Essays

Creative nonfiction essays

Mapping a Country

By Akpa Arinzechukwu | Published: September 19, 2017

Am I cutting myself? Does the country hurt much? Why are you crying?

Posted in Essays | Tagged Christianity, history, Nigeria, Suicide, Trump Train | Leave a comment

This’ll Be the Day That I Die

By Kailee Marie Pedersen | Published: March 8, 2017

The lyrics were incomprehensible to me at the time, but I knew even then that I wanted to be Miss American Pie.

Posted in Essays | Tagged China, Music, New York, Pop Music, Race Relations | 1 Response

On Stuff

By Josephine Sloyan | Published: February 2, 2017

I feel like I’m in an abandoned Marshalls warehouse.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Consumerism, Hoarding, Reality TV | Leave a comment

Character Arcs for a Neoliberal World

By Julie Chinitz | Published: October 25, 2016

Housing Blocks courtesy Karl-Ludwig Poggemann on Flickr (hinkelstone)

This is what neoliberalism wants, a prisoner’s dilemma on macro scale.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Neoliberalism | 3 Responses

Balderdash

By Alyssa Pelish | Published: October 11, 2016

You could sense our tongues at the corners of our mouths as our pencils paused over the small squares of paper before us.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Family, Games | Leave a comment

Instructions for When It’s Too Late

By Kari Campeau | Published: September 20, 2016

Central Park Runner - photo by mckaysavage on Flickr

You have never thought of yourself as someone who is embarrassed by her body—you’re a college athlete!—but you will be, intensely so.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Food, Health, Sex | Leave a comment

Stranger on the Seine

By Micah McCrary | Published: February 3, 2016

Normally my being black makes my being American complicated, but in Paris I found myself perhaps saved by my nationality, by a particular foreignness, with my blackness possibly somewhat overlooked.

Posted in Essays | Tagged James Baldwin, Paris, Race Relations | Leave a comment

Where It Grows

By Rachel C. Lewis and Susannah Betts | Published: January 14, 2016

I’m standing in the grocery store balancing cloves of garlic in either hand. They are for my vagina.

Posted in Essays | Tagged College, Homosexuality, Marriage | 1 Response

Certifiable

By Caroll Sun Yang | Published: March 5, 2015

I was a seemingly innocuous, privately neurotic, stone-broke girl seeking hiatus from the soul-sucking world of fine art, writing, coolly inebriated boys and waitressing.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Letters, Psychology | 6 Responses

Ira Levin’s Creepy Valentine: Rosemary’s Baby and the Power of Place

By Tony Van Witsen | Published: September 10, 2014

Rosemary’s Baby entered my life at the same time as my growing awareness of the power and mystery of place.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Novels, Rosemary's Baby | Leave a comment

Custerism (A Manifesto of Doubt)

By Rachel Wilkinson | Published: August 8, 2014

I write this to you because I wonder if we can ever overcome what we are: prototypical comfortable liberals with radical pretensions.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Activism, Howard Zinn, Philosophy | 3 Responses

Spironolactone

By Tamara K. Walker | Published: June 19, 2014

tablets click into sickly amber plastic like the urine they render so urgent in reverse. click (drop), click (drop), streams of static swishing sound heard on the off-air channels of anything analog.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Drugs, Experimental, Science | Leave a comment

Sweet Little Comforts

By Jalina Mhyana | Published: March 31, 2014

My thought is a mandala, a mantra. A round thing turning over and over in my mind. A focus for my eyes and my breath. It’s as close as I come to prayer.

Posted in Essays | Tagged Flash Essays, Mountains | Leave a comment

Oreo

By Micah McCrary | Published: March 11, 2014

“There will be people who’ll cross the street to avoid you because you’re black,” my mother would tell me when I was younger, in every conversation or argument about race we ever had.

Posted in Essays | Tagged James Baldwin, Race Relations | 1 Response