Category: Creative Nonfiction

Essay: Excerpt from Tiny Gradations of Loss by Nicholas Grider

Tumors that couldn’t have grown fast enough to suffocate her. She died from cancer, she died from causes unknown. With him but already gone, crimson scarlet alone. Still warm. _______________ Day -2 he thinks it must just be all the morphine. He wants to think so. He says it to himself. He says it to…
Essay: “Do You Still Love Me If I’m White?” by Sonja Johanson

In the days immediately after the election, many of us were shocked, grieving, enraged, and struggling with the knowledge we had, for too long, been silent as our friends, neighbors, and family members took sides with bigotry. One of the first acts for many was to take to social media and declare sides publicly, announcing…
Essay: “On Family and White Liberalism after the Election” by Justin Brouckaert

In the days after the election, Twitter became a madhouse of pointed fingers—who to blame, who to follow, what to study. Shocked and numb, I scrolled through every thread my liberal echo chamber deemed a “must read.” One in particular, by Marco Rogers, actually was. White liberals, Rogers claimed, have “systematically and deliberately separated themselves…
Essay: “Recent Encounters with Wildlife” by Ginny MacDonald

I’m writing at work again. I’m sorry, employer. I keep the news feed on: Google the names, groups, affiliations. I get my facts straight. I saw a moose in the headlights—dust-brown flanks, head forward, long-legged and unconcerned with my existence. I stopped the car, but I was already past and the sun was not yet…
Essay: “Return to Pleasantville” by Tabitha Blankenbiller

In the 1998 film Pleasantville, one of my favorites according to my college MySpace page, an alternate-universe, black-and-white TV town undergoes a metamorphosis. Led by the arrival of achingly young Tobey McGuire and Reese Witherspoon from our world, the small world residents are introduced to the foreign concepts of sex, art, and literature—revolution by proxy,…
“How a Shark Encouraged Blake Lively to Finish Medical School,” a Haunted Passages essay about grief by Tasha Coryell

Someone is dead or someone is dying before the shark even arrives. Sharks can smell blood in the water, even if this blood is only a metaphor. In The Shallows, the shark has ostensibly been attracted to the beach by the floating whale carcass. In actuality, the shark was attracted by Nancy Adams’ grief. I…
Essay: Zeke Jarvis’ “The Unintentional Dreads”

Not only do I remember the baby cats, but I remember how I heard about the baby cats. Actually, I remember that better than I remember the baby cats, which I didn’t see that much. It was the guy’s girlfriend that asked, “Don’t you think the baby cats are gross?” I stared at her until…
“They Killed Portland, You Know”: Culture Essay by Tabitha Blankenbiller

Three years ago, I met Chloe Caldwell for lunch. I was two weeks away from moving out of Oregon for my husband’s job transfer. I was reluctantly going along because that is what spouses do and what marriage is about and all that bullshit. Caldwell’s essay collection Legs Get Led Astray was a pivot point…
“The Bullet in My Brain.” a literary enquiry by Coe Douglas for Bad Survivalist

Moments before the bullet that tore through his brain was fired, Anders was lost in a fit of laughter brought on by the surly bank robber’s use of the word capiche. As the narrator in Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain” explained: He covered his mouth with both hands and said, “I’m sorry,…