Our creative nonfiction selections for the summer simmer and burn, interrogate and soothe. These five contributors bring to our pages child bodies, lost bodies, how we are unable to outrun change or ignore our thirst for more.

In “Black Raspberry Chip” Liza Ruggiero writes of a longing to make people permanent and to truly know them. When she gathers with the women in her family and her young daughter to visit her ailing grandmother, she reflects on how “dementia had made a home of her mind – a tide whose beating softened clear, brilliant green glass, the kind that glints in the noon sun, to soft, dusky edges – but her body seemed to remember how to accommodate the weight of a small child, and her hands, how to hold.” 

In “Do You Remember Being Eight?” Jodi Plaia looks closely at the vulnerability of being a child, how our bodies hold on; the ways we try to let go. “I am studying truth,” she writes, “- a practice given to me by my counselor, Diana: watch eight-year-old girls. See how small they are. How full of light. How breakable. I did not know. Not really. I am a stranger visiting my own history.” Her exploration is a search for reclamation, for peace.

Amy Simmons Farber writes of the ways we can burn in “Ash”, of the anger that consumes her upon learning her husband is leaving her for another woman: “The slow draw of fury coils into my lungs, so stealth I don’t recognize the flavor against my tongue. My blood warms. Each breath enlivens a plume of rage. I become big in rooms where I feel small.”

“D.” is Sarah Kilch Gaffney’s exploration of a summer when the world tilted and also opened up for her 16-year-old self. An injury, a death, and “word spreading like fire through the inn’s dining room and our tiny town, and that evening, the sun set over the sea like it always does, the light lingering but everything sharply different, and even your death never prepared me for so many blue skies awash with loss.”

And finally, in “Hermit Crab at Low Tide,” Maggie Hart invites us to contemplate with her the relentless and luminous cycle that makes up a life. “At low tide,” she writes, “The water pulls back and leaves everything splayed out and exposed, kelp ropes sprawled like intestines, fish bones, pearly insides of shattered shells, a film of rot that smells like pennies and iodine. Nothing stays buried. Something is always dying or molting or being transformed.”

Creative nonfiction at its most resonant conveys the clearest truths a writer understands, crafted into shapes that can beam through darkness, cross immeasurable distance and time. This genre beckons us to feel and see one another, move closer to recognition and understanding. I’m grateful I get to read this work. I hope you enjoy the pieces in this issue as much as Lisa Buchanan and I did.

I hope your summer is safe, healthy, and that this season nurtures you.

All my best,

Ronit Plank 
Creative Nonfiction Editor