Nonfiction

  • Nine Changes of a Watery Star

    —for Blaze You left home with nothing but a cell phone, left without your wallet, your keys, your glasses, without saying goodbye. Perhaps you forgot them. Perhaps you got a text and rushed outside without stopping to think about what you would need. Perhaps you were feeling flustered, impulsive. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you left…

  • netwerk

    /ˈnεtˌwәrk/ Goose bumps are a good sign. More and more often these days, I find my eyes falling on just the thing I was looking for in an area of apparent chaos. More and more often these days, I find myself encountering significant floral debris just at my feet. Some weeks ago, during my first…

  • Vita Nova

    I had some vague idea that I would one day write a book (maybe a comic picaresque memoir) about having cancer, but it also feels like maybe I don’t have time for that. With what rapidity life follows my pen, etc. —Text to friend, December 28, 2025 I am used to dealing with the dead….

  • Memory Foam

    April 12, 2025 | Pets I always say that I hate nature, but the more I think about it, I find that I hate nature in the “american midwest” where nature is mostly grass and useless trees. My father was, above all else, a farmer. He hated planting useless trees; he only planted trees that…

  • West Shed

    My friend Clytia dropped me off near Point Reyes Station for a writers’ retreat at Mesa Refuge. It was my first writers’ residency, and as a scientist I had no idea what to expect. For so long I had organized my days with precision to pack in the tasks that made my career. Would I…

  • Happy New Year (Emerging Writers’ Contest Winner: NONFICTION)

    Our nonfiction winner is Ennis Smith, for his piece “Happy New Year.” This year’s nonfiction judge was Elisa Gabbert. Of Smith’s essay, she writes: This beautiful, swift, and complex portrait of a friend (“if that’s what you called that in-between place where ex-lovers lived”) is also a remembrance for times and places lost, for youth and…