Category: Nonfiction

The Parts

Bahiyyih El-Shabbaz Winner, 2014 Creative Nonfiction Award  APRIL It’s early April, and my tummy is still a valley. By the summer, it will be a bunny hill. By mid-fall, a mountain. It’s not so...

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Forensic Biography and the Art of the Screenwriter

Ray Shea paperHere is one thing I do know: I didn’t write down enough of this when it was happening, and now there is nobody I can ask. This is why I am trying to piece together, from the available...

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Aspiration

Anna B. Sutton The nurse is small, chubby and folded over the desk like laundry folded then forgotten. She’s wearing worn pink scrubs and frameless glasses under a bowl-cut of thinning brown curls....

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Oscillation

Sayantani Dasgupta Runner-Up, 2014 Creative Nonfiction Award  I. When I was nine years old, I read Swiss Family Robinson, and it exploded my imagination. At that time, my family and I lived in a...

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A State of Feeling

Rachel Luria   Anyone who is to be happy, then, must have excellent friends. —Aristotle “What is the matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I am not careful,” she thought, and...

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The Last Séance

Deborah Thompson Winner, Nonfiction Contest   I wrote down memories, detail upon detail, with shamanistic obsessiveness, before they slipped away, before he slipped away. I wasn’t trying to...

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Preconceptions, or Frontiers

Jacqueline Kolosov   After two years of trying, my husband Tom and I began to seriously consider reproductive technologies to conceive a second child. “Do you think I could love another child...

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John’s House

My friend John and I shared a seat on Bus 77. I needed both arms and sometimes a leg to wrestle my trombone onto the bus, but John could manage it with just one hand. John signed my fifth-grade...

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Sea Change

Nonfiction Priscilla Kinter

Soil and leaves filled the empty human spaces, and always the buzzing of insects. Spider silk and dust and feathers and carapaces accumulated to build...

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Cornish Pasty

Nonfiction Alice Lowe

When Don says, “Wow, she’s good,” I muster up a grudging agreement, but I can taste the bitter wilted greens of envy. I’m already lamenting my lack of...

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