Category: Creative Nonfiction

Nonfiction: A.A. Balaskovits’ “How I Helped You Fly with Pearls in Your Guts”

You must never doubt the thoughtful cruelty of your childhood. My mother raised butterflies of two sorts: the Monarch with ombré orange wings, and in less quantities, because they take so long to pupate and hatch, black Swallowtails, with blue edges or white spots. I assisted her at a young age, even when my hands…
“CisWorld,” a speculative essay by Torrey Peters

If there were only trans people in the world, would the monsters in horror movies be cisgender people? The way that cis people have their monsters and villains in transgender characters like Buffalo Bill, or Michael Caine’s character in Dressed to Kill, or Angela in Sleepaway Camp, or Brother Martin in the X-Files episode “Gender…
Lyric Essay for Bad Survivalist: “Who Killed the Nyan Cat?” by Jill M. Talbot

I stare at the barbed wire at the top of the fence. All I want to do is to go home. Home is more of a concept than a place. I wonder who invented fences that kill. Nazis? They say that the best way to survive real tragedy is to do so as if within…
Side A: “Antikythera,” a hybrid essay schematic by Jenny Fried

L2 I wore girl’s pants, even when I was still telling people I was a boy. I had lots of different colors, reds and purples and yellows, all clingwrap tight against my legs. The cut of these pants always made my penis very obvious. It wasn’t really my intention to present my dick to…
“Puritan Remnants,” an excerpt from Time’s Up! A Memoir of the American Century by Robert Cabot

Blending history, essay, travelogue, and autobiography, Time’s Up! is a personal and political saga: luminous, probing, and absorbing. At constant odds with his Boston Brahmin lineage and upbringing, Robert Cabot confronts white privilege, rejects the conventional trappings of wealth and fame, and critiques our American heritage of colonialism, imperialist yearnings, and penchant for perpetual war. In alternating…
Serialized Essay: “The Great Indoorsman, Part the Last” by Andrew Farkas

The Great Indoorsman PART THE LAST From A Philosophy of the Indoors—The Out-of-Doors vs. Outside: In Lawrence, Kansas, a Lyft driver asks me where my accent’s from, says she’s lived lots of places, says she has a good ear for accents, says that I do a good job of covering it up, but that I…
Part the Third: “The Great Indoorsman” by Andrew Farkas

The Great Indoorsman PART THE THIRD From A Philosophy of the Indoors—The Beautiful On-Purpose and the Beautiful Accident: The waitress looks at me and frowns. She says she’s seen me before, thinks she’s seen me before, is told that she has indeed seen me before. Baffled, befuddled, the waitress asks if I live in Chicago,…
Part the Second: “The Great Indoorsman” by Andrew Farkas

The Great Indoorsman PART THE SECOND From A Philosophy of the Indoors—Where I Lived, and What I Lived for: I went to the Indoors because, like Henry David Thoreau, I wished to live deliberately, I wished to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to…
“Suite Polonaise,” a generational serial killer enquiry by Carrie Laben

Part 1: Cecelia As a child I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t love my grandmother. Everyone else loved their grandparents. But Cecelia Laben (or Labenski) (nee Trybusckewicz) confused me. She alarmed me. At least once, she kind of technically kidnapped me. And then there was the fact that she lied.…