“Freshly divorced, I drive from Miami, Florida, to Durham, New Hampshire, with my new girlfriend, who is headed for grad school there. We arrive a day early and decide to spend a night at Ogunquit Beach in southern Maine, a place I’d enjoyed greatly with my ex-wife and now want to reclaim as a single man. A depressed man. A browbeaten man. But a single man, choked with possibility.”
I wore it on my right middle finger: one of ten short but slender, pale, nervous, guitar-blistered fingers which melted in a room on fire during my sixteenth year.
My father had an unusual book that rested on his work desk. It was worn and brown. The covers looked hard, almost like a box. When I was a child, from my view at four feet, the ends seemed tinted, a marbled brown design, chipped at the edges. I imagined it to be a case, a chest filled with things I might find interesting or valuable. I wanted to look inside.
Sara Etgen-Baker is digging through her grandmother’s attic one day and comes across a box of old photographs of ancestors she’s never met. She learns about their past, their family, and their adventure that led her family to travel from Germany to America.
Barbara Krasner explores an album left behind by her deceased grandmother, whom she has never met.
A small box of family treasures given to Gayla Mills by her father sparks a journey through the generations.
By using form, poetry, and visuals, Joyce Munro’s story moves beyond fact and prompts readers to consider a sculpture and its owner in deeper ways.
Terri Elders looks back on her life and reminds us that all we have is this moment right now.
This essay by Ronnie Hess revisits her journey, through translated letters, to learn about and try to find peace with her Jewish grandparents’ lives in Nazi Germany.
A creative nonfiction piece by Brandon Hansen styled as an email to a lost love, with a bit of Russian space history thrown in.