the sun is retreating from yet another day that wishes to lay claim
over our bodies & my friends have taken to the streets in my name.
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Edge of a Piece of Cloth, Made Strong by Holly Willis
If I could I would sew for my sister a coat of soft leather. I would ply malleable pink hide for an effort so vital, but a gabardine twill is perhaps more practical. Gleaned from the coats of animals, culled from the cocoons of silkworms, scavenged from the seeds and leaves and stems of plants, remnants, vestiges, reckoning, reckoning.
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Clementine, My Darling (an almost-memoir) by Joanna Brichetto
It was the clementine that killed me. I peeled it for your lunchbox because you need Fruit to complement the Protein and the Crunchy, and because school lunch is so short and you get busy chatting and if I don't peel it for you and break it into segments, the whole thing comes back home in its BPA-free, nesting container (labeled with your name in silver Sharpie).
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On Becoming a Person of Color by Anne Liu Kellor
She is used to defining herself in the negative—not quite this or that; or as divided—only half or part. She is mixed, which means that she has never seen herself entirely as Chinese, nor entirely as white. As a teenager, her friends were mostly white, in a school that was mostly black and white, so she identified with the white kids. Her friends would eagerly ingest her mom’s Chinese leftovers after a night of partying (where she’d teach them how to say, We are going to drink a lot of beer tonight! in Mandarin); she was their fun Asian friend, different, yet rooted in the same pop culture, white culture.
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Neighbor by Virginia Marshall
Virginia Marshall is a writer and audio producer. Her work has been published in The Harvard Review, Brevity, Atlas Obscura, and has aired on NPR and WBUR.
What'll I Do by M. A. Vizsolyi
She thought she heard someone say her name—not loudly, but not loud enough that she could make out the melody of vowel sounds that comprised her name—Laura, it said—in a way that asked her to look quickly, as if there were something to see suddenly alighting just behind her on the shelf of the bookcase—but she didn’t see anything—and things like this happened to her once and a while, but not so much that she thought it odd.
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Two Poems by Robert Krut
And as the curtain above turns
to black with the absence of time,
we lie here, backs on grass,
dew climbing up and over our thighs.
Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir brilliantly blends author Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s own experiences with mental illness with research about the history of mental illness (and treatments) in the United States and interrogation of the gendered stigma surrounding mental health. I recently had the chance to talk with Montgomery about the process of writing and publishing the book—due out from Mad Creek Books this fall—as well as why we read and write creative nonfiction and the ways that nonlinearity and memory often go hand-in-hand.
An Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Owning Our Experiences on the Page
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No One Here Named Me by Suzanne Roberts
At Burning Man, you’re supposed to resolve your issues with a Black Rock Ranger, someone who can come and negotiate problems on the playa, but I was beyond that. I wanted to call someone with handcuffs and a squad car, someone who could take him away. But would they? I didn’t know.
Read MoreTake your medicine by elizabeth zaleski, illustrations by kevin abt & chad miller
You know those old public service announcements about your brain on drugs?
The egg sizzling in the skillet. Your metaphorical brain--fried.
I think about those commercials a lot.
Two Poems by Jessica Guzman Alderman
Like all beasts wandering on the edges of cities, I turn my head
toward the highway. The sun sets across six lanes of idling engines.
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A Normal Interview
Ryan McDonald Talks with Steven Church
A Normal Interview: Conversation on The Spirit of Disruption
Featuring 28 writers, The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Essays from the Normal School is an anthology containing an eclectic array of traditional and innovative creative nonfiction essays that were published in the Normal School during the ten years since its launching in 2007-2008. Over email, editor Steven Church spoke with me about it in-depth.
Read MoreTone by Kristine Langley Mahler and Kevin Mahler
You conjure up cruelty, sketch it:
the wires binding should demonstrate your value,
so close it's like lust.
Tiny Worlds by Molly Gutman
When the Devil comes for Christmas he brings
a casserole. He wears an argyle crewneck,
too expensive, pilling, starting to smoke.
Screen Time by Mina Manchester
Light crept in through the space between the black out curtains hanging over the bedroom window. Ron, her husband, shifted in his sleep. His shoulder twitched slightly as if reacting to a breeze. Soon the alarm would go off and he would stretch and get out of bed, not bounding exactly, but with enough gusto that Leigh would feel guilty. She was always tired. So, so tired, ever since their son was born.
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Oracle by Dustin Heron
Now Zeke looks at his grandfather. A thin old man always stooped over, the ridges of his spine bulging against his flannel, baggy corduroys hanging from his bony hips. He’s standing in the shadows of the porch, dusty shadows crammed with old wooden chairs split at the seat and mildewed couches sagging under milk crates stuffed with odds and ends. All this leading into a narrow house just as dark and just as choked with dust, the whole house tottering into its last stage of disrepair. Zeke wants to scream at everything and he wants to smash it all.
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Reflection: Kristen Cosby on "Visions"
Editor's Note: For our newly released anthology, The Spirit of Disruption: Selections from The Normal School, we'll be running a series of author reflections excerpted from the book. If you like what you read, you can order the book here.
Reflection on “Visions” by Kristen Cosby
I wrote the first draft of “Visions” seven years ago. It was my second attempt to write about living aboard my family’s boat. At the time, I was in my late twenties, happily teaching and writing for a small but well-regarded science magazine. Sailing and family were two aspects at which I considered myself a failure and I saw no reason to display myself at my weakest. Until I wrote this essay, I was a writer who hid her personhood behind her writing. I used esoteric vocabulary and complex syntax to make reading my work more difficult. The production of this essay demonstrated a huge change in my writing process and my willingness and ability to represent my memories without pretty distractions. I’d finally understood the necessity of being vulnerable on the page.
Writing the piece didn’t feel like a calculated strategy. I sat down one morning at my computer and an essay about how living on the water changed my way of seeing the world began to happen. I didn’t understand what the piece was about until long after I’d finished it. I don’t mean to say it was effortless; it required a huge amount of discipline and it pushed the limit of my skills at the time, but it was as if the decision to write about my family-life aboard had been made by someone else. I submitted the essay to The Normal School’s nonfiction contest with much trepidation. At one point, I almost called the editors to withdraw from the contest because I couldn’t stand the idea of showing something so raw.
As with most of my projects, when I came to the end, I felt the work was incomplete. I tinkered with it constantly. That urge to improve and amend the piece did not stop after it was published. I continued to pursue and grow the piece into a book manuscript, which I am still working on six years after the first appearance of “Visions” in The Normal School. In a manner of speaking, the essay hasn’t ended, it just became much longer. I’m uncertain when it will “end” or whether or not it has, or will ever, succeed in capturing the complexity of a family as crew.
The metaphorical journey of writing this piece, and, by extension, the manuscript that’s emerged out of it, has led me on several very real journeys. The pursuit has taken me to from Pittsburgh to Texas, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Barcelona, Budapest, London, and San Francisco. It’s caused me sadness, stolen sleep, appetite, and many precious hours with beloveds. And yet, I continue to prize this piece and to enjoy the opportunities it’s afforded me. Whether or not the essay succeeds in displaying how living on the ocean changed my perspective, it gave me the idea for my first book-manuscript and instilled in me new skills and standards for my craft.
Word Music: A Discussion with Brian Turner and Benjamin Boone By Optimism One
Given the common ground between the two art forms, it is no surprise, then, that creatives throughout history have combined music with poetry, poetry with music. And that pursuit continues today, whether it is at your local open mic, the Lincoln Center in New York City, or on record. Two recent examples of the latter can be found on The Interplanetary Acoustic Team’s 11 11 (Me, Smiling), conceived of and directed by poet Brian Turner, who uses the written and spoken artifacts of the poet Ilyse Kusnetz, also his late wife; and on The Poetry of Jazz, a collaboration between saxophonist Benjamin Boone and the late poet Philip Levine.
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In the Grove of Self-Charging Trees by Jessica Jacobs
It is early enough that fog still skeins, / like moss, the highest branches. / And twining each tree: a cable / rough-creped as wild grape vine, / with both ends socketed / into the trunk.
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A Normal Interview with Ander Monson by Matthew Kenerly
In a far-reaching half-hour, our assistant managing editor, Matthew Kenerly, reflected with Monson upon March Shredness, talked up his forthcoming projects on emotion and Predator, and what it means for intrepid writers, emerging and experienced alike, to strike out into unfamiliar territories with their work.
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