River Teeth—a conceit that writer David James Duncan draws from in his own writing life and traces in the opening essay of our first issue—brings together several tributaries of this factual writing. One branch flows to us from the sorts of journalists who have been pushing at the edges of newsrooms for years now: demanding more space in newspapers and magazines; finding room to breathe with a story, to worry over it, and to watch it develop; buying the reporting time to seek out the details that will make it work…

Another stream springs from personal experience and the stories of family and community that bubbles into essays and memoir.  These stories are written by authors who understand their responsibility to facts as well as their commitment to literary style, all the while understanding, with Tobias Wolff, that “memory has its own story to tell.”

To these two sources we add a third: the sort of thoughtful, critical essay that examines the emerging genre of literary nonfiction and that explores the impact of narrative on the lives of its writers, subjects, and readers.  These essays examine how material is gained and how it is presented.  They draw out the implications of writerly decisions that at first seem merely stylistic, but which gain social power of problems when applied to the real lives of writers and their subjects.  They explore the impact that such stories have on the people whose lives they report.

– Editor’s Notes, River Teeth, Volume 1, Number 1