While I don’t think time is literally speeding up, the older and busier I get the more it seems that way to me. I can hardly believe we are in the Summer of 2024 – I feel like I looked up and a whole season had passed. Perhaps that is why I was particularly drawn to the creative nonfiction selections in this issue. They soothed and slowed me with their patient unfolding and confessional interiority burning to break free. These six selections speak to what we can digest and what we hunger for, how our bodies betray us. They give voice to fierce and enduring longing and the memories and wishes that make up our lives.

In “Malocchio,” Stephanie Trott recounts a complicated crush she hasn’t quite yet been able to relinquish. She tells of summer, swimming pools, first kisses and family dinners; what she can’t have but keeps revisiting. She writes, “I watch from the second floor as you sit at the table and pick at antipasti, as your mother pours another glass of red wine, as your grandmother spoons gravy over macaroni and chicken cutlets. She serves you first, the baby of the family, the boy of the family, belonging in name to God.”

In “On Feathering,” Eliza Hayse luxuriates in feeling separate and alone while also contemplating what it would take to move through the world differently, to care for herself without deprivation. She speculates that, “In some other life, perhaps, I am a crow queen, covered in black feathers, my intelligence less of a hindrance and more of a faculty. I would call to my murder, and we would drink mucky water together, break nuts open with our beaks and eat to our fill.”

In “Continuing Education,” Mary Ann McGuigan writes of the future her Irish mother has planned for her, her yearning to escape it, and how sometimes the only way we can hold onto what we desire is by protecting it from those who are supposed to care about us most. She writes, “My mother wants to know about the letter I got from St. Peter’s College. College is a touchy subject around here. That’s because we can’t afford it. The first time she told me I couldn’t go, she made a lame attempt to sugarcoat it. “The truth is you’re better off without college.”

With language that vibrates and rueful wit Mikki Aronoff brings us “Dysphagia,” her acerbic and poignant assessment of a new more complicated physical reality: “Mementos not mori” you call them. You finger snippets of silver balloons that were waiting for you your last day of radiation, kiss glittery hearts scissored from get well cards, feel the peel and coil of birch bark cocooning your all-clear report.”

In “Facts I Learned This Month,” Kirsten Reneau reckons with how in just a brief period that which she despises and yearns for has utterly changed. She wonders where her culpability might lie: “Somewhere in the pit of the worst thoughts I have,” she writes, “I believe that when bad things happen to me, it is my own fault. Because I wanted to hurt another living thing, however briefly, a larger all-knowing universe has stopped me from having something living to care for.”

And in “The Museum of Hidden Sorrows,” Nancy Barnes contemplates artifacts and memories; what remains of our lived experiences and where all that we have lost goes. She writes, “I am also reminded of the old artesian well at the house where I spent my childhood summers; sometimes hidden sorrows rest at the bottom of a deep well. The water in that well was so delicious I wanted to see it, yet so far down in the stone cavern that when I leaned over the edge to look, my father holding tight to my ankles, I couldn’t even glimpse its shine.”

The creative nonfiction selections for Summer 2024 pulse with curiosity and self-recognition. In reading these contributions I am struck again and again by how much this gorgeous genre can accomplish. I’m reminded that when we follow the impulse to express our deepest truths, we embrace an invitation to create evocative and enduring art that can transform us.

I’m happy to be reading this issue’s creative nonfiction with Lisa K. Buchanan. My thanks to her and the entire Citron team. I love this literary magazine.

Best wishes for a good summer! 

Ronit Plank
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review