By using techniques of fiction—such as conflict, deep characterization, and a dramatic arc—in order to tell a true story,
creative nonfiction seeks to expand our understanding of realities that are not always readily understood. Our four selections for this month do an engrossing job of exploring the ambiguities of being human.
Two of the pieces have a lot to tell us about the parent-child relationship. Jeni Mae McKenzie’s “Black Walnut Swing” is a family-of-origin story that dramatizes uncertainties that extend even to the identity of the narrator’s father. JP Reese’s “The Skull Beneath the Skin” surveys equally poignant territory, dramatizing the uncertainties that arise when a parent becomes terminally ill—is the person in the dying body the same person one has always known?
In Patty Somlo’s “Starlight,” the ambiguities of the narrator’s life lead her to try to view them through the imagined perspectives of the writer May Sarton. Just as intriguing is Linda Purdy’s “Ms. Savonarola’s Crime,” which explores so many ambiguities in a museum that we can only read them as a projection of the central figure’s own unresolved conflicts.
But one thing is not ambiguous about these four tales: Each of them tells a great story that you won’t be forgetting anytime soon.