Using Fiction within Nonfiction to Navigate Difficult Emotional Terrain
My mother was one of the most significant adults in my childhood, as mothers are for many people. Yet when I tried to write about her, my writing fell flat. I was unable to capture her complexity or the complexity of my feelings for her, and she came across as annoying and the narrator (me)...
A Review of Katherine McCord’s Run Scream Unbury Save
Katherine McCord’s book Run Scream Unbury Save, winner of the 2016 Autumn House nonfiction prize chosen by Michael Martone, is a whetstone of a fragmented and poetic memoir in bursts and paragraphs. You will emerge from each page emboldened to capture the exact this-ness of your day as a shadowbox-diorama with that exact plastic dinosaur...
Beauty and Youth
It begins with a man, an older man, and he is nothing like your father. He is tall and kind and has soft hands and a lot of money. He waits for you to grow up. You are his housekeeper, his running partner, his intern. He is the bank president, a private pilot, your high...
The Essay and the Art of Equivocation
Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I was struggling with a short story for a fiction workshop and turned to a close friend who was, and still is, a master of the form (let’s just say his short-story collection won all the big awards). I was hoping, as all apprentices do, that I...
Truth & Delight: Resisting the Seduction of Surfaces
Among the least pleasant chores of a writing teacher: dissuading students of the notion that what sounds good in a piece of writing is, necessarily, good. It’s the part of my job that I most dread and dislike, the part where I’m forced to play bad cop opposite a classroom full of good cops who...
About Allison Dalton, Artist, Issue 54
Allison Dalton is an Associate Professor at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where she teaches project-writing and supports students’ writing and research practice in studio art and design classes. She is also an ordained reverend of the Los Angeles branch of the Church of Craft. Her recent work has lately included a...
A Review of Joel Peckham’s Body Memory
“Without the emotional connection to pain, pain is still experienced, but not as pain.” — Joel Peckham, Body Memory How do I explain what Body Memory, Joel Peckham’s most recent collection of essays, is doing? Do I say that this book is an exploration of the ramifications of physical pain? Do I say that this...
Three Commandments for Writing About Race
A craft essay to accompany our Special Issue on Race, Racism, and Racialization: Race, unlike a monotheistic god, no longer has a singular ancestry. There are those who like to think it still has, but that paradigm shifted centuries ago. Thus the first biblical commandment, about a god liberating people from bondage can apply to...
How We See One Another: Our Guest Editors Castro and Sukrungruang in Conversation
Guest editors Joy Castro and Ira Sukrungruang discuss what they hoped for and what they learned in assembling our Special Issue on Race, Racism and Racialization. __ Joy Castro: Editing this issue with you has been a fascinating process, Ira, and I’m really glad to have gotten the chance to read these essays. Can you...
A Review of Peter Selgin’s The Inventors
I’m a sucker for literature that pursues an unanswerable question, all the better if that pursuit takes some idiosyncratic course, as with Peter Selgin’s new memoir, The Inventors. Recently published by Hawthorne Books, and a finalist for the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Graywolf Press Prize for Nonfiction, and the AWP Award Series for Creative...
A Review of Maggie Messitt’s The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa
Sometimes a writer can be loudest by being the most quiet, an effect brilliantly achieved by Maggie Messitt in her first book, The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa. Unlike Messitt, I never could stay quiet or porch sit long enough to listen. Messitt was twenty-four and on an indefinite leave from...
A Brief Atmospheric Future
If we’re to believe the neuroscientist Professor Marcus Pembrey, from University College London, who concluded that “Behaviour can be affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory…phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders… [even] sensitivity to [a] cherry blossom scent…” then the pigeon knows of its ancestors’...
On Keeping a (Writing) Notebook (or Three)
In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion writes about the odd notes she has taken over the years – on conversations she has overheard (“That woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today”), facts she has learned (“during 1964, 720 tons of soot fell on every square...
Becoming a Writer in Due Time
I recently found a line in my old journal that reads, “What I really want to do is get an MFA in creative writing.” I wrote this on April 25, 2000. More than fifteen years ago. At the time I had spent two exhausting years getting a single-subject credential to teach high school English, and...
On Asking the Hard Questions
When I first started writing nonfiction, as an undergraduate creative writing major, I struggled—a lot—to find my subject matter. These days, I write about my ever-evolving relationship with masculinity, particularly now that I have been living openly as a transgender man for five years and have been sporting a beard for three. Back then, though,...
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