”Our Fall Creative Nonfiction selections speak to tenacity and survival; they undulate with longing and determination. The writers of these five pieces push themselves to self-interrogate, they strive to see themselves and their behavior as clearly as possible even when they might not want to. Their voices are self-aware, wry, and unwavering.

“I am mesmerized by March clouds,” J.A. Liebl writes in her piece “In This Story We Are the Deer,” “dark and bruised, even in a bright sky. Two years ago, in England, there were hills and warm hearths, but I still managed to constantly crush eggshells. I was forever in debt to him—the ex—because love was a type of remuneration, and I was grateful for the work.”

In “Alegría,” Filiz Turhan writes of how “An incubus of anxiety squats” on her stomach all night long and yet, she must carry on. When her “luck feels thin,” she writes, “and the obstinate demon continues to clutch at me, I try something else. I take the backroads instead, hoping the slow meditative curves will do me good. The tires of my Japanese car spin along roads well worn by seventeenth-century English settlers along footpaths hewn by Matinecocks for eleven centuries before that.”

A physical and psychological reckoning opens Paulette Perhach’s “One Must Imagine Sisyphus Fabulous,” a moment where she has no choice but face herself. “The thud and bounce of my skull,” she writes, “my head lands now in the usual spot at the foot of the mountain. Around me crash the ropes and pulleys, the caribiners and anchors I thought would surely hold me to the peak this time.” Gathering her strength, she negotiates with Camus on her own terms: “He says one always finds one’s burden again, so let it find me it in a chiffon dress that billows in the winds, earrings that dangle and graze my face on the fall.”

In “Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss,” Giuseppina Iacono Lobo searches for a way to reconcile that which has lost. “I never would have imagined that this absence could be filled with an indefatigable hum,” she writes. “Or that this hum, a static noise like the whooshing of waves (but not soundwaves), ebbing and flowing, competing with the volume around me, louder with the loudness, but never too too soft, could be but the sound of my brain’s mourning a sudden and inexplicable loss.”

And in “I Don’t Want to Write About My Mother,” Beth Holly attunes herself to the complexity of the relationship she and her mother have always had; how they’ve disappointed one another over the years and transformed and repaired and become closer. “I don’t want to write about the sight of her back storming out of a restaurant,” she writes, “leaving me with the tab and the ache of abandonment. I don’t want to write about the sound of her voice when she spoke of her fear of losing me.”

When we examine our patterns and our desires on the page we welcome those who read us to share in and witnesses our experience; to make this life feel more achingly alive. I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to read and explore this work; to study closely the tension and evocative noticing these writers have made palpable in their narratives.

Thank you to our contributors and thank you, Citron readers. I hope Fall treats you well and that you enjoy the creative nonfiction in this issue.