Category: Creative Nonfiction

Side A Essay by Gabriella D’Italia: “How to Get Dressed in the Dark”

At a recent art exhibition titled after my recent memoir, I overheard a group of women: “What does Getting Dressed in the Dark have to do with anything? I don’t get it. Oh, it’s the title of a book. It still doesn’t make any sense.” They joked with one another, unaware of my presence. I…
Hybrid Essay for Side A: “Post-Mortem Report No. 0607-EX” by Atreus Fong

POST-MORTEM REPORT NO. 0607-EX EXAMINER: [REDACTED]SUBJECT: Male, 29 years old.DATE OF EXAMINATION: Ongoing. I. EXTERNAL EXAMINATION The body presents no visible or any obvious trauma. Facial musculature is disciplined; trained into neutrality. No signs of impact, struggle, or force. No outward signs that anything is, or even could be, wrong. This is typical. Observed behavioral…
Side A Flash Nonfiction: “High Maintenance” by Jade McGregor

High Maintenance After my mentally ill ex moves out, I, also having moved the mental illness goalpost right off the soccer pitch, start doing things again: using bar soap, taking milk-less jugs to the return-it depot, vacuuming. I drip water all over the bathroom counter if I want. I pull the crown off the tub…
New Hybrid: “Mother, Madre, Mamma, Mom” by Chiara Reali

My mother is the text. I cannot enter her.Kate Zambreno, Book of Mutter The notebook begins like this: search for death rattle. Search for: death rattle, translation. Search for: rantolo terminale. The notebook is blue and green and pink—a blue background, green cacti, pink flowers. It begins on May 22, two days before the death…
Haunted Passages: “Audrey Hepburn,” an Autofictional Dreamoir by Meghan Lamb

(A dreamoir inspired by Wendy C. Ortiz) I wake with a sharp pain behind my eyes, the kind that makes it difficult to open them. I rise in a fog of headache and blurred vision, taking careful, tender steps around the apartment. The apartment is a strange amalgam of familiar spaces, other spaces I’ve lived…
New Side A Essay from Raymond de Borja: “, I mistake things for other things,”

“Writing ethnography offers the author the opportunity to encounter the Other ‘safely,’ to find meaning in the chaos of lived experience through retrospectively ordering the past. It is a kind of Proustian quest in which the ethnographer seeks meaning in events whose significance was elusive while they were being lived. Dorrine Kindo, ‘Dissolution and Reconstitution…
New Fiction-Memoir-Essay by Jason Dubow: “Seven Takes on Mindfulness: A Work in Progress”

Brother B., who directs Campus Ministry at the Franciscan college where I teach, asked me if I would write and record myself reading a short mindfulness message as part of an ongoing interfaith dialogue initiative. “Sure,” I said, without fully considering, I see now, the conflict between the focused awareness inherent in mindfulness and my…
New Essay: “The Gospel of the Dumpster” by Joey Colby Bernert

Move-out day, April 2022. I had just graduated, just came out, and was sitting on everything the university left behind. The Photo This was me in April of 2022. A queer who had come to terms with their gender identity and sexuality. I had just finished my undergraduate degree in Women and Gender Studies. I was…
Side A Graphic Essay: “Fire” by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Mini-interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? JLK: My very first writing teacher—and a wonderful one—was Janet Burroway, who many people know from her textbook Writing Fiction. We met again, after I had finished my first novel, The Museum of Happiness,…