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 75Featured Stories
True Story Magazine
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#35 Not Your Ordinary Experience of Desire
A poignant postmortem of a four-year relationship, told in alternating voices, becomes a catalog of unmet needs and wants … and a path to a hopeful future. -
#34 Plume: An Investigation
In True Story #34, “Plume,” a former environmental investigator applies her forensic skills to a family mystery. What happens to us when we are exposed to toxicity, both literally and figuratively? -
#33 My Monument
Surrounded by his neighbors’ maximalist holiday displays—104 inflatable Christmas decorations in all, with not a repetition among them—Ander Monson ponders the history of spectacle and considers the meaning of community. Then, he orders a two-story-tall Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to stand among the desert plants of his Tucson front yard.
79
The 79 bus loops around the housing projects in the East Hills of Pittsburgh all day—“like a noose,” as reluctant resident Brian Broome puts it. This might be one of Pittsburgh’s least tourist-friendly neighborhoods, and Broome an extremely uncomfortable tour guide … but the trip is well worth taking.The Braided Essay as Social Justice Action
The braided essay may be the most effective form for our timesThe Wolf and the Dog
In the aftermath of a school shooting, a teacher plans for next time
CNF Highlights
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
