water will come again
if you can wait for it.
—Lucille Clifton, “water sign woman”
Mid-March: You wish for the late-winter rain that Seattle is famed for. You wish for all the water the Pacific Northwest can ...
DESIRE IS AN IAMB by Lauren Fath
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Both my grandparents died very young.
My mother thinks it’s because my grandfather would chain smoke in the greenhouse, creating a literal greenhouse effect where my grandmother constantly took in the secondhand ...
Practicing Dying by Rebecca Suzuki
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Two days before I flew to my childhood home in rural Assam, India, an unaccountable itch made me put off some last-minute tasks and rush over to Will Rogers State Historic Park, in the Pacific Palisades. The vast lawn ...
Love Letter to Will Rogers, from Assam by Grace Singh Smith
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Grandma Roberts has a secret. She tells me this as I’m lugging a jug of brown well water across the old cemetery while trying not to knock my shins against the stones. It is the summer of 2015, five years before she ...
Home to Ohio by Chelsie Bryant
LAR Online, Nonfiction
Heuston Street and Oppenheimer’s Cottage
The last lines of The Living and the Dead about snow falling on the living and the dead are painted, in pastel letters, on an electrical box in downtown Dublin; I saw them last ...
2024 Creative Nonfiction Award Winner: Rebecca Pyle
Award Winners, Nonfiction
This small town, the place where I grew up and occasionally return to, is beautiful, but dull. When I am away, I long for the town’s routines, which, as a teenager, bored me: the boats lowing in the morning; the fog ...
California Romantics by Becky Peterson
LAR Online, Nonfiction
2020
The first fall of my empty nest, a white-hot aloneness. Covid-19 raging, and no vaccine against it. No café, no colleagues, no classes except on my laptop.
And suddenly it’s raining ash. Stay inside, seal ...
Fire Song by Samina Najmi
LAR Online, Nonfiction
I’m learning how to be a good neighbor. On my walks to work I turn and turn again, charting through the network of neighborhood dogs. Set on edge by the unfamiliar click of my heels, offended by my proximity, they ...
GOOD NEIGHBOR by Gabriela Valencia
LAR Online, Nonfiction
A MAGIC TRICK
Marvelous Melvin said I was the bravest girl he’d ever met.
The magician came to my elementary school every year in the spring. On a Friday afternoon, our teachers packed us into the gym, where we ...
Two Works by Joanna Grisham
LAR Online, Nonfiction
