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18 Articles

We all get tired of being ourselves, sometimes. That’s one of the reasons we read, in any genre—to be transported beyond our own experiences, to consider others’ perspectives and ways of going through life, and then, to come back with a fresh outlook. It’s why we write, too: to discover unexpected truths or previously unarticulated ideas. But sometimes there are ideas or truths that feel too complicated or too dangerous to approach head-on. Fortunately, writers have a range of tools at our disposal, and one of those is voice. While assembling this issue, our editors were drawn to works with unconventional narrators: a cancer story narrated by a sardonic tumor; a profile collaged from a month’s worth of conversation; a confession—or is it?—that could crack a decades-old cold case, among…

Battling the Book

I have just finished writing a book that tells the story of the evolution of creative nonfiction, as I saw it and lived it. And now, as I write this in late July, a couple of weeks after sending the manuscript off to my publisher, I am beginning to feel like myself again. I mean, I am ready to re-enter the world—as a person, as Lee Gutkind, a guy who lives in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh and has a family (small), friends (a few), and interests aside from writing (the Steelers, golf, hanging out at bars)—all gradually left behind as I was writing this book. There’s an isolation, what becomes an obsessed single-mindedness, that comes with committing to a book project. The book takes over your life. This doesn’t happen…

The Sounds of Your Self

“Finding your voice”—or, even better, your voices—on the page is more than a craft challenge; it’s the key to claiming your story When you’re inside a piece of writing that hums and crackles and sparks, when a real person is talking to you from the page, you’ve encountered a voice. “Voice” is what writing feels like. It sets off sympathetic vibrations in readers. It gives us a sense of connection to another live human presence, creating a real and complex moment of communication. As the poet Adrienne Rich put it, words written with voice have “the sheer heft/of our living behind” them. We already have voices, so the guidance to “find” one’s voice is often confusing for writers. If you’ve read about voice, you might have encountered the idea that…

The Sounds of Your Self

BETH KEPHART on Margo Jefferson

In her 2015 memoir, Jefferson chooses to write toward the cultural history she was born into—“upper-crust black Chicago,” as the flap copy puts it. from Negroland (Pantheon Books, 2015) As the book begins, Jefferson is taking it slow—easing in with repetitions and unpretentious verbs, filling each paragraph with a single sentence. I was taught to avoid showing off. I was taught to distinguish myself through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off. But isn’t all memoir a form of showing off? In my Negroland childhood, this was a perilous business. She has chosen language and rhythms that announce something like ambivalence toward her given project. This early voice is quiet with introspection. It is a voice yet deciding. Seven years later, in a companion book…

BETH KEPHART on Margo Jefferson

I AM AL’S LYMPHOMA

More specifically, I am Al’s Primary Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphoma. Even more specifically, I’m Al’s Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma. Or, you could just call me Cancer, but you’re better off not calling me at all, and hoping that I never call you. Al is fortunate to have me. Really. There are many types of lymphoma more aggressive than I am. I hear medical staff describe me as non-aggressive, indolent, and slow-growing, and honestly, I find this kind of insulting. I’m no wimp-phoma. I usually affect the skin only, but in one in ten people, I will progress further to the lymph nodes and/or internal organs, with serious complications. And now, I’m doing my best to ruin Al’s day, maybe even ruin Al. Goals. So, where did I come from? Who can…

I magine a sticky, early August morning, around three o’clock. It is dark, the moon blocked by clouds, no streetlights, a siren in the distance, medics running to a heart attack. Imagine a man out on a bike or walking a sick dog, or maybe a woman who works at a bar and has just finished the late shift. In a car or on foot or on a bike—it doesn’t matter. This stretch of road is rarely used; it’s dark and development has yet to come, so there isn’t much through traffic. Just a lonely street on a high bank above a muddy black canal that smells of salt marsh. A desolate piece of road below a span of highway that towers twenty-four feet above. The passerby is startled by what…

SEAN PRENTISS on Steve Coughlin

from “The Next Thirty-Two Years” Driving at Twilight (Main Street Rag, 2018) This speculative essay about the author’s father’s work begins far from where readers might expect a speculative essay to begin. Rather than being overly poetic, it begins with the pragmatic, a hallmark of Coughlin’s voice. The second-person point of view immediately asks us to become Coughlin’s father on his first day making gears. Work starts at six a.m. You can arrive early but never arrive late. This is your workbench. It will always be your workbench. This is where you put your work gloves. You can place a photograph of your newborn son here or here, but not here—this spot is only for your work gloves. In twenty years your newborn son will be murdered. His skull will…

SEAN PRENTISS on Steve Coughlin

Striving for Harmony

How turning to geometrical concepts can strengthen nonfiction writing A poster in the back of my high school math classroom announced Math Is Everywhere. The words were displayed across a flowering shaft of lavender, the feather of a bird’s wing, and the interior of a seashell. Mapped into the center was the Pythagorean theorem: the square of a right triangle’s hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of its other two sides. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras swam in math, leading devotees to believe in the “harmony of the spheres,” a relation of the vibrations and distance of celestial bodies from earth to string length-ratios. This idea, that numerical ratios are present in both math and music, was taken by Johannes Kepler and further extended into geometry. I often think…

Striving for Harmony

Dismantling the Patriarchy by Reclaiming Her Voice

In 2010, Elissa Bassist, then age twenty-six, wrote to Cheryl Strayed, a.k.a. Sugar from the Rumpus advice column Dear Sugar. She asked, “How do I reach the page when I can’t lift my face off the bed? … How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be?” Part of Sugar’s advice would turn up on coffee mugs and journal covers: “Write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” (In 2013, Bassist interviewed Strayed for this magazine.) Now, twelve years after her letter to Sugar—in which she confessed that she wanted to jump out a window because she couldn’t write a book—Bassist’s memoir, Hysterical, has been published by Hachette. A personal narrative packed with footnotes and put-it-to-use-today advice, the…

Dismantling the Patriarchy by Reclaiming Her Voice

JILL CHRISTMAN on Jaquira Díaz

from “Beach City” (Brevity #52, 2016) By the end of the first sentence, the voice is all there—the collective “we,” the protective teenagers who are of this place. The girls of Miami Beach won’t hesitate to lob an f-bomb. Writers are often told a benevolent lie from the beginning: “You need to find your voice.” As if voice were one stable, constant, singular thing; as if voice were something we could discover on the street, slip into our pockets, and keep forever and ever amen. I tell my students that of course voice is style and syntax and diction, but voice is also subject. What is this writer afraid of? What is her idea of evil? Of beauty? Of love? What is she willing to take on? We talked about…

JILL CHRISTMAN on Jaquira Díaz

So this dude I’ve been working alongside, landscaping and whatnot, he looks a lot like me: buzz cut that’s starting to grow out, blond beard and mustache, blue eyes, maybe just shy of six feet, 160 or so pounds. Three weeks we’ve been working together, talking and talking and talking. DRIVING THE TRUCK I’d like to get another twenty on me, but summer is hard. In November I’ll gain it back. But then with all the snow, shit, gonna lose it. Last January he plowed five eighteen-hour days in a row, followed by a month of shoveling roofs, meaning rope and harness, eight feet deep plus plenty of ice. Raised in Connecticut, this dude: Thirty-four years old and counting. First got busted for weed in high school. SPADES IN THE…

mama asks, haven’t you been lucky to know gracious men

yes mama, after all, the only time I really felt uncertain about a sexual advance was at a college party where my boyfriend took me, drunk for the very first time, to his bedroom, pulled my underwear to my knees & used his fingers to enter—did I mention I was drunk?—& said, I know you don’t want to have sex, but do you want to just touch it, & for a second I closed my eyes & I thought, I guess this is what we’re doing, but he stopped when I asked him to stop & in the morning he apologized & meant it so, really, who could blame him & a couple months later, on a first date, a different man bought the drinks & made me laugh, so…

SILVER SPACESHIPS

Push open the high school doors during lunch hour and breathe in the salty-sweet air of Burger King and Taco Bell and Starbucks, the delicious temptations of the franchised suburbs. Behind you, forever behind you, the cafeteria food is as appetizing as the Wednesday buffet at a strip-mall Irish pub—steamed cauliflower and yesterday’s flounder—without the booze. Who among us wouldn’t crave the bag of hot, heavily salted fries, the Nachos BellGrande, the sugary, caffeinated comfort of a Frappuccino? Who wouldn’t look at the kids with easier lives, kids with money jammed in their pockets to buy the bliss of filling, empty carbohydrates and think: I’ll do it. And you do. You, driven only by the knife of teenage hunger and the slanted courage to make it happen, take the dare.…

YI SHUN LAI on R. Eric Thomas

from “There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland” Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America (Ballantine Books, 2020) This excerpt begins a solid page into a 15-page essay. The opening anecdote, related to Lassie, has completely disarmed me, and I am ready to hear something contrary. (I am a dog person.) As a child, I found Lady Elaine terrifying to the point of nightmares, but I will come along. And by the end of this essay, I am 100% on board with Thomas’s assessment of Lady Elaine. I credit this winsomely accurate description for a lot of that. For much of my childhood, the only television channel we were allowed to watch was MPT [Maryland Public Television], so Lassie (RIP), Mr. Rogers, and Sesame Street were…

YI SHUN LAI on R. Eric Thomas

Finding Your Public Voice

Early in my career, I joined a writing group with the word change in its name. When friends asked, “What kind of change are you writing about?” I responded, “Whatever kind of change is happening in my life”—whether that change occurred by chance or was initiated by me. Changes occur daily in all our lives: moves, aging, illness, death. As a writer and public speaker and citizen, I’ve always been especially interested in the way we can use these shifts in our personal landscapes to bring about change in the world. In 2018, for example, a mishandled 911 response led to the asphyxiation death of a sixteen-year-old boy trapped in his minivan, leading his parents to push the Cincinnati City Council to overhaul its emergency measures. Author Nadine Gordimer, a…

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

NIKKI CAMPO Interview with Elissa Bassist Nikki Campo is a nonfiction and humor writer who has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Geographic, the Belladonna Comedy, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. nikkicampo.com nikkicampo KRISTIN KEANE Striving for Harmony Kristin Keane is the author of the novella Luminaries and a memoir about grief and time travel, An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Her writing and research have appeared in the Washington Post, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Electric Literature, Catapult, Reading Research Quarterly, American Educator, and elsewhere. thisisnotreallyhere.space kitenearsink LEATH TONINO So This Dude Leath Tonino is a freelance writer who has published prose and poetry in Orion, the Sun, Outside, Tricycle, New England Review, and many other magazines. He is the author of…

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Deceased Matriarchs. Gram. Mom. As I move deeper into the dirt of terminal cancer & the disabilities it brings, I hear frustrated voices, scowling faces, because no one understands. I see shoulders & backs hunched over walkers & canes. I shuffle by the mirror. It’s me. @charligirll • 4 JUNE 2021 I was the girl who couldn’t speak. I was so shy, so afraid, I remember clearly the first time I heard my voice. My high school boy friend had asked for his class ring back, and I said no. It shocked us both. He let me keep it a few more weeks. @ConnieKuhns • 14 JUNE 2022 Undiagnosed autistic, I masked so well I couldn’t see it. My last fifteen years of essays aren’t false, though they rarely fully…

FRIENDS • $50 or more

Between April 14, 2022 and September 19, 2022, the following individuals and organizations contributed to the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. Their generosity makes the magazine and CNF’s other publications and educational programs possible. We are tremendously grateful for their support. FANS Peggy Acott, Carolyn Alessio, Courtney Allen, Judith Armatta, Leslie Baker, Julia Baker, Chandra Bales, Michelle Barichello, Jane Barnard, Nancy Barnes, Monica Barron, Stephanie Barton, Jennifer Beard, Kathy Bell, Cathy Beres, Catt Berlin, Daniel Bernhard, Alex Bertram, Shannon Bevins, Denise Bike, Dr. Dianne Blomberg, Sabrina Bolus, Ellen Boomer, Suzanne Bossert, Lauren Botha, Melissa Bouyounan, Nicole Bowmer, Deborah Brandon, Karen Buley, Kelly Campbell, Amanda Campbell, Nicole Campo, Sabine Casparie, Joyce Catlett, Nancy Cattelona, Maria Ceferatti, Liesse Chable, Becka Chester, Rachel Christensen, Lisa Cottrell, Mary Couture, Jocelyn Cox, Margaret Crane, Barbara Davenport, Alden…

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