Current Issue / Issue 75 Spring 2021
This milestone issue features some of our favorite prizewinning essays. These curious, beautiful, nuanced stories about everything from surviving lightning strikes to the relief of solving medical mysteries consider the many perils, as well as the tremendous power, of living in a body.
Plus, brief excerpts from some of the phenomenal interviews we’ve published over the years, with advice and reflections on craft from writers including Dave Eggers, Leslie Jamison, Patricia Hampl, and many others.
Including essays by
Explore Issue 75Recent Essays
Harriet
My brother caught a turtle in the pond near our house. She was a painted turtle, about four inches in diameter, her legs and shell striped with orange. We named her Harriet. There was an old aquarium tank gathering dust in the basement, and we brought it upstairs, wiped it down, furnished it with rocks and twigs from the backyard.Stay at Home
I know where to step. I tiptoe from plank to plank. The hallway and stairs are the trickiest spots in this old house, but I’ve mastered how to avoid the areas that creak and crackle and pop and whine.Almost Behind Us
“I think he knocked out my tooth,” I tell my husband, carefully feeling around my mouth with my tongue. My three-year-old had been in my arms, but he’d wanted to dance. As I was putting him down on the floor, he jumped too soon, colliding with my chin.
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CNF Education
Writing can be lonely. Often, what we need most as writers is a network of focused peers and professionals who can provide constructive feedback, keep us motivated, and inspire us to do our best work. You don’t have to write alone.
From online classes to webinars, all year round, CNF offers a variety of ways you can connect with the broader creative nonfiction community and learn new skills, generate new writing, stay focused, and create your best work.
About the Genre
What is Creative Nonfiction?
Dive in with CNF Founder and Editor, Lee Gutkind
Creative Nonfiction magazine defines the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as “true stories well told.” And that, in essence, is what creative nonfiction is all about.
In some ways, creative nonfiction is like jazz—it’s a rich mix of flavors, ideas, and techniques, some newly invented and others as old as writing itself.
How to Survive an Atomic Bomb
In this issue, we travel back to the anything-goes days leading up to the July 1945 detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Edward McPherson takes readers on a tour of the site, exploring the history of the atomic bomb, as well as the modern-day challenges still posed by our nuclear arsenal.
Something Like Vertigo
An environmental writer sees parallels between her father’s declining equilibrium and a world turned upside down
In Case You Missed It
#013 Heat.
True Story
Each pocket-size issue our monthly mini-magazine showcases one exceptional longform essay by one exceptional writer.
