Current Issue / Issue 77 Spring 2022
In this issue, we consider the challenges of living through collective (and too often unacknowledged) grief. How do we keep going in a time of tremendous sorrow? How do we put our experiences to good use? And how do we make room for joy and hope and laughter?
Featuring new essays about empathy training for medical students, the smell of fear in wartime, the explosive force of steam, the language of dishonesty, the tenacity of the house moth, and the necessary folly of renovating a home in fire season. Plus, advice and inspiration on staying motivated, writing about trauma, and finding creativity during a pandemic.
INCLUDING ESSAYS BY
Explore Issue 77Featured Stories
50 Years of Making Nonfiction Creative
How all the different flavors of nonfiction transformed into a literary art
Punching Up
Funny women are bringing serious subjects to the stage and revolutionizing comedy—and creative nonfiction—in the process
Renovations
The necessary folly of rebuilding a home in a world on fire
Misery & Company
Celebrity funerals, social media condolences, roadside memorials, and more: tracing the history of how we experience loss—and how we share it.
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
CNF Highlights
How to Reintegrate
A step-by-step guide to returning from war, utterly changed
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.
