While I sat reading the poem “Pause” by the great Irish poet Eamon Grennan, I read several lines that speak to me about the lot of the literary nonfiction writer. In a poem ostensibly about the speaker’s brief vision of his life the moment his young daughter returns from an ordinary day at school, the poet writes,

In the pause before all this happens, you know something about the shape of the life you’ve chosen to live between the silence of almost infinite possibility and that explosion of things as they are—those vast unanswerable intrusions of love and disaster. [. . .]

Allow me to stretch a bit here, with apologies to Mr. Grennan. For serious creative nonfiction writers, there will always be a pause, the pause that follows the life a writer has shaped out of the life she has chosen to live, the pause before the work is read by the writer’s family and friends.

Let me crawl out from behind abstractions and come clean. After finishing my memoir, “The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage” (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming), I asked my first and best reader, my wife, Dandi, to read the manuscript. As an accomplished and successful writer, Dandi’s advice and criticism would be invaluable, always have been, always will be. What I didn’t count on was that she would be reading the manuscript not only as a writer but as a woman and a wife. Let me just say that her reading of the memoir was not an unambiguously pleasant experience for either of us. She learned ugly and heart-breaking things about me that she did not know; some of these “things” had happened during our marriage. (Just what these things are, you’ll have to read the book, as hucksters always say.) Let’s just say it would have been a good time to be a fiction writer. By writing the book, I had shaped the life I had chosen to live, and those who love and care about me would have to suffer the “explosion of things as they are.”

Writers in this issue of River Teeth have shaped their own lives, and perhaps they’re living in the pause, too. Joe Bonomo writes of his flirtation with pornography. Mark Sanders about the hard, blue-collar drinking and driving of his youth. Patricia McNair writes of a one-night stand in Cuba. Joel Peckham reveals that his marriage to a well-known poet was not as perfect as other people believed it to be. Kurt Inderbitzin writes of his dubious feelings about caring for his young son.

These pieces are not “confessional” in the sense that these writers needed to unburden themselves of their sins. Rather, revealing personal details was a means to an end. And the end makes it all worth it. Of course, these are just the surface subjects of these fine pieces; much more meaning and nuance exist in the depths. Perhaps plumbing the depths of our experience is why so many creative nonfiction writers have to reveal those parts of their lives they would rather keep secret. Maybe our only hope of ever reaching the depths is by passing through the surface.

I, for one, will be forever grateful that so many nonfiction writers do just that.

And on that note, we’d also like to congratulate Lynne Hugo for winning the third annual River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize with her book Where the Trail Grows Faint: A Year in the Life of a Therapy Dog Team.

Thanks for reading.