Essays

Creative nonfiction essays

Hyperreality: The Battle at Play

By Caryn McKechnie | Published: July 27, 2017
ipad dream by lancesh on flickr

With screens mediating their worlds, kids tend to interact less and less with nature.

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This’ll Be the Day That I Die

By Kailee Marie Pedersen | Published: March 8, 2017
Don McLean American Pie

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

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On Stuff

By Josephine Sloyan | Published: February 2, 2017
Pile of clothes

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

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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.

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Balderdash

By Alyssa Pelish | Published: October 11, 2016
Balderdash definition

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

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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.

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Stranger on the Seine

By Micah McCrary | Published: February 3, 2016
Photo by Micah McCrary

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.

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Where It Grows

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

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

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Certifiable

By Caroll Sun Yang | Published: March 5, 2015
Skid Row

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.

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

By Tony Van Witsen | Published: September 10, 2014
Rosemary's Baby book cover

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

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Custerism (A Manifesto of Doubt)

By Rachel Wilkinson | Published: August 8, 2014
Activist holding sign

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

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Spironolactone

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

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.

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Sweet Little Comforts

By Jalina Mhyana | Published: March 31, 2014
Mont Blanc

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.

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Oreo

By Micah McCrary | Published: March 11, 2014
Normal, IL movie theater

“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.

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Night Cycling

By Jalina Mhyana | Published: February 18, 2014
Night Cycling

The island was ours; each kissing gate and the kisses inside of them, each water trough, every animal call, root, rock, dock leaf and bunker. Even the moon.

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