Blackbird ArchiveWhose Story, Whose Skin
In elementary school I already felt as though I should write my grandmother’s life story. Most likely the feeling came from listening to her as she told anecdotes—some from her childhood, some from having children of her own during World War II. But whenever I’d try to write her life, I’d stall on everything I didn’t know: What did the stairwell that led to her childhood apartment smell like? How many steps up? What kind of steps?
When, forty years later, I took my first creative writing class, I learned that some nonfiction writers barge right ahead and make stuff up. We do our best, of course, to ground our imagination in research. We strive for truth, not only in emotion, but in detail. But—wow—as long as I tell my readers what I’m doing, I can give myself permission to slip into someone else’s skin! Which was where I’d needed to go all this time: under my grandmother’s, grandfather’s, father’s, mother’s skin. Into muscle. Into bone.
Most of my essays grow from family anecdotes, a few sentences my mother, father, or grandmother told on repeat. I write them down because they call me, even though I have no idea if or how they might become an essay. I steep the sentences I heard in my body, water them with weeks and months of research. Which hospital? What year? How many steps across the street to the cemetery? Gravel or stone on the paths? The sentences bloom, like tea, like sun-parched moss in rain. Then they—the hydrated anecdotes, the relived stories, the scenes—incubate in a drawer. Often for years. Until I can figure out if or how they belong to me, what they might mean inside my life. Until something happens, ringing the old story inside my body like a gong: My mother shows me a photograph. Someone says something. Or my stomach hurts.
Simon Shieh’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal , Best New Poets , Poetry , Poetry Daily , Shenandoah , and elsewhere. He was awarded second place in Narrative ’s 30 Below Contest and a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
Caleb Braun’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems , The Atlanta Review , Cherry Tree , The Crab Orchard Review , Image , and elsewhere. Braun earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington, where he received the Harold Taylor Prize. He is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Texas Tech University. Photo by Emma Aylor
Colby Cotton’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2020 , Gulf Coast , Iowa Review , Prairie Schooner , and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Photo by Kris Brunelli
Catharina Coenen’s essays have appeared in The American Scholar , The Normal School , The Pinch , The Threepenny Review , and elsewhere. Her work was listed as “notable” in Best American Essays 2021 and anthologized in Best of the Net (Sundress Publications, 2020) and Flash Nonfiction Foods (Woodhall Press, 2020). Coenen is the recipient of the Appalachian Review ’s 2019 Denny C. Plattner Award in Creative Nonfiction, The Forge ’s 2021 Flash Nonfiction Competition, a Science-as-Story Fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, and a Hedgebrook Residency. She is a professor of biology at Allegheny College. Photo by River Branch
Lena Fultz’s short fiction has appeared in The Loch Raven Review and Archipelago - The Allegory Ridge Fiction Anthology . She earned her MFA from Hollins University, where she was runner-up for the Andrew James Purdy Prize for Short Fiction. She works as a ghostwriter.
Patricia García Luján’s work is forthcoming in Coolest American Stories 2023 (Coolest Stories Press, 2023). She is a former culture writer at Vogue and a current James Michener Fellow at the University of Miami’s MFA program. In 2021, she was a Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award finalist and the Sewanee Review Fiction Contest finalist. Luján is at work on a short story collection. Photo by Xavier Luján