Author’s note: I wrote this story because I yearn for the days that the wind has swept away. In the neighborhood of fishermen where I was born, we kids didn’t have a bathroom. Only adults had…
Creative Nonfiction
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Photo courtesy of Ksenia Emelianchik / UnsplashFranco’s legacy falls across a celebration of two friends’ birthdays but fails to stifle the hard-earned, uncontainable, savored joy. Up four flights of…
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Photos by Daniel Lincoln and Debby Hudson / UnsplashThe Georgian Sketchbook is both a poet’s diary and a chronicle of a Russian war exile in Georgia. Irina Lewinsky, an executive member of the Saint P…
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Looking for relief and new possibilities, a lecturer at the University of Ibadan travels to Cape Town, but the route is anything but direct. By 1999 the massive exodus out of Nigeria had attained a cr…
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Earlier today, as our car was on queue along the Saudi–Bahrain causeway, he turned down the stereo volume for a moment. “What will happen to this Filipini?” The Mary Jane Veloso trial was broadcasted…
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Cairo Al-Rifa'i Mosque | Photo by Mohammed Moussa | CC BY-SA 3.0 An Iranian woman living in the US seeks to understand the meaning of home on a journey to Egypt to visit the burial place of Moham…
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Interior of Arbatskaya subway station in Moscow, Russia A woman sweeping the Moscow metro with a twig broom, a violinist playing a Beatles tune, and Chekhov: Philip Metres reflects on his time on…
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Translator’s note: The following text by Lin Yi-Han, like her novel Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, is based on the theme of what it’s like to dwell in a body that carries traum…
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What Is Lost Can you picture the Argentine pampa? Flat fields, eucalyptus trees, a seemingly inoffensive landscape where a gray sunset might use your boiling blood to paint a path st…
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Transfer of Saint Remi relics, stained glass window in the Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Paris, France Named after a medieval French bishop, a transgender poet and essayist reflects on the inheri…
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Photo courtesy of the author. for Juan José Hurtado, in memoriam For the narrator of the following crónica, 16mm films made by Kaqchikel villagers, flying ants, and dragonflies all flick…
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Gloria Blizzard and Jazz, Lake Ontario, Canada | Photo by Heidi Seirekidis This essay takes the form of a jazz standard. Nestled within the intro and outro are alternating A and B sections. I am…
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Photo by by Elena Croitoru A countryside flâneuse in search of her deceased grandfather contemplates anchoring, wandering, and the small marks we leave on the world. How does one get to know…
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Girma Berta, Asmara XII (2018), digital archival print, 45 x 60 cm / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art Oscillating between Asmara, Eritrea, and Washington, DC, the narrator reflects on the powe…
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Photo provided by Nina Kossman A family’s history, Soviet history, and the role of a father’s stamp collection. Do you see this little metal box? It was surely unusual for its time—just look…
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“Demeter and Persephone Terracotta Myrina 100 BCE” by mharrsch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 A car racing down an empty steppe highway frames this essay from Kazakhstan today, as a mother pon…
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M. Florine Démosthène, Wounds #1, collage on paper, 22 x 30 in. / Courtesy of the artist There was once a beautiful little bear called Baby Bear. One day, Baby Bear went for a walk in th…
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M. Florine Démosthène, But I Have To, collage on paper, 44 x 60 in. / Courtesy of the artist A djeli (commonly known as a griot) is a West African storyteller who is the keeper of oral t…
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Illustration by Maya Ish-Shalom Chickens, from Bessarabia to New York City, provide a generational through-line in these four vignettes. Popol Twenty-three years after my…
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Illustration by Avery Holmes “Bakery Scent is a complex that cannot be dismantled or piecemealed,” yet the author still searches for that perfect madeleine, especially the one that can no longer…
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Photo by Krisztian Matyas / Unsplash “Awl” is from a series titled “Words I Did Not Understand.” Through memory—“the first screen of nostalgia”—and language, a writer pieces together her story of…
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Armando Diaz / Flickr In that swirl of ideas, stuck in the middle of that overpopulation of bodies, I lose my cardboard piece. That is a sign too, another type of sign, a message from the gods of…
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Photo: Havana, Cuba by Tiago Claro / Unsplash In this work of creative nonfiction from Cuba, plague is something common shared with those who lived in Thebes. I carefully open a pregnancy te…
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