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 78Featured Stories
Battling the Book
The book is no longer a piece of writing; it’s a puzzle
The Sounds of Your Self
“Finding your voice”—or, even better, your voices—on the page is more than a craft challenge; it’s the key to claiming your story
Striving For Harmony
Using geometrical concepts to strengthen the structure of a work
Dismantling the Patriarchy by Reclaiming Her Voice
Elissa Bassist reflects on how women’s voices get silenced & reborn, the eleven years it took to write her memoir, and how she wrote like a mother#^@%*&
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.
Gun Bubbles
The unlikely connections between baby bumps and bulletsResurrection
When one of their chickens starts exhibiting strange symptoms, a family does everything it can to keep from having to suffer through yet another deathNo One’s a Virgin
A volunteer escort collects stories outside an Alabama abortion clinic
