Tag Archives: Creative Nonfiction

Last Letters

by Lynn Levin

When the final rounds of radiation and chemo exhausted my friend Pam but failed to halt the resurgence of her breast cancer, when her tumor markers rose and she lay bedridden, her family advised me that rather than calling and emailing, I should write her letters. I wrote to her on deckle-edged stationery silk screened with bright flowers, on museum cards depicting works of fine art, and on picture postcards. I wrote in my best penmanship. I told Pam again that I loved her, that I knew she never stopped climbing mountains, that I only wished she did not have so many mountains to climb. She once said that we were like sisters. Those words bounded me to her like a ribbon. We each wanted the best for the other. We laughed together and celebrated each other’s successes and joys. In darker times we sympathized, advised, and listened. We were friends for forty-seven years. I hope that I was as good a friend, as good a sister, to her as she was to me.

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A Dream of Earth in Summer

by Jenn Dean

If April and May felt hesitant and pale like an egg, with June comes the hatching of summer. Summer looks like the earth’s Bacchanalian dreaming: bees cluster, drunk on the pendulous and phallic spears of flowers, orgiastic birds couple, beetles crawl and heave, and snakes unroll from the marsh grass like rolls of striped tape. The trees pump themselves so full of water their trunks swell and water shoots up the inner bark’s xylem with enough force that you can hear it with a stethoscope. This is the tipping point, the point of no return: summer can no longer be stuffed back into the bag it came in. Continue reading

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Rhoda

by Karina Cochran

Some names have been changed to protect identity

When I met Rhoda, every bell inside of me started ringing.

Some of those bells sounded like the siren on a fire truck, warning of potential danger. Some of those bells sounded like a gentle chime, inviting a sense of calm and beauty. But mostly, meeting Rhoda was an alarm, waking me up from a life I didn’t realize I had been sleeping through. Continue reading

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Interregnum

by Rebecca Bihn-Wallace

I am an observer. I most likely can’t tell you what I ate for breakfast this morning, nor can I keep track of my belongings or change the oil on a car or explain the stock market in any real sense, but I remember the interior of every house I’ve lived in, and could probably even tell you how the  furniture was arranged. I have been cursed with the curious combination of operating in two worlds: the real world, which is often loud and confusing and leaves me at times baffled; and the imagined world, the life of the mind, which is soothing but not always the best place to be. That is to say, I am a writer. Because of this, I wasn’t aware of my need for regular human contact until the pandemic hit. It came upon slowly, this pandemic, or I think it did; now when I look at the timeline of events, I think, Weeks, not months.  Weeks for my state to go on lockdown, weeks for my university to close, weeks for shelter in place to begin. Months for people to rebel, months for the country to undergo another racial paroxysm. Continue reading

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After World War II

by Karin M. Gertsch

The rhythm of my early childhood was as regulated as the Swiss clock chiming on the wall in our foyer in Cologne. Then one day, when I was six years old, my grandmother was forced to change the course of our lives. Continue reading

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