Following on yesterday’s short stories, I’ve got a few memoir-style pieces of creative nonfiction I’ve read lately that I want to share.

Hideous Miracles by Barlow Adams in The Forge. Barlow’s fiction was included in yesterday’s post, and it led me to this piece. It’s about suicide, homicide and divine intervention, for better and for worse. It’s riveting, gutting stuff.

The Cheese Plate by (blog fave) Jake Maynard in Write or Die – this one goes to a lot of places I didn’t expect. It’s ostensibly about the difficulty of ending stories, but it’s also about self-doubt and the human desire for comfort and tidiness.

Andrew Bertaina writes about shame, also in The Forge. He weaves in religion, Knausgaard, brain science, and his oldest memories. It’s uncanny in its accuracy, especially to a recovering Catholic like me:

I still hide, I suppose. Who wouldn’t? When you learn from an early age, from first schooling, that whatever you have inside you, isn’t quite right. That you’ll never fit in entirely. You’ll never cut straight with scissors or learn to play tether ball with the other kids. Even, years later, when none of this is true, it rings true, like the church bell tolling out through bright, clean air. Hide yourself from God, from your neighbor, from everyone. And perhaps it’s true, which I’m just now discovering, even as I write this essay, that shame is the entity around which my internal self has been constructed, inexorably linked, as two trees grown together.

I would like to hide, even now, in this essay. To be coy, to play, less than fast and loose with the facts than to obscure them, to obfuscate.

---