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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #45

Unbecoming Doogie

By Storey Clayton

 

In retrospect, it seems likely that the school district administrators were bluffing when they recommended that I skip four grades. Oregon District 10 Superintendent Harold Riggan put the offer to my parents: “Storey is testing at an eighth-grade level…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #44

No Baby, An Apology

By Bill Marsh

 

I dream sometimes about babies. I know these are babies I’m dreaming about because afterwards, when I stir awake with some semblance of recognition, I feel a hazy sense of having dwelled for a moment in fuzzy warmth, a zone of charmed interaction….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #43

Keto Crash

By Lauren Mauldin

 

Last week, I dreamt I was eating a bagel. Not a New York bagel, the outside crisp and sprinkled with poppy seeds, toasted flakes of onion and tiny, square cubes of salt. No, the dense, bready pre-sliced kind you buy in plastic bags…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #42

In Memoriam of Rust

By Alexia Kemerling

 

“I just have regular old fashioned music on the radio,” Mike says. “I hope that’s okay.” He adjusts the volume knob and the bass line of “Under Pressure” fills the van…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #41

A Country May: 14 Days

By Chila Woychik
 
 

1. From the brash and loud, we seek the soft Midwest melody. This is less provincialism, more self-preservation. Years in the city left us numb and sightless; now, every new day brings startle and flux and a cold slap of air where we need it most…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #40

Doll

By Melissa Goodnight
 
 

Dana worked the morning shift at Skaggs Regional Hospital. As far as nurses go, she was friendly and efficient. She was a sturdy girl, with gentle hands and a welcoming hug. In the early morning hours, as the sun made its slow climb from behind the clouds, Dana could be found shuffling cords and fluffing pillows…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #39

Take My Hand So I Can Walk

By Peter Galligan
 
 

April and I are married, expecting a child. We’re at Denver Health, the city’s municipal hospital, for an ultrasound. The room is dark. April is holding my hand as I sit next to the bed. Being terrified of having a child to begin with, I sit silently with sweaty pits…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #38

Spiritual Dissonance

By Shaun Anderson
 
 

The mission president told me I suffered from something called “spiritual dissonance.”  He described it as a situation where what I know (I am a missionary, called by God, to teach others about the true church of Jesus Christ) and what I want (a relationship with a man) exist with internal discord….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #37

Fireflies

By Wendy Fontaine
 
 

My daughter runs through the backyard of our rented cottage in Peachtree City, a southern town named for the fuzzy fruit that grow in every orchard. Stars appear in a darkening sky, and the air is sticky-sweet with the scent of magnolia…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #36

The Measurer of Ruin

By Lynne Feeley
 
 

I am matching up misfortunes. In my left hand, I hold a Polaroid of a crumpled Saturn on rings of burned rubber and broken glass, while with my right, I tick through thick manila folders. I find the folder that matches the name my father has scrawled at the bottom of the picture….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #35

Lingua Nova

By Mahdis Marzooghian
 
 

I Inpulsa/Negatio: I wish I could tell you I love you in every tongue ever spoken. Maybe then it will be enough. Maybe then it will convince you. Or maybe it will make up for the fact that I cannot be yours in this lifetime….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction #34

Everything Presses In

By Rachel Veroff
 
 

Swish. Swish. The morning sun flashes through birch boughs as I race my flickering shadow. Cold air stings my face, and my skis whisper across the icy crust of daylight like a blade being sharpened….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #32

Bugs

By Naomi Ulsted
 
 

I was watching television when my dad barreled into the living room in his boxers. He twisted and shimmied and slapped wildly at himself, his hands clapping sharply against his pale skin. My mother was at Grandma’s house…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #31

Blighted

By Elsa Valmidiano
 
 

Blight: NOUN 1. Any of numerous plant diseases resulting in sudden conspicuous wilting and dying of affected parts, especially young, growing tissues. 2. The condition or causative agent, such as a bacterium, fungus, or virus, that results in blight….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #30

Dark Bodies

By Abi Newhouse
 
 

Olivia and I drove through the canyon in the dark. The only light came unnatural and electric from street lamps or the car clock or the bright headlights behind us. I followed the road, the curve of it, and the hill, and did all of this with tears dripping down my face…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #29

Goodbye to All That

By Jordan Floyd
 
 

If Belle London were alive today, she’d be an intersectional feminist. She would frequent 25th Street in Ogden—where it all began, her Sin Alley, Two-Bit Street, the home of her once lucrative prostitution house…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #28

On Weaving

By Jericho Parms
 
 

Lately, in the middle of the night, I wake up in a tangle between the cat and my partner, whose chest rises and falls with his measured breath. I still use the word partner although it sounds like we are police officers or share leadership in a law firm…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #27

Gravity

By Meredith Boe
 
 

The planes over this city, they fly low. Above my bed, night or day, where I’ve spent my hours lately. The rush of vibrations gets louder, then softer, louder, then softer, like waves. When they’re really low, it sounds as if the sky is ripping in half. I go to work, read, drink too much, eat, make love. And repeat. Time feels wave-like, or more a whirlpool tub I can’t climb out of….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #26

Honeymoon Reservations

By Nancy McCabe
 
 

The first time I saw a slide of Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” projected on the screen in art history class, Marc and I had been married for nine months and I felt like I was viewing a metaphor for my own life….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #25

Bring Out Your Dead

By Rebecca Fremo
 
 

He repeats the lessons from yesterday: “Only aim at the target. Never touch the trigger til you’re ready to shoot the target. Never point it at people or up in the air. Animals could get hurt.” …
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #24

Reservation

By Andrew Maynard
 
 

I’ve seen tumbleweed before, but never this massive. They look like clumps of wicker, like loosely bundled strands of barbwire, somersaulting viciously across the asphalt and shrinking into the shrub-covered desert. “Goddamn,” my father says, squinting out the passenger window of my truck. “They’re not even this big in Westerns….”
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #23

The Funambulists

By Jonathan Rovner
 
 

Conjure up two people—let’s say one man and one woman—and place them in a nondescript room. Don’t slap them down like stamps in an album; people are fragile, after all. Fill the room with tension. The problem, of course, is that tension doesn’t look like anything. You might have to use your imagination. Maybe floodwaters are filling the room with a sluggish inevitability…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #22

A Song for the Beautifully Useful

By Barry Maxwell
 
 

I discovered the clock radio in an out-of-the-way niche of Granny’s living room, wedged on a bookshelf behind a ribboned bundle of last year’s Christmas cards and a stack of miniature New Testaments. It was an early ‘60s model, a minimalist white cube atop a round footing, designed to look space-age and modern, with no place in Granny’s poor-folk country décor….
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #21

Cornucopia, Unincorporated

By Nancy Wyland
 
 

When I was younger, Dad often remarked about Cornucopia being “unincorporated,” as if this were a point of interest or amusement. I could tell it had something to do with the town’s size, but only after I looked up the word “unincorporated” did I realize the charming irony of a village proclaiming its independence within a town of 230 people…
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Creative Nonfiction

Creative Nonfiction Issue #20

Knives

By Lauren Spinabelli
 
 

The author has requested that this essay be removed. We apologize for any inconvenience….
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