My friend John and I shared a seat on Bus 77. I needed both arms and sometimes a leg to wrestle my trombone onto the bus, but John could manage it with just one hand. John signed my fifth-grade yearbook like this: “I hope I know you when you are an artetic and I...
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~ a Journal of Literature and Art since 1971~
Nonfiction
John’s House
An Interview with Katherine Boo: National Book Award Winner
This year’s recipient of the National Book Award in Nonfiction is Katherine Boo, for Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. In September, Phoebe’s C0-Nonfiction Editor Erica Dolson got the opportunity to interview Boo. Their conversation covered everything from Boo’s reporting strategies to the ethical questions that arose while reporting on a slum in Mumbai....
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Crafting Truth: the “New” Journalism of Dick Reavis
Blog Traci Cox
“I read pamphlets and Marx in college,” he noted. “Not Esquire.” In both his writing and lifestyle, Reavis is a bit of a daredevil, willing to risk his life for an assignment. But there have been many sacrifices he’s made along the way, he warned. “You can’t have a family and...
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Sea Change
Nonfiction Priscilla Kinter
Soil and leaves filled the empty human spaces, and always the buzzing of insects. Spider silk and dust and feathers and carapaces accumulated to build soil, to make new ground for the first seedlings of oak or mulberry that would push through the glass of those stone-walled greenhouses, reaching through broken windows...
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Cornish Pasty
Nonfiction Alice Lowe
When Don says, “Wow, she’s good,” I muster up a grudging agreement, but I can taste the bitter wilted greens of envy. I’m already lamenting my lack of musical ability; now I feel dowdy, too—my chocolate brown sweater, the lush cashmere that I love for its tactile elegance, seems drab, its...
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How the Lake Saved Me
Nonfiction Rachel Toliver
I used to be a young girl, only 18, who had left the East—where I had neither much sinned nor been much sinned to—but had been often tired, and often had been the girl who did not raise palms when the others raised palms, who did not flay under a...
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From the Other End of the Speculum
Nonfiction Sharon DeBartolo Carmack
Dr. Sweeney had summoned Coroner Edmund Rawson to Mrs. Bird’s boarding house because Eliza was in a “dying state.” Dr. Sweeney told him that the girl was a native of New Haven, Connecticut, who had “respectable connections.”
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This Town
Nonfiction Bret Schulte
When we arrived at Boys Town, we all saw what we wanted to see. I noted that the church was old and stone and shaped like a crucifix the way I liked it. Priests bustled about before the beginning of Mass, behaving as if all this really meant something. One...
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The Velvet Queen in Sternum
Nonfiction Katie Jean Shinkle
Tandem visions of our chests in waves of bone. I find myself aware of the bones in my ribs, the bones in my sternum. When I lose and gain weight, I pose in the mirror to see if I can still collect rain in the crevices of my clavicle. I look...
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epitaphs #5, #19, #40
Nonfiction Matthew Vollmer
here lies a man who lost his virginity during his senior class trip to Grand Bahama Island but thanks to the storms that had gone before them their sailboats never made it, so the deceased and his girlfriend wandered the sandy streets and empty beaches of a much smaller island...
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