Here at River Teeth, we love essays. We love reading essays, choosing essays, and writing essays. We love essays that feel urgent, essays we can’t put down, and essays that don’t turn away when the truth gets difficult or slippery.
We also like to think about how the best essays work—and that’s why we started River Teeth Revisited. Guest writers choose essays they love from the River Teeth or Beautiful Things archives, think about particular elements and strategies the writers use to transform real life into essays that speak to the core of the human experience, and provide the gift of a writing prompt at the end.
River Teeth Revisited is a celebration of the essay and, we hope, a jumping-off point for readers and writers, teachers and students, anyone who has something to say and wants a place to begin. Remember that if you have access to the ProjectMuse database, you can find every essay River Teeth has published since Fall 2003 as free, downloadable pdfs. Not only is Project Muse a literary treasure trove for you, but it’s also that trickle of fresh water found in the cave at the center of the desert island for us: every download is a drop in our bucket and in this way we sustain the printing of River Teeth. (Which is to say, download away! If you’re teaching RT essays, share the link instead of uploading a pdf and keep that stream flowing.)
In Spring 2024, I built a version of the Advanced Creative Nonfiction course here at Ball State University (also home to River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, Beautiful Things (RT’s weekly online magazine of micro-essays), and the associated literary editing course built around River Teeth. The course went terrifically well, and I wanted to make the template available to other cnf teachers whose students have access to the rich resource that is Project Muse:
Click here to download the template PDF.
Please feel free to use/adapt whatever works for you and your students here. I’ve cut it down to its bones, leaving just the course description, suggested resources, and calendar. Of course, there’s a lot more where this came from—both in the RT archives on Project Muse, new essays each week up at BT, and fresh lessons on a variety of cnf-related subjects in RTR: if you have questions or have a version you want to share with other students of the essay, we’d love to have you reach out to us at riverteeth@bsu.edu.
The idea for River Teeth Revisited was born in 2019, just before COVID-19, and we launched our first posts at the beginning of the pandemic, in a time when the whole world had lurched on its axis. As I told my creative nonfiction writing students on the last day we were together physically, before we headed home and began that first season of social distancing: “This is what we do. We observe and take notes. We watch closely for the patterns and connections that will help us to find meaning in a world that often doesn’t make sense. We think about what it means to be human. We’ve been training for this. We’ve got this.”
We’re still here. Still reading, still writing, still hoping that sharing stories might save us after all.
Thank you for being here!
Jill Christman (Editor)—& the whole River Teeth team
