Cy Twombly, the austere and enigmatic expatriate painter who recently had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, hates watching his paintings leave the house. He imagines the movers in Rome, where he lives, crossing the street with a canvas and someone on a motor scooter driving through it, like a stunt in a circus.

There we were, taking the long way home through the park, Toby, my black lab, bounding on ahead, doing two miles for every one of ours. Lovers we were, holding hands when we weren’t struggling single file over rocks and roots.

Doing my usual Monday morning imitation of Lucifer descending, muttering sullen insurrection, I Kathryn, Archbitch of San Francisco (self-appointed), hurl myself into the abyss and thump perilously down the wet brick stairs into the BART station, mere seconds behind schedule.

This issue was inspired by the first annual Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers' Conference sponsored by Creative Nonfiction and Goucher College in Baltimore, Md. As Creative Nonfiction is the only literary magazine to publish nonfiction exclusively, so, too, was this event the only conference to feature workshops, readings, seminars and panels about nonfiction, only.

That August I returned to the town in New Jersey where I had been born 50 years before. It looked much the same. Any town would, after five weeks.There was a great deal of waiting mail—08540, 08540, 08540.

At home I sat in a chair by the window, watching Frisbee players in the park, cars pulling into the gas station. The hospital had been a natural setting for a crisis, its waiting areas filled with worried relatives who blinked at our footsteps then retreated back into themselves when they saw we weren’t doctors.

Errors and corrections, errors and corrections. So far as I can tell, that’s what psychotherapy is all about.

Mr. Kohlbert locked his hands behind his back and paced in front of the class. “Und sooooooo…,” he droned, “Ve haf efry reason to belief dat Columbus vas a Jew.”I paused in the sketch I was drawing of a new 1957 Ford Thunderbird and glanced around the musty classroom.

A year ago, one of my mother’s rare, brief letters arrived, bearing in its folds the reason for its being: Tom’s obituary. In two column-inches of newsprint, I learned that, at 38, he had died at home of complications from diabetes; that he was a lifelong resident of our hometown in the Midwest; that he was survived by a sister.

It’s 1964. In her room my sister turns her radio up high. Eighteen and a half, her door shut tight. Scratchy voices croon shriek yodel about love. I have peeked through the space around her doors latch and seen her dancing like some tribeswoman out of National Geographic, the brown, plastic, radio icon urging her on from its place atop her highboy.