Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of creative nonfiction is the invitation this genre offers to explore forgotten parts of our lives, the memories we return to again and again, and how both the unspoken and spoken animate our intimate relationships. The creative nonfiction selections in our Fall issue swirl with what presses in on us, what we are unsure we’ve got the strength yet to share, and the myriad and competing truths within us.

In “Blind Curves,” Erin Wood writes of a marriage that she questioned continually but remained in and moments that helped crystallize her reality. “Over and over,” she shares, “I have been lulled back, have kept the words I am leaving you from tumbling from the cliff of my mouth. Yet another fight will come later that night–a threat to throw my phone in the ocean on our anniversary, our daughter on the other side of a reverberating wall, a 2 a.m. apology in the darkness.”

Taking stock of who she is and the immediacy of living her life richly while also hoping for a partner punctuates Sharon Goldberg’s “For a Limited Time Only.” “I don’t believe in soulmates,” she writes, “but if you think I’m yours, great. I clench my teeth when I sleep, so I wear a night guard and get Botox injections to relax my jaw. I do not permit myself to keep peanut butter in the house. If I do, I will consume the entire jar, spoonful by spoonful.”

In “Motel on the Edge of Everything,” Dawn Miller conjures the slowness of time and the viscousness of wading through memories of her family trying to reorganize itself after grave loss. “Outside, a spiral staircase twisted from the ground to the second floor,” she writes, “rusted metal stairs that shook as Fatima, the motel owner’s daughter, and I panted up and down—swapping roles as towered princess and horsebacked prince—while in the background, the steady off-and-on hum of a vacuum her mother, who spoke little English, carted room to room, and I thought how the staircase was a small miracle, defying gravity, the kind of miracle Mom wrote to the faith healers about, stuffing money into envelopes, but they never answered.”

And finally, in Brooke Middlebrook’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” a dinosaur, space dust, and the magic trick of being able to glimpse the present day as a blip and also lastingly important. “The best part about living in the Anthropocene,” she writes, “is not being sure what will come next, epoch-wise. I’d like to race around the room when the spirit moves me like the dog does when she has the zoomies. Does she know something I don’t? I know scientists found the layer of earth that confirms the asteroid impact because there are spherules of vaporized rock, encased, that fell back down like beads on Mardi Gras.”

This issue’s creative nonfiction invites us into long ago locked up spaces and to witness the danger and vulnerability of emotional dynamics as they unfurl. This work speaks to how we bide our time or hope to hurry it along, how we cling, when we need to leave, and what it’s like to be alive right now. Thank you to our contributors and thank you, Citron readers for returning to our pages. What a gift to spend time with this work.

Wishing you a Fall that nurtures you.

Ronit Plank 
Creative Nonfiction Editor