Summer again. More light and heat for those of us in the Northern hemisphere and, I find, within these longer brighter days, an invitation to explore and savor as much as I can because the season can feel so fleeting.

Charlotte Hamrick and I don’t seek themes out for our issues but often when I put together a letter of introduction to the collection, one or two seem to emerge. The writers of our Summer creative nonfiction selections have crafted work imbued with urgency, heft, and a certain resignation. These six pieces concern themselves with beginnings, endings, and the courage to see the truth of a thing: the dissolution of a home, a marriage, a life, and the new architecture we create when we insist on surviving.

Contending with grave illness, the speaker in Jennifer Maxon’s “Surface Tension” measures her strength by a ritual that helps her navigate when fear threatens to overtake her. “For these two hours, focus on this one wave. The grief of a lost future. Let go. Protecting your girls. Let go. Their first loves. Braces. Driver’s licenses. Graduations. Weddings. Let go. Imminent pain. Paralysis. Infusions. Scans. MRIs. Surgeries. Let go. Those ghosts can stay on shore.”

While impending loss can compel us to hold on harder, it is letting go in Angie Wright’s “Yielding” that has granted the narrator a clearer sense of what she is and is not willing to do for love: “Season after season of planting and watering and whispering to the growing, flowering, fruiting things, Thank you, and More, please. That’s what I said to you for twenty years. More, please. Until the time came, when I could only say, No more. Please.”

Marie Manilla’s narrator in “Never Marry a Wounded Bird,” has also recently struggled with a decision about digging in or letting go. When she discovers a bird on the shore confronting a dangerous fate, she recognizes a recent precarious position of her own, one in which she needed to choose to stay or to go: “It didn’t cry as folks raced by within inches, seemingly oblivious, as the surf crawled higher and higher. I imagined the empty beach after dark, water erasing our towel stamps, our footprints and moted fortresses. Overtaking the bird. I couldn’t bear that kind of end for the thing. Its inability to escape as the water inched up.”

In Carolyn Pledge-Amaral’s “Settling the Score” the narrator recounts a night she had no choice but accept the end to her family’s life as she’d known it; a night when there was no mistaking her father’s intentions: “Neil Diamond crooned his Song Sung Blue from our giant stereo and fiddle music giggled from counter radios against a chorus of crickets and the lonely drone of bagpipes that echoed over emerald highlands. And on the night my father set out to tear down our house, the score was a symphony of fear.”

As events that make up a life and the memories that become our experience accumulate there can be no real way, the narrator in Bria Winfree’s “Bath Receipts” seems to be saying, to fully assess the cost, but she tries: “When I first got to the foster house, bathing was hard. I could usually bathe my younger brothers without problems, but I didn’t take baths for a while. Bath tub (42 gallons) of warm water, in Many, Louisiana (2008), $.48, Lice shampoo + comb kit, $8.28.”

And sometimes though what we have endured remains unspoken, it can take up large swaths of the space between us, as it does for Beth Kephart’s narrator in “Middle Distance”, who in her mother-in-law sees a woman who has endured ineffable loss: “Her coffee farm. The actual terrifying bloody civil war. The earthquake that shook her land and Santa Tecla to the covetous till of the ground. The story her son had told about the unbridled horse that had careened out control on the steepest pitch of dirt road and flung her, or did she fling herself, to the hard stop of a rut. A shattering of bones.”

These creative nonfiction selections speak to how we navigate threats to our bodies and peace of mind, what we do when we suspect we are running out of options. These six pieces suggest that in recognizing what it is we need to feel whole – or at least more whole – and allowing ourselves to choose that, we discover a new kind of tenacity, even though we may be forever changed.

I want to thank my Creative Nonfiction co-editor Charlotte Hamrick, whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with these last several years, for her literary vision and dedication and heart. I will miss you!

And best wishes, Citron readers, for a summer that feeds you in all ways, especially creatively.

Ronit Plank
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review