Nonfiction
By Sonya Huber, with audio : 3rd Annual Nonfiction Contest Winner, Judged by Christopher Cokinos
Fall in love with a blue-faced interstate sign for highway 35-W in Minneapolis; ache and hold back tears because Minnesota winters are so cold and the sign has no choice but to shudder and brave the wind like a ragged prayer flag.
By Langdon Cook : 3rd Annual Nonfiction Contest Finalist
My boy talks to the hawks. Like me at his age, and even now, he is outraged at their indifference. A familiar red-tail in a snag starts at our approach, lifts regretfully from its bony limb.
By Josh Shear : 3rd Annual Nonfiction Contest Finalist
That moment when you’re screaming downhill into the valley, two hours out of Las Vegas into the setting sun with some too-clean ska music breaking through the speakers and into the air through the just-cracked windows.
By Jacqueline Kolosov, with audio : 3rd Annual Nonfiction Contest Finalist
West Texas: by midday, the fierce heat of early June has climbed to 103. About four o’clock the wind picks up, and the sky turns that smudgy blur of brownish-pink that suggests a coming rain, though the woman has lived here long enough to know that such a sign can prove to be a tease.
By Marco Wilkinson : 3rd Annual Nonfiction Contest Finalist
We are all boats alternately swimming, treading, and floating on any current that can bear us. The New York Times tells me that only one in ten cells in the human body is human. In a sweat lodge, the leader tells me we are floating on a turtle’s back in a great water.
By Jolie Kaytes, with image gallery
In the blast zone of Mount St. Helens, I have been drawing. With my eyes and with my pen I follow jagged ridge lines, the Us of valleys. I move through fallen forests, into snaking drainages, across billowy landslides, tracing contours, ticking textures.
By Charles Goodrich
How can we encourage the making of long-range commitments when things seem to be changing so fast? Against the tide of haste and short-sightedness, I want to share a couple of stories from the field about how scientists foster long-term research and how a program that hosts creative writing residencies has tried to adopt some similar strategies.