The creative nonfiction selections for November all deal with the strains and rewards of human connectedness.  In “Bees,” Samantha Lamph explores the miscues that are so often apparent in first love, while in “Marigold Wind,” Kate McCahill dramatizes the intensity and depth of new love.  Meanwhile, Marcia Trahan’s “Lost, 1974” may just be the best thing you’ve ever read about mothers, fathers, and the families they create.

Finally, Applewhite Minyard’s pedagogical personal essay, “The End of the World as We Know It in Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower,’” presents us with a mission far more complex, mysterious, and challenging than dealing with all of the connections and broken connections of family and love:  trying to teach a class of American college students how to read and interpret a text.  As we celebrate Thanksgiving, may we all be grateful for the simpler travails of life.