Sugar, stained glass, water, and birds weave through the creative nonfiction selections for Winter. And longing. Longing for more time, a different direction, a lost place; closeness with those to whom we are bound. Our Winter creative nonfiction contributors play with form and language, revel in the particular. These writers offer us a sensory feast, the gift of place, and the weight of what goes unsaid.

In “An Index of Desires” Allya Yourish discovers in lush, soft passages that for her, “There has been an abundance of thinly veiled yearning. Yearning as a constant state of being.” She writes of how she’s come to understand her identity, wondering if, “I would be an entirely different person if I had known the definition of desire sooner. Instead I kissed boys and thought about where my hands were supposed to go. Thought about what noises were right to make.”

Post-divorce and in the throes of new, less certain yet deeply knowable love, Jess D. Taylor thinks about in “All That Risk” where she might land next; what pain and reward await her. She describes how, “In an open-air circus tent smelling of dry grass and spun sugar, I watched a couple on the trapeze. I wondered if they were in love—all that risk, all that trust. I’d been married for nearly a decade before that, sure I’d not love anyone so vulnerably again. The possibility was exhilarating and also kind of sad.”

“Wordgame” is Candace Cahill’s innovative and evocative exploration of losing her son; of coming to grips with choices she was once ill-equipped to make. “‘You’ll place your baby for adoption,’ they said,” she writes. “Not give away; not surrender. Their intention, I think, was to soften the reality that they wanted me to abandon my child. ‘You’ll move on. You’ll forget,’ they said. ‘You can always have more children.’ I did none of those things.”

And in Jacqueline Goyette’s breathless “Blood Sugar,” a bounty – as much as a body can take – surges from the first sentence to the last. Goyette unleashes a sweet hurricane of comforting foods she remembers and a wish to know her mother more. “The times I walked into the kitchen,” she remembers, “when she was leaning against the refrigerator eating halo halo by the spoonful, sticky sweet, big jellied cubes: this, my mother – and yet in those moments she was someone I didn’t know, someone whose childhoods had lived other lives somewhere else, somewhere made of islands and shorelines and mango groves and westward Pacific waves, nowhere near this small town in Indiana.”

Melissa Goodnight’s “Mourning Dove” bestows numerical order both on a life already lived and one still in progress; depicts how in brief seconds we might experience all we need to know about a loved one. “The dove reminds me of my mother’s pet bird, the one that kept her company for over a decade when I moved away, whose feathers fell around her like Midwest snow.”

Then, abundance again, gushing, flowing through a town and transforming people in Fran Blake’s “Summer”. “The streets flood,” she writes. “We stand knee high dragging the water, making paths with our feet. The corners of books have turned brown and wrinkled dyed by water and salt; the clothing hangs on lines, flat and shapeless without bodies inside, occasionally blown into shape by the wind. Clothespins fall like pellets of rain.”

In experiencing this collection of work, I was reminded again and again how as readers and as people, we are drawn to that which is distinct. The details that stay with us and we choose to excavate can anchor our stories, anchor us. They can become a way to survive the too-much and the not-enough.

As 2023 comes to a close I want to thank The Citron Review for being a place that reminds me how much writers can accomplish with words. Thank you, Citron contributors for trusting us with your writing, and thank you, dear readers.

Best wishes for a good Winter.

Ronit Plank
Creative Nonfiction Editor
The Citron Review