In helping to put together this retrospective issue, I’ve gone through the entire archives in order to select what I think are the six best examples of creative nonfiction we’ve published. Three were published by me and three by the previous editor, Katie Sallitt Fallon.

If you’re a writer of creative nonfiction/narrative nonfiction/the personal essay, you’ll no doubt be reading these best-of selections with a certain amount of envy, and wondering how you too can see your work published here.

Since we’re going on a month’s hiatus while running this retrospective issue, this is your chance to submit. For an entire month, I’m going to be reading, reading, reading submissions, to determine which creative fiction writers we’ll be publishing in the fall.

Send me your best work at [email protected].

Now on to the best creative nonfiction to appear in Connotation Press thus far:

Paul Heilker’s “Inertia” is the kind of piece that kicks the concept of creative nonfiction up so many notches that you immediately consider your previous notions of the genre to be as pedestrian as a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. Heilker manipulates personal facts with a dexterity that gives his narrative a poetic structure. His mastery makes you wonder if form is indeed becoming meaning. However he achieves his ends, Heilker stirs the soup of meaning with such vigor that the product becomes much more nutritious and tasty than any of its single parts. Take the first spoonful and you won’t be able to stop.

I have long been a fanatic about the work of Lisa Alvarez. She’s the kind of writer who makes you want to climb to the top of the Empire State Building and shout to the editors and literary agents below, “Hey, you need to be publishing this fantastic writer.” While I wasn’t the editor who originally published her “Pedagogy of the Deceased,” I can at least fulfill my dream of publishing her by reprinting it now. On the surface, this is the story of how a teacher deals with the deaths—one after another after another after another—of her students.  I lack the artistic ability to reproduce for you how Alvarez explores the meaning and finality of your mortality and mine. You’ll just have to read her stunning essay and see for yourself.

Michael Leone—author of “The Aggrieved Novelist: Is He Going to Kill Me?”—reports from Moorestown, New Jersey, that he is still alive, despite the fact that he antagonized a Random House author by publishing an atom-bomb review of his work. That wasn’t enough. He then posted the review all over the Internet. That wasn’t enough either. He then sent us his hilarious version of these events, which of course we had to share with the world at once. It’s been four months since his essay came out and people are still talking about it. Last week, I was having lunch with my friend [nickname redacted], so named for his lifelong Christlike demeanor, and he shocked me by telling me how very much he enjoyed reading this literary bile fest. You stand warned:  You too will enjoy being corrupted.

I’m not even going to attempt to explain how JP Reese’s “For Captain Paul” accomplishes its literary magic. You’re just going to have to experience this literary earthquake and then try to determine why this 427-word essay about AIDS just happens to be one of the most powerful things you’ve ever read in your life.

Just as startling and honest is Ethel Morgan Smith’s “Lilacs,” which interweaves the strands of varied cultures even as it dramatizes their inner and outer conflicts and deconstructs their interconnectedness. Like the greatest of literature, Smith’s story goes through all of its complexities and dramas in order to arrive at the most worthy of destinations:  to show us the humanity that we all share, and which is always more important than the facile surfaces to which too many people become attached.

Any litmag editor will tell you that one of the greatest pleasures of this labor of love is the discovery of young writers, many of whom are so talented you’re tempted to demand to see their birth certificates. Such a writer is Marlaina Gaspardi, who attests to being a mere twenty-four years old, but who writes with the structural dexterity, the depth, the compassion, and the emotional vitality of an artist twice her age. Her story, “Anthony,” will stay with you so long after you’ve read it that you might just start to think of the title character as a member of your own family.