A melancholic thread runs through Paul Crenshaw’s collection of narrative essays, This One Will Hurt You, set in the Ozarks, specifically northwest Arkansas, where the writer grew up. He opens with “After the Ice,” remembering his eighteen-month-old nephew who cried in the arms of his “stepfather, who looked frustrated or angry or even lost,” but...

After I miscarried my first pregnancy, I dreamed of former loves, all the ones who came before the one I love now. Night after night, these lost loves returned to me. They were handsome and young. Clothed and naked. Hands shimmered out of darkness. One pushed an empty baby stroller. Nothing I did could stop...

I escaped the mayhem of the birthday party with a slice of cake, sinking with a sigh into the woven fabric of the front sitting-room couch. I was there to support my friend—mother of the birthday boy—but none of the screeching children belonged to me. A ten-year-old girl sat near the window, knees pulled into...

Early in her newest essay collection, The Reckonings, Lacy Johnson describes what has become a common occurrence: At the end of a reading, someone, usually a woman, asks Johnson what she wants to happen to the man who kidnapped, raped, and tried to kill her. Does Johnson want him to die? To suffer? The questioner...

Porochista Khakpour spoke on the first panel I attended at the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Program’s Annual Conference. The panel titled, “The Body’s Story: On Writing Narratives of Illness,” also included Sandra Beasley (moderator), Sonya Huber, Suleika Jaouad, and Esmé Weijun Wang. This was my first AWP after a Lyme disease diagnosis, traveling...

I volunteered to write this book review of Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor, over a year ago. It was a foolish thing to do given my schedule, but I had just read and reviewed Minna Zallman Proctor’s essay collection Landslide, and I was smitten. Also, like most graduate students, I was...

In the summer of 2012, I attended the Tin House Summer Workshop where Ann Hood read from, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, her memoir about her daughter’s sudden death at age five. It was a hot summer night and people fidgeted endlessly to get comfortable. Hood’s words, so full of sadness but a testimony to love and...

It was my last year in high school when my father and I had the granddaddy of all fights. He referred to my boyfriend by a racial slur, then the room exploded. Fists flew, clothes ripped, hair pulled. Once exhausted, we stumbled to our feet, wiped blood off our lips, and stared at one another....

When my mother-in-law was dying, I cooked. We brought her home from the hospital, the doctors having said there was nothing more they could do, and set her in her chair by the fire. Her husband of 45 years drifted through the house, his too-large belt cinched tight; her daughters seemed to fade into faint...

My mother was the one who screamed when the tyrannosaur rex devoured the sniveling lawyer from Jurassic Park, but my brother and I, eight and eleven, just watched on in big-eyed wonder. By 1993, my brother was already obsessed, but after the film, I, too, became unknowingly affected by dinophilia, which Sam Chiarelli describes, in...

We all have that friend. You know the one. He says he doesn’t understand what people are so upset about, that slavery’s been abolished for like 150 years, that everyone’s got the same rights and opportunities in this country as long as they work hard and behave properly. That all lives matter. If you’ve ever...

“I assume I have always been attracted to the mysterious…” begins the first essay in Erica Trabold’s Five Plots. She is standing in a cave in New Mexico. The cave is dark, and its depths announce an intention for the book. We are going to look into the unknown, to adventure somewhere foreign. What comes...

“My mother saw demons,” begins Kelly J. Beard’s stunning debut memoir. Though I feared the narrator would show me the cruelty and violence of her parents’ chosen faith, she does so with such a commitment to understanding the sources of her family’s suffering that I had to follow her narrative. Religious fundamentalism and poverty, the...