The previous two issues were anchored in work by or about such writers John McPhee, Charles Simic and Adrienne Rich. This issue establishes our commitment to writers who not as recognized, but whose voices are powerful and significant. These are writers who will influence and shape creative nonfiction in the future.

When the man behind the concierge desk calls out my name, I look up to see a phone receiver being waved in my direction. “Kathleen, it’s Diane. I’ll be there, but I’m a little distance away.

My mother welcomed my father and me at the door and led us through my grandmother’s house like a newly hired tour guide. She showed us into the kitchen, walked us through the living room and pointed out where the hospital bed had been.

My Uncle Ben is 90 years old—maybe. He isn’t exactly sure anymore, and no one is left to argue that his real age is 89 or 91, or tell those in the next generation the actual date of his birthday.

Only the short fluorescent bar over the sink was lit; most of the room fell into brown shadows. The placenta in its pink tub had been carried away. The sterile instruments were gone, and the deep-blue cloths.

I see that old woman every now and then at the Y, the one who is not a lunch meat lover. She swims, as I do. She swims in a pair of black shorts and a black shirt. She is ashamed to show her loose, curdled flesh in front of the old men in the hot tub, with their big bellies and skinny legs, red faced, eyeing the teen-age girls splashing each other.She’s

Starting at the Lincoln Wood trailhead, we cut off onto Bondcliff Trail. On day one, we hiked about six miles, much of it on the old railroad logging trail.

A therapist is forced to revisit her past when assigned to treat a woman in an institution where she herself was once a patient.

Legend has it that Colon, Michigan, doesn’t exist, except for four days each August, when the magicians appear. More than a thousand magicians from all over the world have been congregating here for the past 54 years, doubling the population of Colon, a town named after the punctuation mark.