Essays

Creative nonfiction essays

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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Gdansk Fever

By John M. Edwards | Published: September 19, 2013
Gdansk

According to an Ask Jeeves Internet search, Gdansk holds over 300 hotels, not including informal hostels and private “zimmers.” Why so many? I’m glad you asked.

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Meditating with Mabel

By Daniel Browne | Published: September 17, 2012
mabel

We considered Mabel housebroken, but as any good Buddhist—or new dog owner—knows, identity is a construct, subject to change. In other words, accidents happen, especially when no one’s watching.

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If You Think You’re the Best

By Emily Meg Weinstein | Published: June 11, 2012

When I ascended to the den, pliers in hand, to watch the Americans go down in Lillehammer, I knew I didn’t want to go out like them.

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For a While, For the Summer

By Natalie Vestin | Published: May 7, 2012
Coffee mug and press

I want an example, a model for how to live independently, with the smallest bit of indifference and anonymity, without fear, for a while, for the summer.

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The Edith Wharton Inside Me

By Mark Gozonsky | Published: March 1, 2012
Edith Wharton

It is rare in my experience that anyone can be both the center and circumference of a circle. How does Edith manage it?

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I Was 16

By Sean Christopher Lewis | Published: November 30, 2011

I was 16 in 1994. I had a crush on a girl at my high school named Stacy. She was two years older — blonde hair, a grunge band on her t-shirt and a constant half-smile on her face — and it goes without saying that she had absolutely no interest in me.

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David Foster Wallace and the Velveteen Rabbit

By James Warner | Published: August 12, 2011
The Velveteen Rabbit

Interviewed by Stacey Schmeidel for the Spring 1999 issue of Amherst Magazine, David Foster Wallace said, “The truth is I don’t think I’ve ever found anything as purely ‘moving’ as the end of The Velveteen Rabbit when I first read it.”

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Whore of Babel

By Anne Germanacos | Published: October 28, 2009

The place in the brain where language sucks meaning can seem like nirvana.

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Daughter off the Cross

By Karen Sosnoski | Published: September 30, 2009
Crucifix

It wasn’t until she lied to me that Irene earned my respect.

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