Welcome to our creative nonfiction for winter, a tapestry woven with longing that evokes the tenderest places within us. These selections are an homage to family and lost childhood; the closeness that clings, distances we sometimes can’t bridge. They speak to the moments that shape us and losses that endure.

In “Shoulder Season”, Meredith Seung Mee Buse writes of an autumn trip with her daughter to the ocean where they draw closer to the past and to each other: “For months, we’ve been in all sorts of things—you in your bedroom, door locked, headphones on. Me in my head. In conflict. Indifferent.”

On a visit to his deceased father’s childhood home, Chris Pellizzari beseeches him to return and intervene on his behalf. “I anticipated those strong hands as I lay in bed,” he writes. “I was waiting for my father to lift me up and carry me into something better, better sleep, a better life. I was waiting to be lifted up from the bed, from the world. I really thought it was coming, the great lift.”

In “It Took Us Years to Hear Helicopters Again” Justine Sweeney recalls the years of her Irish childhood spent amidst the specter of military helicopters. “At school we formed our letters. Mixed up our ‘b’s and ‘d’s. Wrote in our jotters with fat-trunked pencils. On the playground we’d run and duck and tag, shouting: ‘You’re it!’ while the black blades of a low-flying Gazelle – an agile animal – cut up our yells and laughter, its glass eye surveying the narrow streets and alleyways around about us.” 

And finally, in “Desperate, Bright” Kate Michaelson writes of her mother whose life is waning, whose children tend to her on a jeweled autumn day. “Today, we gather around her,” she writes, “angling our chairs so she needn’t turn, scooching her right up to the table’s edge so she needn’t reach. Ignoring old wounds, we bring gifts of fancy candy and more scented candles than she’ll ever have a chance to burn. We fill in missing words, race to pick up what she drops.”

How words can share our lived experience and transcend space and time will always awe me. These writers have gifted Citron with their insistence, their heartbreak, their knowing. Thank you to our contributors for trusting us with your work and thank you dear Citron readers. My gratitude to Editor-in-Chief Angela Brommel, Online and Micros Editor JR Walsh, Creative Nonfiction reader Lisa Buchanan and the rest of the Citron team for another fulfilling literary year. A pleasure to do this work with you. My best wishes for a safe and healthy new year.

Ronit Plank 
Creative Nonfiction Editor