Current Issue / Issue 78 Fall 2022
What is voice? How do you find yours? How can you change it, rearrange it, play with it? And then, how can you use it to make change in the world?
This issue is a celebration of writerly playfulness, exploration, and risk-taking, featuring breathless, epistolary, speculative, second-person, and snarky essays. Plus, an interview with Hysterical memoirist Elissa Bassist, close reads of work by Steve Coughlin, Jaquira Díaz, Margo Jefferson, and R. Eric Thomas, micro-essays, and more.
Including essays by
Explore Issue 78Recent Essays
Write About This Life
I let a squirt of Purell cover my palms. I punch in the code to open the locked ward door and let myself in. An aide is loudly calling bingo numbers, competing with the din of the Boston Philharmonic on the television.One Morning in Maine
The L.L. Bean catalog arrives in early June, in an avalanche of hospital bills, condolence cards, and COVID-19 reopening announcements from Red Lobster and the Pinch a Penny pool supply store that proclaim, Jeffrey, we want you back!Thin Place
We’ve entered the thin place again, where the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead feels as if we could rip it open with a breath. We make altars to our beloved dead, arranging flowers and symbols around their fading photographs.
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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.
True Story
Each pocket-size issue our monthly mini-magazine showcases one exceptional longform essay by one exceptional writer.
