Perhaps one of the most important functions of literature is to help us deal with uncertainty. Authors may not set out to write with the express purpose of exploring life’s vagaries, but to write about humans is to engage with uncertainty, so it happens anyway, and we are the better for it.

Reading about someone else who has lived through those uncertain moments can help us as we encounter them, too, because while it can be maddening to not know what tomorrow will bring, we realize that we aren’t the only ones to experience that frustration. Our creative nonfiction selections for the Spring 2018 issue of The Citron Review do just that: Not only do they show us human stories with beautiful language and inventive perspective, they tell us that we are not alone in facing the unknown.

In “Solve for X,” Jackie Sizemore brings us to France, shows us a provincial setting, and involves us in the conundrums that travel so often creates—all of it complicated by factors that give life the resemblance of a middle-school math problem.

In “Monsoon City,” Dani Redd and her partner are confined to their apartment by the nearly incessant torrents of the monsoon season, forced, it would seem, to consider life-altering possibilities that may or may not happen after the rains eventually part.

My fellow creative nonfiction editor, Marianne Woods Cirone, and I are proud to publish these essays. We hope that you find them as engaging and illuminating as we do.

Thanks for reading.

Zach Jacobs
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review