Current Nonfiction

Julia C. Spring

On Saturday mornings my big sisters and I would get as close as possible to our huge cabinet radio, so tall that only when we got to third grade could we see the words in Webster’s Unabridged International Dictionary, Second Edition, splayed open on its top. Our beloved ritual was listening to “Let’s Pretend”—at 9 a.m. when we lived near Boston in the late 1940’s and at noon after we moved to Seattle in 1950, due to the time difference between the two coasts.

Cast members’ […]

James Macdonald

I’m being driven in a white van. It’s 4:45 a.m. on my first day of shooting a low- budget remake of the iconic horror film Chainsaw Massacre. Outside my window the Red River appears and disappears as the pink Louisiana dawn creeps over the dash. I close my eyes, lean my head against the cool, foggy glass, and pretend to sleep. My driver chews sunflower seeds and spits the shells into a Styrofoam cup. He asks if the radio is too loud, which it […]

Traci Elliott

We lived in a duplex on Ashley Circle, in the not-quite-as-nice neighborhood then, Mama managing the trailers up the road. I walked past the circle of them on my way to the bus stop every morning, the cache of less-than-we-were tucked in behind the pine trees. In the summertime, my sister rode her Big Wheel in our driveway, pulling the emergency brake, fishtailing, gravel arching into the air, heat shimmying over the asphalt. We spent some weekends with Daddy at his second wife’s house, with the pool table in […]