Creative Non-Fiction
Why I Grew Up Wishing My Mother Were Dead
The author undertakes an uncomfortable journey of acceptance and tells a tale of a tumultuous relationship she shares with her mother.
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Creative Non-Fiction
Showing 49-72 of 99 pieces
Creative Non-Fiction
In-between Emotions: A Triptych
The author translates, among other things, the relationship she shares with Bombay, the city of her birth; how she has accepted and made peace with the method in its madness.
Creative Non-Fiction
Bird House
The author goes through the pandemic along with a change of residence and lifestyle. A bird lover since childhood, she learns a lot more as she lives along side Woodpeckers and Hummingbirds.
Creative Non-Fiction
An afternoon at the Little Magazine Archive, Kolkata
TBR’s Managing Editor, Maitreyee Chowdhury, takes a trip to the Kolkata Little Magazine Archive in Tamer Lane, in the college Street area. She returned with a treasure trove worth of stories and anecdotes.
Creative Non-Fiction
Cut
Remember the gulf between who you are on the outside and who you are in the privacy of your skull? Yes, yes, you try to assimilate as best you can but you’re never quite…enough. While you know this is the case for most people, somehow, it causes you more problems than you will admit, perhaps because you’ve been raised to believe they’re character deficits and you can’t accept they define you.
Creative Non-Fiction
The Disappearing Cat Chronicles
Their catnaps were high-speed energy recharges. On cool days, they slept in either of two baskets alone or together. Most days, they found sunny or shady corners around the house. We once discovered them entwined to resemble a heart. They had a favorite conjoined twin pose where they slept with their heads against each other.
Creative Non-Fiction
The Scent of Lilacs
My childhood home may have been more than an ocean crossing away from the Adriatic. Nevertheless, in the house I grew up in just west of Lake Michigan, summers proved intensely humid; hence, my association of the season with the dizzyingly sweet fragrance of lilacs.
Creative Non-Fiction
Lives Are Measured
Another memory spreads across the field. My parents load me and my siblings into the brown GM van; we sleep on the 14-hour drive to our grandparents’ mountain town filled with lights and purple shadows and cowboys and scents of anise and Chex mix. The year I was born, my grandparents moved west for Grandpa’s job with the railroad.
Creative Non-Fiction
The Girls, The Ladies, The Rack
My best friend, Lee, and I have shared nearly 50 years of friendship. We have supported each other through childbirth, are godmothers to each other’s..
Creative Non-Fiction
Postcards
Before the 2021 fall election, I agreed to write messages on 100 postcards to a list of strangers in Virginia to encourage them to vote…
Creative Non-Fiction
Breaking Fast at the Baba’s Shrine
This piece by Ahsan Chowdhury resulted from his pilgrimage to Khwaja Baba’s shrine a few years ago.
Creative Non-Fiction
The Burial of the Dead/The Agony of the Living
2 APRIL is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain… What are the roots that..
Creative Non-Fiction
Leaving the Nest
My son and I tried to save a baby bird on our walk together. At a first glance, all we could understand was, that it..
Creative Non-Fiction
Even in the Rain
Failure draws at my life like a sucking well under troubled water; therefore, every journey I’ve ever taken is likened to a desperate breath I..
Creative Non-Fiction
The Yellow Canoe
Last Thursday, I came as close as I ever have to buying a canoe. It had been a long and less than productive day, and..
Creative Non-Fiction
It’s Always Cold in the Afternoon Sun
Colleen Maillet’s personal essay from the pandemic aims to alleviate the shame associated with substance abuse.
Creative Non-Fiction
Elegy
You are scrolling through social media when you see a post by one of those activism pages, the type you like to follow but never..
Creative Non-Fiction
Foreignness
This personal essay by Dina Hendawi explores the dilemma of feeling foreign everywhere, including the place we call ‘home.’
Creative Non-Fiction
The Map of my Mother Tongue
Damilola Oyedele’s essay explores language as both a barrier and a tether. Her accent and diction – influenced by the various Nigerian languages and dialects she speaks – shapes her interactions as an immigrant in the United States and South Africa, and tethers her to Nigeria, her home country.
Creative Non-Fiction
Walking: A Health Story
Although my mother could not control what I ate—at least, what I chose to gorge on while she worked—she could make me get up and..
Creative Non-Fiction
Longing for the Rain: Remembering the Cherrapunjee Summers
Sohra or Cherrapunjee—which we still fondly call the wettest place on earth—is my birthplace, where my ancestral home is, and though only tenants live in..
Creative Non-Fiction
Pennies
The first time I am told I am not actually Jewish, I am eight-years old and I am sitting on the bus. My hair is..
Creative Non-Fiction
My Mother: Technology and Retirement in the Pandemic
My parents now have the same sleep schedule they yelled at me about in high school. My mother goes to bed at midnight and sleeps..
Creative Non-Fiction
Dance Macabre, 2020
In the first week of quarantine my dad started wearing his mask and a tree branch nearly fell on our heads, nearly killing us. It..