Category: Nonfiction

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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How the Lake Saved Me

Nonfiction Rachel Toliver

I used to be a young girl, only 18, who had left the East—where I had neither much sinned nor been much sinned to—but had been often tired, and often...

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From the Other End of the Speculum

Nonfiction Sharon DeBartolo Carmack

Dr. Sweeney had summoned Coroner Edmund Rawson to Mrs. Bird’s boarding house because Eliza was in a “dying state.” Dr. Sweeney told him that...

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This Town

Nonfiction Bret Schulte

When we arrived at Boys Town, we all saw what we wanted to see. I noted that the church was old and stone and shaped like a crucifix the way I liked it....

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