Tag Archives: Creative Nonfiction

Disappearing Sands

by Julie Paul

In every wave, a multitude of yellow fish.

It’s November, 2017, and we’re in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. We watch the ocean from the wraparound lānai of Daylight Mind, a laidback cafe with good coffee and the wifi password “perfectview.” The ever-promised rain is falling, the first real rainfall in six days. A yellow-billed cardinal just visited for our muffin crumbs, and the scent from a foraged plumeria blossom beside my plate transports me back to high school. I wore frangipani essential oil on my wrists then, a strange coral pink elixir in a glass vial from the health food store. Continue reading

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On the Shore of the Apocalypse

by Megan O’Laughlin

One of these days, I will find a dead body on this beach. It’s written in the stars, or at least in so many true crime stories: woman walking dog finds dead body on neighborhood beach.

Every morning I walk the new puppy to our small neighborhood shore where he sniffs seaweed while I hunt for sea-glass. I walk because I’m tired and my depletion comes from something that has a lot of terms: secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, all terms for various forms of caregiver exhaustion, definitions for intense weariness.  I used to believe such symptoms indicate how I’ve given too much, but perhaps it means that the needs outweigh any possible gifts.   Continue reading

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Keith Richards and Rebel Yell

by Leslie Armstrong 

My cousin Elspeth was always going on trips to exotic places in hopes of meeting an improvement over the two husbands she’d already had. One spring in the late ’80s, while on vacation, she met a possible candidate. They’d spent only an evening together, but he was a real estate lawyer practicing in Connecticut, clearly solvent, and, other than his thick south-Boston accent, which offended her Cambridge ear, he was indeed a prospect. Could she invite him to dinner so my husband, Dewey, and I could check him out?  Continue reading

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Seek and Ye Shall Find

by Shawna Ervin


Lost

1984. Scott Hamilton won the Olympic gold medal for men’s figure skating in Sarajevo that February. He trained at a rink near where I lived with my parents and younger brother. I was nine, in third grade. I hadn’t paid attention to figure skating before, and probably hadn’t paid much attention that year either. My parents were conservative Christians. TV—like the radio, movies, alcohol, smoking, dancing, and anyone outside of our small, fundamental world—was to be feared and avoided at all costs. Continue reading

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Variations on Summer

by Melissent Zumwalt

The prompt from writing class last week was, “Summertime—wishful thinking—the summers of youth and their unparalleled magic:” an exercise intended to be fun, upbeat. Good Lord! I’d thought, was I the only one without a fondness for their childhood summers? Certainly, summer couldn’t mean the same thing for all of us? Because the first image that came to me, strong and resonant, was a can of Campbell’s Chunky Soup, Sirloin Burger. The memory loomed so large, took up so much emotional space, there wasn’t any way to stop the mental film reel from re-playing: Continue reading

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