Project MUSE®: River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.daily12026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 5 (2003) through current issueLatest Articles: River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction NarrativeTWOProject MUSE®River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative1548-33391544-1849Latest articles in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor’s Notes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975908
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“The one thing I will not tamper with in this class,” I tell my students when I teach the art of the personal essay, “is your voice.” We can work on many elements of craft: thematic focus, strategies for beginnings and endings, pacing, dialogue, figurative devices, economy of expression, and many more, but voice remains untouchable. “You’ve spent a lifetime creating it,” I say, “and it is your gift. In many ways, it is you.” Robert Bly tells a wonderful story about the poet William Stafford. After listening to craft lectures at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference encouraging young writers to “find a voice” by “studying what the poetry establishment wanted at the moment,” Stafford objected fiercely. “I want to say
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallEditor’s Notes2025-11-26text/htmlen-USEditor’s Notes2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®130312026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26The Unreliable History of Sparkles the Bear/Dog
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975909
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Sparkles was the name of the teddy bear Children’s Hospital gave my son as compensation for experimental surgery on his esophagus after the Other Doctor misdiagnosed him for nearly three years, pumping him full of unsafe doses of untested medicine just to see what might happen.I think they gave those bears to every kid who had surgery, that they kept a warehouse full of them wrapped in vacuum-packed plastic bags in some underground cave where they used to mine coal here in Pittsburgh. That they hire expert milk-bottle-knocker-overs who win them at local carnivals. Or that they highjack truckloads of them at the border. Any cruel border.Unreliable, yes—my wife just told me Sparkles was a dog, not a bear.The surgeon
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallThe Unreliable History of Sparkles the Bear/Dog2025-11-26text/htmlen-USThe Unreliable History of Sparkles the Bear/Dog2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®142902026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Origin Story
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975910
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My grandfather sensed the bullet coming before it hit. At least, that’s the story he tells to us kids. A flash of silver in the corner of his eye. A rush of air. Impossible speed. A trail of burning light.He moved just in time to avoid death, a Matrix-like maneuver that he demonstrates for us on the living room rug. Watch closely, he says, and we follow his gaze to the wood-paneled horizon, then brace as his finger slices a path toward his beating heart. At the last possible second, he twists, twirling his torso to the left, finger-bullet grazing the surface of his broad chest. He lifts his shirt to show us the spot: a puckered scar where his nipple should have been. Took it clean o!, he says with a laugh.In the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallOrigin Story2025-11-26text/htmlen-USOrigin Story2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®55122026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Time’s Fool
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975911
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October muscles into its lean robe of light and time is much on my mind, as it always is this month of my birth, of first frost and leaf fall, reliable as the inverse season’s morels, lilac, robin renewal. The deep green artery of the Rogue River slides past just south of me, sculpting the black volcanic rock that cups it, pulling all things, myself included, on the canyon slopes down toward its roving mass. Time, so often conjured as a river, a mineshaft, an oncoming train, feels to me like a golden bubble I’ve drifted in, an orb of light and rain in which days and routines roll and shine into one another. Fall arrives and I recognize the bubble’s flimsy wobble, skin thin as a scale, near bursting. Or perhaps I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallTime’s Fool2025-11-26text/htmlen-USTime’s Fool2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®194742026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26The Other Side of the River
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975912
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The green staircase is wide and tiled, and despite the fact that it’s not heavily trafficked, I feel jostled by the few strangers near me. I am trying to reach the top, which, as far as I can tell, empties into the sky itself. My grandmother is there, on the steps. I remember wanting to ask if she has these kinds of visions with anesthesia, too.A green ascent into nothingness, a feeling of my grandmother nearby. These are my last sensations before I go under.I wake in the University of Minnesota hospital. It is early July. The hospital sits on the east bank of Mississippi River. The headwaters are up north, near Bemidji, but by the time the water reaches Minneapolis, it has grown to a size useful for trade, into a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallThe Other Side of the River2025-11-26text/htmlen-USThe Other Side of the River2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®263602026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Zero Numbers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975913
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I had just turned eighteen, bade farewell to my friends, and a week later I was at Bard College. I didn’t belong there. I hadn’t earned it. I had spent my high school years mostly high and frequently truant. I happened to have an aptitude for essay writing, so the folks in Admissions ignored my lousy grades and made a poor gamble. Freshman orientation consisted of a course called “Language & Thinking” that looked a lot like creative writing. Each section elected one representative for a reading that was to take place in a great big dining hall where most of the school’s 250 first-year students would be in attendance. It was no compliment to me that I was chosen. I don’t recall how many out of that group of students
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallZero Numbers2025-11-26text/htmlen-USZero Numbers2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®208102026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26The Drunk Girl Who Lives: Inside My Body
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975914
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Or maybe she lives inside my brain. Maybe she moves between my liver and my frontal cortex. Regardless, here she is living. Leeching off me. An uninvited guest. She settled in when I was a teenager. She brought all her things: bags and bags of useless clothing. Her pet hamster. A film camera. A typewriter. She’s a bit old fashioned. Always waving her hand in a dismissal of technology. Burping up an excuse for not being on social media. She smokes cigarettes inside my skin, not knowing or caring about the carcinogens.At sixteen, drunk girl decided she liked rum and tequila. She kept bottles under my bed, pulled them out and chased down pain pills to make me sleep. I’ve always had trouble sleeping. The dark long
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallThe Drunk Girl Who Lives: Inside My Body2025-11-26text/htmlen-USThe Drunk Girl Who Lives: Inside My Body2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®78312026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Who Are We Missing?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975915
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There is no good way to find out that someone you care about is dead. But there is a painfully stupid one, and it begins here, in my neighborhood’s madcap email chain.“IS ANYBODY MISSING A COUPLE OF GOATS?” the email asks. “Animal Control was contacted, but they don’t do goats.” I imagine the Animal Control manual with the page on goats ominously ripped out, a bloody scrawl in the margin: NEVER. DO. GOATS.It’s morning. My kids have left for school, and the echoes of them are finally settling, like dust. The coffee is brewed. The dog rests by the door. The sun lolls on the windowsill. Though I’m ready in my remote-work mullet (business on top, pathetic on the bottom), I’m not needed just yet. Every day, I clutch
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallWho Are We Missing?2025-11-26text/htmlen-USWho Are We Missing?2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®359722026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Admit the Gravity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975916
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When my grandmother saw the bird on her windowsill, she knew she was going to die. And it wasn’t even a good bird, not a hummingbird with its swift greens or a robin wearing its red breast with such serious comportment, not even the woodpecker who’d pecked at her pine trees and back porch and chimney until she shot it with a BB gun. It was a nothing bird, just a small smear of brown on two twigged legs, its beak in the air, chirping, chirping.Please, for the love of God, never write about dead pets or dead grandmothers: a not-entirely unspoken rule of every writing workshop I attended. But I have never been particularly good at following rules where writing is concerned, and death has also never been good at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallAdmit the Gravity2025-11-26text/htmlen-USAdmit the Gravity2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®252022026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Ten Things to Save from a Fire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975917
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My mother used to say, “A move is as good as a fire.” She meant a move destroyed everything you owned. She was talking about Army movers, who, on a move from Texas to Washington, D.C., broke our couch in two. I remember the Army trunks with our name stenciled on them we used to pack our clothes, books, toys, and dishes for each move. And move we did, from France where I was born, to New York, Texas, then hopping back and forth on either side of Washington, D.C., then to Florida.My mother knew about loss, from water if not fire. On July 4, 1939, a flash flood swept through Morehead, Kentucky, where she grew up, killing twenty-five people, including her grandmother. It washed away the house where she grew up and left
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallTen Things to Save from a Fire2025-11-26text/htmlen-USTen Things to Save from a Fire2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®170792026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Bullfight
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975918
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Elaine de Kooning, Bull!ght, 1959When my dad was six in Denver, his mother put him on the wrong school bus. He swung on the playground; his legs carved out a swatch of sky. He was actually alone in the world. Years later, when his mother’s body arrives at his pathology lab, he refers to her as the woman who raised me. This is one explanation for how he withheld love my entire life, which I forgive. Now, he cries over his beer.At dinner, an artist mourns a porn addict. Men are fucked, I say, and she corrects me. What you probably mean is that the systemic oppression created and perpetuated by the patriarchy has fucked us all, including men.I am entitled to some sense of autonomy, aren’t I, kicking the blue carpet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallBullfight2025-11-26text/htmlen-USBullfight2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®37562026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Best Pals
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975919
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When I was ten, I went to sleepaway camp. My first friend there, and soon my best friend, was Nancy. She explained the ins and outs: The counselor who sat outside the bunk at night was the “OD” for “on duty”; every Friday night was talent night and every Saturday night there was a dance. You had to write home once a week; this was called a “meal ticket.” You could just write the words “This is a meal ticket” on a piece of paper if you wanted.Nancy knew how to steal soda from the canteen, where to hide if you didn’t want to be found, and when best to go naked. We let our bathrobes fly open on the way to the showers, wriggled out of our bathing suits at the end of general swim, and performed nude modern dance while
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallBest Pals2025-11-26text/htmlen-USBest Pals2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®100612026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Harvey
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975920
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The summer before my tenth-grade year, I was admitted to a small public charter school in Honolulu affiliated with the local university. It was the early 1970s, so the details of how I got in there are a little fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure I engineered it myself.My mother, a Japanese national who barely spoke English, wouldn’t have been able to help me, and my dad, a former Army sergeant from Mississippi, was too busy working the graveyard shift at an alarm company to spend much time worrying about where I went to school. He revered learning but was also deeply suspicious of anything having to do with the federal government, especially public education, which he saw as no more and no less than an instrument of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallHarvey2025-11-26text/htmlen-USHarvey2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®186712026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Abyssinia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975921
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Billie Holiday’s recording of “I’ll Be Seeing You” was the !nal transmission sent by"NASA"to the Opportunity rover on"Mars when its mission ended Feb.13, 2019.My father’s friend Harry, a man whose memory has perished before him, says, “Are you from the neighborhood? Are you here to take me home?”My father adjusts his pillow. “You’re petered out,” he says. “Get yourself some shut-eye,” relying upon his old phrases for comfort.As if he has dropped suddenly into sleep, Harry slumps in his wheelchair, but my father, instead of reaching for Harry, lays a hand on my arm. He keeps it there, his lips silently forming the measured count of a boxing referee. At seventeen, Harry stirs and sits upright.“Can I trust you?” Harry
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallAbyssinia2025-11-26text/htmlen-USAbyssinia2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®115252026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Because My Editor Reads a Draft of My Book and Suggests I Tell the Reader How My Sister Died
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975922
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I write, You’re right. The absence calls attention to itselfI write, Reader, I’m not trying to be coy. Which is true—it took me decades to expunge a certain coy femininityI write, Listen, it’s not what you’re thinkingListen, it’s exactly what you’re thinkingI write, Mind your own beeswax. Then I Google “beeswax,” learn that in the 1800s women used beeswax to cover up their smallpox scars, a kind of proto-foundation, thus if some busybody got all up in your face, you told them, “Mind your own beeswax”B.A., you’re stallingI write, In all this time I’ve never brought myself to post a photo of us, heads tilting cheek to cheek, arms hugging each other’s warm, bare shoulders, sharing our likeness for all to see, not even
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallBecause My Editor Reads a Draft of My Book and Suggests I Tell the Reader How My Sister Died2025-11-26text/htmlen-USBecause My Editor Reads a Draft of My Book and Suggests I Tell the Reader How My Sister Died2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®73992026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26My Father’s Letters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975923
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From as early as I can remember, my mother only spoke to me of the end of my father’s life. She told me the story of his accident in simple terms: more an outline than a story, more judgment than fact. By the time I was in elementary school, I knew it by heart, and it went like this: My father went bird hunting with his friends on a Sunday morning, driving away from Ankara to Salt Lake in Konya. He should never have gone hunting because he should have been at home with his family: his young wife and his seven-month-old baby daughter. My mother told him so, pleading with him to stay—yet still, he went. A truck crashed into their car on the way back from their hunting trip. My father died at the scene of the accident
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallMy Father’s Letters2025-11-26text/htmlen-USMy Father’s Letters2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®369922026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Contributors’ Notes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975924
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Emma BoldenEmma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull Press, 2022) and the poetry collections House Is An Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016) and Male!cae (GenPop Books, 2013). The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, the New England Review, Seneca Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Shenandoah. She currently serves as an editor of Screen Door Review.Rachel ClineRachel Cline’s fourth novel, Near Mystic, will be published by Heliotrope Books in 2026. Her nonfiction work has appeared
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/239/image/coversmallContributors’ Notes2025-11-26text/htmlen-USContributors’ Notes2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®118962026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26