I will always choose Fall as my favorite season. Growing up mostly in the New York area I thrilled to the prospect of cooler weather and warmer clothes, order and predictability, the palpable change in the air and tempo of my days, restored at last to the classroom with friends and teachers I admired after unstructured, untamed summer. The creative nonfiction selections for the Fall issue bring to mind similar impending change, as well as the shifts within us when we recognize a part of ourselves we thought was gone.

In “Instructions” Meg Thompson writes compactly and with immediacy of faraway youth and that which is physically unreachable but still stirs inside: “If you still cannot find me, then I am already gone, a girl again, 1987, watching the ducks in a low river off I-71 at a rest stop outside of Ashland.”

And in “Spice” Barbara Phillips recounts the warmth that washes over her during a plane ride back from a hot air balloon festival while sitting next to a man she’s just met, but who sparks a longing in her. There’s no time like right now, she realizes and also, there is hardly enough time. “Fifty years ago,” she writes, “working for racial justice in a tiny southwest Mississippi county where until recently Black folks had to step off the sidewalk for passing white folks, I stared at the iconic poster of the Fiesta in the office of a civil rights lawyer. For a moment, I was transported to a place that had to be so different from my county – a place with balloons of all shapes and colors rising into the sky as if by wizards.”

When and how we might run out of time with someone we love deeply is what preoccupies Lisa Buchanan in “How I Lose Him,” an ode to the fear that, in a reality of unknowables, that fear can become a certainty and details from a life redemptive: “Dad spit-shines his wingtips, down and up with a full head of hair and a spine made of rubber. I’m in the kitchen, visiting, mid-pumpernickel with egg salad, but my parents ignore me, as if I don’t exist. And, really, I don’t, because they’re happier than I’ve ever seen them.”

Clarity about who her mother really is and how she raised her punctuates Katy Goforth’s “Lessons Learned,” which speaks to the sharp and specific edges that mark a child when they understand the person charged with protecting them can hurt them most: “Mama used to line up the live sand dollars on the splintered rail of the beach cottage. They were covered in a mossy grey. Alive and wondering where their wet home went.”

Music, desire, and the tension of bodies pressed close together in dark spaces course throughout Liam Strong’s “The One Year I Broke My Glasses at Bled Fest” who writes, “But tiny and moving and parts are a kind of joyful tinkering, like you’re with him, Alan, like he’s your hex key, learning how all his buttons work, how the nipple is a countdown to nuclear reaction, his lips the alarm you do not touch at all costs.”

In “Window Seats” Navneet Bhullar excavates the unspoken moments that both bridge and distance us from those we most love, shaping us: “Dad reads the newspaper quartered lengthwise, spine upright, thighs crossed on the black leather sleeper. I peer out the window, my nostrils speckled with engine soot. Mum daydreams and looks out for the wandering chai seller. Dots of light in the fields float like insects mimicking stars.”

And finally, “How to Eat a Plum” and “A Dahlia or Something” by Tina Kimbrell who writes of her ailing mother as her life draws to a close. “The nurses have turned the TV in my mom’s room to a constant loop of nature images and soothing music. It reminds us of the nature documentaries that she used to watch on the Discovery Channel in the 90s. We’d make fun of her for so intently watching hours’ worth of fuzzy footage of lions hunting or grasshoppers mating or crabs side-shuffling on seafloor. There was always something eating. Always something dying. Always a family doing both together.”

The details we remember, those we select as writers shape our work and become part of who we are. They have the strength to break through our reverie and show us what matters, what we hold onto even when we may have lost so much. The creative nonfiction in this issue is a reminder of the ways in which seemingly small moments can take over a memory, transform a relationship, change us.

Thank you to these contributors and to you, Citron readers. We hope you enjoy these selections for Fall 2023.

Ronit Plank
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review