By Mark Neely
“How strange is it that I am a person?” Indira Khera asks in “Electrocardiogram,” the first of eleven brilliant, beautiful, necessary essays you will find printed in these pages. This question haunts Khera as a child, then returns years later when she visits her parents in their new home in Florida, and, in trying to make sense of their lives, opens up new inquiries about her own.

“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.

By Jill Christman
Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote an essay called “Weaning Ella” for a now-defunct magazine I loved called Brain, Child. In early 2006, a few months after our first child—the titular Ella—had turned two, I left on a three-day work trip to Washington, D.C. This was my first time away from Ella—ever, in her life—and my husband Mark and I decided this separation would open the perfect weaning window for our well-attached toddler.

By Mark Neely
Joe Mackall tells a story about a creative writing professor who told him that she and her students had been studying River Teeth but were having a hard time ascribing any kind of general aesthetic to the magazine. They could find “nothing consistent except a concern for quality writing” and “a strand of loss that seems to run through every issue.”

Featuring the writing of Sean Enfield, Robert W. Fieseler, Melody Glenn, Hannibal Hamlin, Jenna Hammerich, Timothy J. Hillegonds, Sarah Minor, Ali Saperstein.

By Jill Christman
As I write this note, it’s early September here in Muncie, hot and sticky, no autumn chill in the morning air. On Ball State’s campus, where River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative has lived for almost five years, we’re still all shorts and flip-flops, dreaming of rivers and unscheduled days—and me? I’m under a deadline emergency of my own making because I forgot, clean forgot, it was my turn to write this note. Meanwhile, the essays…

Deep into his first memoir, What I Think I Did, the late Larry Woiwode writes several sentences that define him as a writer, revealing his material, his process, his calling. “I write more daily pages than ever, all background, prelude to my brother’s visit, and then a phrase sends a scene wobbling up in focus: my grandmother, my mother’s mother, at a sink in her farmhouse.”

Featuring the writing of Nicholas Dighiera, Nicole Hamer, Jessica Kulynych, David McGlynn, Lilly U. Nguyen, Craig Reinbold, S. N. Rodriguez, Ellen Rogers, Ana Maria Spagna, Leslie Stonebraker, and Jessie van Eerden.

By Mark Neely
Writing these words, a few days before Thanksgiving and a week shy of my fiftieth birthday, I find myself wondering what the world will look like by the time they appear in print. It will be late winter by then, or early spring, a whole season having dissolved into the past. Maybe you picked up a copy at the AWP conference in Philadelphia and you’re flipping through these opening pages on the weary plane ride home. Of course it’s entirely possible that AWP will be forced—by local ordinance, or “abundance of caution,” or plain common sense—to cancel. So maybe you’re stuck at home again, chained to your laptop, reading this on the River Teeth website. I used to contemplate what life might look like in five, ten, twenty years. Now I don’t dare think more than a few months ahead …

Featuring the writing of Erin Block, Michael Dinkel, J. Malcolm Garcia, Megan Harlan, Susan Jackson Rodgers, Ren Jones, Emma Kaiser, Brenda Miller, Micah Perks, Molly Rideout, Allie Spikes, Jonathan Starke, and Julie Marie Wade.

In the fall of 2018, Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman wrote to us to say that River Teeth needed a new home. They wanted to know whether we would consider joining them on the masthead and making Ball State University the magazine’s institutional headquarters.

By Joe Mackall
The other day I had occasion to drive through a town named Red Haw, just a few miles from my home in rural Ohio. I live in a small community, but it’s a booming metropolis compared to Red Haw, a town of Trump re-election signs, a smattering of houses, a few barns, and a Methodist church. Red Haw is an easy place to ignore, and it’s an even easier place to think you know.

By Dan Lehman
Two giants of nonfiction literature have died since last we wrote these notes: Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion. And so we offer tribute. Simply stated, one cannot imagine nearly twenty-five years of River Teeth without their enduring influence. You can find it on every page of this issue. In fact, every memoirist or literary journalist writing today owes these women deeply for their pioneering work …

Featuring the writing of Mark Beaver, Wendy Bone, Jill Christman, Bonnie Ilza Cisneros, Tom Montgomery Fate, Carol D. Marsh, Anton DiSclafani, Thomas Larson, Suzanne Roberts, Emily Sinclair, Heather M. Surls, and Alia Volz.

Featuring the writing of Anne Barngrover, Sarah Curtis Graziano, Nicholas Dighiera, Joan Frank, Ted Gup, Mary Haug, Ann Hood, Cecele Kraus, Jessica Lind Peterson, Marilyn Moriarty, Amy Peterson, and Ana Maria Spagna.

By Dan Lehman
Two giants of nonfiction literature have died since last we wrote these notes: Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion. And so we offer tribute. Simply stated, one cannot imagine nearly twenty-five years of River Teeth without their enduring influence. You can find it on every page of this issue. In fact, every memoirist or literary journalist writing today owes these women deeply for their pioneering work …

At the end of the academic year, when students start to lose it over grade pressure and work load, and I begin to wear down and wonder how much longer I can read thousands of pages of student work, I do what every burned-out writing teacher would do—I read.

By Dan Lehman
Two giants of nonfiction literature have died since last we wrote these notes: Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion. And so we offer tribute. Simply stated, one cannot imagine nearly twenty-five years of River Teeth without their enduring influence. You can find it on every page of this issue. In fact, every memoirist or literary journalist writing today owes these women deeply for their pioneering work …

One day last spring my co-editor, Dan Lehman, and I were emailing back and forth—with me in Ohio and Dan in Taiwan—discussing River Teeth and a writer we were excited to be publishing in this issue. And then Dan said something that knocked me flat: “He reminds me of the late Charles Bowden.”

Some of the best writing speaks in that realm, whether we are readers of compelling nonfiction or, perhaps especially, when we struggle as writers to get such stories onto the page. One writer who gets this complexity is Justin Heckert, whose literary reporting, “Susan Cox Is No Longer Here,” first published in Indianapolis Monthly, is featured in this issue.

Featuring the writing of Marley Andino, Chelsea Biondolillo, Christopher Bundy, Steven Church, Penny Guisinger, Michelle Herman, Keith Lesmeister, Joe Mackall, Brenda Miller, Leila Philip, Kim Todd, and Nicole Walker.

Featuring the writing of Jessica Bordoni, Brian Doyle, Katie Fallon, Bettye Kearse, Daniel W. Lehman, Mark Liebenow, Chris Offutt, Beth Peterson, Aaron Poor, Seth Sawyers, Debie Thomas, Helen Wallace, and Michelle Webster-Hein.

Featuring the writing of Marilyn Bousquin, Jackson Connor, Philip Gerard, Richard Goodman, Sonja Livingston, Glenn Moomau, A. Sandosharaj, Amy A. Whitcomb, Kathryn Wilder, and Kirk Wilson.

Featuring the writing of Robert Atwan, Kathleen Blackburn, Andre Dubus III, Richard Gilbert, Lee Martin, Karen McElmurray, C.D. Mitchell, Eli Sanders, Joshua Wolf Shenk, Leslie Stainton, Laurie Rachkus Uttich, Robert Vivian, and Jerald Walker.

Featuring the writing of Steven Harvey, Jon Kerstetter, Thomas Larson, Sydney Lea, Sara Loewen, Rebecca McClanahan, Leila Philip, MaryKatherine Ramsey, Dan Roche, Michael R. Shea, and Sarah M. Wells.

Featuring the writing of Cynthia Anne Brandon, Rosa Del Duca, Philip Gerard, Steven Harvey, Mary Haug, Michelle Herman, Richard Hoffman, Kim Dana Kupperman, Sydney Lea, Bethany Maile, and Lisa Ohlen.

Featuring the writing of Bruce Ballenger, Bob Cowser Jr., Lori Jakiela, Tom Lassiter, Mel Livatino, Maggie Messitt, Angela Morales, Sam Pickering, Jason Tucker, and Gabriel Urza.

Featuring the writing of K. Emily Bond, Greg Bottoms, Kurt Casewell, J. Malcolm Garcia, Will Jennings, Jill Noel Kandel, Phillip Lopate, Robert McGowan, Brad Modlin, Maureen Stanton, Eric Dean Wilson, and Kathryn Winograd.

Featuring the writing of Anne Bardaglio, Michael Downs, Valerie Due, Richard Goodman, John E. Keats, Daniel W. Lehman, Gregory L. Morris, Nick Neely, Anne Panning, Jonny Steinberg, Emily C. Watson, and Eliza Wilmerding.

Featuring the writing of Featuring the writing of Mark Behr, Michelle Bliss, Michael Bogan, Jill Christman, Gretchen Clark, Kathy Fagan, Mohja Kahf, Mark H. Massé, Rebecca McClanahan, Heather Killelea McEntarfer, Kelly McMasters, Chris Rose, and Brent Spencer.

Featuring the writing of Kim Barnes, Ann M. Bauer, Sophie Beck, R. Glendon Brunk, Jill Christman, Steven Church, Tracy Daugherty, David James Duncan, Tom Feeney, Tom French, Diana Hume George, Philip Gerard, Stephen Gutierrez, Jessie Harriman, Walt Harrington, Steven Harvey, Michelle Herman, Barbara Hurd, Diana Joseph, Ted Kooser, Daniel W. Lehman, Andrea Lorenz, Margaret Macinnis, Joe Mackall, Teddy Macker, Nancy Mairs, Lee Martin, Rebecca Mcclanahan, Amy Morgenstern, Chris Offutt, Sam Pickering, Seth Sawyers, Floyd Skloot, Brent Spencer, Maureen Stanton, Deborah Peterson Swift, Gay Talese, and Brad K. Younkin.

By David James Duncan
… Our present-tense human experience is like a living tree growing by a river. The current in the river is the passing of time. Our individual pasts are like the same tree fallen in the river, drowned now, and disintegrating with surprising speed. We resist time’s flow with our memories and language, with our stories.