Tag: Memoir

New Essay in Electric Literature

“Making a narrative out of a life requires a lot of distilling. You gather as much flotsam from the past as you can and try to piece it all together just the way you remember it, only now, all your memories are liquid and volatile and won’t form a complete picture anymore. Eventually, you leave out the parts that you can’t make fit or the ones you don’t like thinking about. With time, these pieces fade until you can’t even remember what you left out anymore and the narrative becomes the memory.”

Read in full at Electric Literature

Two Summer Publications: Camas & Pidgeonholes

POINT COUNTS AND SHIFTING BASELINES
in Camas Magazine

Photograph of the magazine cover with a painting of a Joshua Tree against a bright blue background.

“Can we celebrate the wild just beyond the doorstep without conflating it with the wildness of places far from any doors? If we expect the wild to adapt to our cities and our lifestyles, where do we adapt to theirs. We must leave space and silence and open places for them to build their own nests, make their own paths through the desert, and communicate with each other in whisper songs.“

Purchase the issue to read in full

THE FIRST TIME in Pidgeonholes

“He sounds like one of the mice that live in the house I will move to the first time I try to leave him, the ones I will set hard metal traps for in the kitchen. I will hear the bitter snap and squeak of them at night when I try to fall asleep but instead replay a recent conversation in which he tells me I am easy to love.”

Read the full piece online

Image of a gray concrete building with a white curtain blowing out of an open window. Over this image is the following text: Nonfiction. THE FIRST TIME by Nell Smith.