not a club I’ve ever had any interest in joining. Instead, I have contented myself by building my “writing life” on the fringes of my “real” life. And there’s the rub. I tell myself I will…
-
Anti-Depression
CREATIVE NONFICTION BY ASHLEY ESPINOZA I don’t want to write about my depression. I don’t want to make sense of it. Follow it around a path, a spiral. I don’t want to find the source of it. I want to wallow. To sink deep into it. I want to let it engulf me. To take…
-
Suing for Peace
By Russell W. Johnson When I’m not busy trying to be a writer, I make my living as a lawyer. I know, I know. How original? Another John Grisham wannabe. I admit it has become kind of a cliche given the number of attorneys turned author. Scott Turow, Richard North Patterson, Meg Gardiner, Theodora Goss,…
-
Artful Academics: What Are The Odds?
By BrandY Renee McCann I have a math lesson. Wait—bear with me, please! In an introductory statistics class in graduate school (also taught in 4th grade math in the state of Virginia), one of the first principles we learned is that two unrelated things can be correlated, or seem to have a relationship with one…