In her memoir Motherland, Venezuelan journalist Paula Ramón explores the collapse of her homeland and the loss of her family as she’s known it. Her ongoing and painful sense of displacement colors every aspect of her life and her relationships. The ruptures are at once untenable and inescapable, which she illustrates with this quote from Leonardo Padura who writes in The Man Who Loved Dogs, “What else can we the shipwrecked talk about but the sea?”

Writers, especially writers of personal creative nonfiction, know what it is to pore over their lived experience to better understand and perhaps find kernels of meaning in what has occurred. Maybe winter, especially in regions where temperatures plunge and the ground hardens beneath us, where our windows remain shut for weeks and maybe months on end, makes ignoring what gnaws at us impossible. What better way to alchemize what has shaped us than turn it into art and words, allow ourselves some forward motion from what has been trapped within, maybe even hint at change.

The writers in the winter issue of Citron grapple with the weight of the roles they play and explore former versions of themselves and their loved ones. In Mole Poblano Kathryn Jankowski nurtures her garden and hopes for signs her mother is still on this earth. She writes,  “The dreamer in me looks for signs she lives on. In her book, Animal Medicine, Erika Buenaflor says ancient Hispanic civilizations considered mariposas spirits of their ancestors. That orange-and-black Monarch flitting through a bed of zinnias could be my mother prompting me to live in the moment, not the past.”

In Brixton Born and Dreaming, Felix Bill wills back another time and place far from his current life, embraces his yearning for what’s gone. “I live in stolen weekends,” he writes. “Back where I belong for just long enough to breathe, to grieve, before— end scene. I was twenty, the first time I saw real stars; the vast, hungry abyss of space the night sky becomes, without London’s amber glow. It still frightens me.”

In On Faith’s Lips, Mariam I. Williams’ captures how a chance afternoon with a role model changed the way she thought about herself. She writes, “The day she converted me from fat seven-year-old with an overbite and gapped front teeth into the model I wanted to be, Faith wore a hot, peppery orange lipstick. On Faith’s skin—Fashion Fair’s Ebony Brown, a “chocolate brown with red undertones,” per the company—that color was bold, even for the 80s. It could arrest passersby, command their respect, banish old adages about black women, monkeys, and red lipsticks into forgetfulness.”

In It is the Responsibility of the Teacher, Emily Brisse contemplates the depth and weight of shepherding those who depend on us to guide them. She writes, “It is the responsibility of the teacher to spot the kid eating an apple alone at lunch, to chat with them for a while, offer them generous attention. It is the responsibility of the teacher to be patient, especially with that kid whose desperation for attention comes from a desperate place.”

In Lost in Translation, Jennifer Pinto recalls the ways her mother relied on her when she was young, how she was of service at a tender age, before she knew much about the world of adults. She writes, “I am nine and my mother is on the Morning Exchange. She is interviewed about being a successful Deaf business woman. She sells clothing for a company called Queen’s Way to Fashion. The teachers at school stopped all classes that morning so everyone could watch. I’m thinking this will somehow make me famous, or at least as popular as Kari K., but instead from that day on I was known as that girl with the Deaf mom.”

And in Debbie Pierce’s Ninetyish, a mother’s love for her child doesn’t stop her from leveling with her though it might hurt. Her willingness to speak pragmatically, honestly, is a necessary kind of mothering. “My youngest daughter (who is twenty-nine),” she writes, “announced on her last visit home that she needs me to live until I am ninety, the year when she will celebrate her fifty-fourth birthday, an age she feels confident that she can let me go, an age where she thinks she will have come to terms with my impending death.”

As this year wanes, I hope that the new one begins gently enough to allow you space to breath and create, reflect and find moments of calm. I am grateful for the team that makes Citron run, our Citron readers, and our contributors for the gift of your work. Your words help affirm for me that there are myriad ways to share what we have experienced, and that every time we do, we bring into being a valuable rendering of our truth.

Best wishes and happy New Year to you and yours,

Ronit Plank
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review