The Spring issue brings us intimately close to the lived experience of an array of writers fighting for family and searching for lost selves. They slow down time, peel back moments, and reveal the irrevocable shifts within us, both sudden and subtle. These selections grapple with what we’ve survived; how we search for calm when we can barely still our hearts.

From the first gripping sentence of Angela Edwards’ “The Bite I Still Wake For,” the past comes calling: “The bite comes when I am half in sleep and half in whatever comes after it. Not hard. Not gentle. Just certain. A clean press of teeth into skin that is enough to pull me back into my body.” And In “When a Body Dies,” Kiana Govoni implores ghosts to help her dad: “To grow my father a new leg I shall call on the dead masters,” she writes. “I am not psychic, but my voice can try travel. If men can conquer galaxies and become Martian, then I know it. One malfunctioning human leg, Bradbury. You can fix it.”

Recognizing her life has irrevocably changed, Anne Giordano writes in “Surfing” of how“Just after sunrise, I slink from our Huntington Beach hotel room while my seventeen-year-old daughter is still asleep. My mind has been whirring for hours, and I need to move.” In “Getting Clean,” Maggie Levantovskaya must step into an unexpected role she’s never had to play before: “Usually, it’s my mom’s job to wash my grandparents, to twist her crooked back above the tiny tub, to catch their heavy bodies when they slip. I’m the academic, I don’t do the dirty work. I decipher documents, translate into Russian what the doctors say, negotiate with hospitals when they send bills.” And finally in “Clouds, Above,” LJ Sedgwick shares a walking homage to her mother: “Up the Dell Road, through St Fintan’s estate. Past the gallery in the white house and down onto Carrickbrack Road. My mother tells me the names of plants we pass, of trees, stories from her past. In sun or wind and rain, she names the clouds.” And so begins this essay of loss and remembrance.

For me there is no other alchemy as bracing and resonant as the reckoning we do on the page. I’m humbled and enlivened by creative nonfiction, how sharing our work brings us closer to one another. I know myself more deeply because of how I’ve come to understand others and I know others more fully because of how I’ve come to understand myself.

Thank you to our CNF contributors for your excavations, your generous invitation to feel and experience ourselves anew. A gift to be able to read and take in these selections and offer them to you dear, Citron readers.

Ronit Plank 
Creative Nonfiction Editor