Within the lives of the people who inhabit the Spring 2024 Creative Nonfiction selections are entire universes of experience these writers have captured in vivid, bracing detail. They are lyric and they are linear, with voices that speak to yearning and resignation; to what has been left unfinished and to what might be on the verge of beginning.

In Sandra Fees’ “Ergonomic Chances” she and her new husband face the first real snow of the season. She peers out their window at the white and transformed world, the work ahead of them to shovel themselves out, the luck of having found one another. She writes, “Everything’s bridal when you’re a newlywed, even after sixty. Even after a decade of checking single on your tax return. And then one day you Say Yes to the Dress. Even when you know exactly what you’re saying yes to—the random ups, downs, the years, the years ahead, behind.”

As a daughter driving with her mother across the Trans-Canada highway in “Rearview,” Rachel Laverdiere feels the weight of their entanglement, how her mother both knows her better than anybody else and also doesn’t recognize who she is trying to become. “Everything behind us has vanished,” she writes. I’m the panicked driver in that Stephen King story who looks in the rear-view mirror and sees everything getting gobbled up. The past is chasing me, getting closer and closer, and I’m afraid it might swallow me whole.”

Gary Fincke conjures up the tension of burgeoning independence in “Porkchop,” a meditation on adolescent freedom and transgression, pushing boundaries but also needing comfort as a thirteen-year-old who has the house to himself for an evening. “Now, for the first time,” Fincke writes, “you have eaten what your father expects to eat at 10:30, laid between two slices of rye bread that he baked Tuesday morning at 2 a.m., the loaf your mother brought home at 6:15 today when it didn’t sell fresh or stale. Leftovers belong to your father. He eats them before his work begins at eleven. He washes them down with coffee. Always, he extends the meat with bread.”

Memories of childhood are fraught in Dani Blackman’s lyric essay “M.A.S.H.,” titled after the fortune-telling game, in which she simultaneously evokes the past and present, the raw and the bittersweet. She writes, “One day you’ll be hitched to gratitude, an inch of moments, long drives to collect the teenagers inside you still waiting for a ride home. You might never reconcile harmony of gain plus loss, pain trumpeting over joy. You might learn surrender and still stack your chips in 4 equal lines, keep the truths from towering over.”

The breathlessness of discovery propels John Janelle Backman’s lyric “Pink but Deeper” which begins in mystery to unfurl in crisp snapshots the story of her awakening. She recalls, “The whole dream was as black as his helmet. We stood over a lake, at either end of a causeway barely wide enough for two men, which I thought we were, based solely on appearance (my moustache, his muscles). He glided inexorably toward me, and my dread grew with each swish of his cape.”

And finally, in “You Still Wouldn’t Trade It For Another Lap Around,” Abby Alten Schwartz savors the memories that make her life uniquely hers and how that which once addled or even frightened her is alluring compared to what might come ahead.  “What you miss now you rushed through then, eager for each year that edged you closer to adulthood. You weren’t a kid who wanted to stay a kid, but a kid who wanted to outgrow your fears — the ones you confessed only to your diary with the green vinyl cover that locked with a tiny brass key.”

The selections in this issue invited me to embody for a short while other lives, and reaffirmed for me the magic of creative nonfiction. Each time we follow our impulse to convey what we have seen and been through, each time we tap into our truth to make something new, we invite a kind of witnessing and there’s transformation in that. My heartfelt thanks to our contributors. It was a pleasure to create this issue and we are thrilled to feature your work.

Thank you, Citron readers, for spending time on our pages and my best wishes to all for a creative and healthy Spring.

Ronit Plank
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review