About the Contributors

Jennifer Case is the author of We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024) and Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared widely in journals such as the Rumpus, Orion, Ecotone, Literary Mama, and North American Review, among others. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. You can find her at www.jenniferlcase.com.Kurt Caswell is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently, Iceland Summer: Travels Along the Ring Road, with 35 full-color illustrations by artist Julia Oldham. Winner of a Foreword Indie Silver Medal for science writing, Laika's Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog, tells the story of the first animal to orbit the Earth, the Soviet space dog Laika, who flew on Sputnik II in 1957. He is co-editor with James Perrin Warren of Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez. Caswell's essays, stories and reviews have appeared in American Literary Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ninth Letter, Orion, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, Terrain.org, and other publications. He is professor in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, where he teaches writing, literature, and intensive field courses on rivers and trails in the US and abroad.Sabrina Dalla Valle is an experimental writer with a BA in Anthropology from Reed College and an MFA in Writing and Consciousness from New College of California. She is author of 7 Days and Nights in the Desert (Tracing the Origin), selected by Mei Mei Berssenbrugge for Best First Book Award (Kelsey Street Press, 2013), and two chapbooks: 7 Days and Nights in the Desert (Mindmade Books, 2012) and Bee as Timbral Space: A post-geometric eclogue (Logosophia Books, 2016). She is editor of Centenarian Vision (Ringling College Letterpress, 2018) and Diaphany, a peer-reviewed journal and nocturn (Rubedo Press, 2015). Her writing has been anthologized and archived in numerous places: PennSound, The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania, 2014; The Poetry Center Archives, San Francisco State University, 2014; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2016; J. Paul Getty Research Institute Library, 2016; Tampa Bay History Center, 2018; and St. Petersburg Museum of History, 2023. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.Jessica Franken has creative nonfiction and lyric prose published with Seneca Review, River Teeth, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere; included on the Best American Essays Notable list; and anthologized in The Essay Form(s) edited by Jill Talbot. She lives in Ithaca, NY, and leads generative writing communities with writers around the world.Anne Gudger is a memoir/essay writer who writes hard and loves harder. Her debut memoir, The Fifth Chamber, was published with Jaded Ibis Press in September 2023. She's been published in the Rumpus, Real Simple Magazine, Atticus Review, PANK, Citron Review, Sweet Lit, Cutthroat, CutBank, Columbia Journal, the Normal School, KHORA, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She has been a Best of the Net nominee twice and has won a handful of contests. At the start of the pandemic, with her beloved daughter, she co-founded Coffee and Grief, a community that includes a monthly reading series focused on grief in its many forms. Everybody grieves and when we share grief, we feel less alone. They launched a podcast called Coffee, Grief, and Gratitude. Anne's big purpose is to normalize grief, to give grief a microphone. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her beloved husband. More at annegudger.com.Marah Robyn Hoffman (she/her) is a poet–turned–creative–nonfiction writer from Pennsylvania. Since graduating with her BA in English and Creative Writing in 2022, she has lived (at least briefly) in Tennessee, Michigan, Vermont, and North Carolina. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. There, Hoffman teaches undergraduate students, works as the creative nonfiction editor of Ecotone, and hosts Write Wilmington. In the fall of 2022, she was the long-term writer-in-residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA).Liv Kane is a writer and filmmaker currently pursuing their MFA in Nonfiction Writing at the University of Iowa, where they are an Iowa Arts Fellow. Their work has appeared in River Teeth Journal, the Rumpus, and Reckoning Magazine, and has been a finalist for Bellingham Review's 2024 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and Fourth Genre's Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize. Their first essay collection, “Gulfwater,” was published with Sunset Press in 2021.Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and has always been an avid life-long birdwatcher or “birder.” His father, a General Telephone Company switchman, introduced him to the pursuit, not to the actual watching of bird birds but of human bird-like contraptions—airplanes, gliders, blimps, helicopters. Fort Wayne, located on a vast glacial plain in northeastern Indiana, was far from the continent's seasonal avian flyways. Its forests had been clear-cut, and its swamps all drained. Actually, much of Indiana was a bird desert. The indigenous species, extinct or flown, poisoned and predated. The skies were empty save for the corduroy clouds of contrails arching overhead, mirroring the furrows of the crop rows below imprinted on the denuded landscape. Martone's father would take his son to the local airfields and airports to catch takeoffs and landings of civil and military aircraft. To the north of the city was Smith Field, named for an early aviation pioneer, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, who imagined skywriting and developed the apparatus to actually address the sky with artificially produced clouds of smoke. On the way to the Smith Field, Martone and his father would stop at a Dairy Queen drive-in for an icy Misty slush (in summers) and then nurse the drinks with flavors that were more like colors than fruit. Martone's father liked the red flavored Misty, and Martone preferred the blue flavor, the color of the sky like the blue of the sky that served as a foil behind the ascending or landing Piper Cubs with their lightning flash factory yellow finishes and Beechcraft Bonanzas with their distinctive “V” shaped swallow tails. Martone and Martone's father sat on the hood of Martone's father's Chevrolet Bel Air, two-toned copper and cream, at the end of the long runway 13/31, forgetting to sip their Mistys, their Mistys melting as the airplanes lifted up and over them, their control surfaces flexing, the persistent strain of their single engines. Or the airplanes would land over them, appearing, suddenly falling, wagging their tails. Martone loved the way the crosswind would push the little planes around as they landed almost sideways it seemed in the middle distance. A huge windsock out in the grassy field inflated and fell like a conductor's wand. If they were lucky they would see a twin engine Cessna, a spitting image of the “Songbird,” the plane on the TV show Sky King, lumbering down the tarmac turn and trundling toward them, hop once, twice on its triangular gear, and, then, effortlessly leap off the black-topped pavement just beyond the big white stenciled stretched out numbers spray painted on the landing strip. Or they would drive to the other side of town, the south side, to the old Army Airfield, now the airline terminal and National Guard airbase, and watch the traffic there. Then the “gates” that let the passengers out to the planes were actual gates, gates cut in to the low cyclone fences. The passengers would walk across the apron, climb the rickety portable stairways up to the doorway to turn and wave to the people on the observation deck who waved back before disappearing inside the cabin. Martone and Martone's father were on the deck too, observing though they knew no one boarding and were sending strangers away into the wild blue yonder as Martone liked to say to himself, “off you go . . . ” to himself. Off on a distant runway the Air Guard's F-84 Thunderstreaks performed touch-and-goes, throttled up their engines like clearing a throat as they took off and banked and circled overhead. Back on the observation deck, Martone and Martone's father waited for the four engines of the airliners, Constellations and DC-7s, to crank one-by-one, cough and explode, the propeller blades disappearing, and then the whole aircraft shrugging and turning away from the terminal, the backwash hitting them, an invisible wall buffeting the crowd, rattling the windows behind them. Martone watched as the airplane and its sound grew small, taxiing away from them, then grew large again as the plane returned on its takeoff, rotated, roared overhead and disappeared into the low clouds that he always remembered being there. There were a few bird birds there at Baer Field, Martone remembers now. House sparrows at his feet, pecking around the deck, hopping away from the well-wishers waving goodbye. Startled pigeons settling back into the stand of antennae on the tower's top. A plague of grackles grazing by the candy-striped radio beacon on the grass island floating between the intersecting landing strips. Years later, at the hospice where Martone's father was dying, a bone cancer painfully metastasizing, Martone would wheel his father down to the lobby's large cage of birds—parakeets, lovebirds, canaries. Martone would watch his father as he stared into the animated space of the cage. Martone's father was heavily sedated, and Martone had really no way of knowing if his father was even registering the streaks of color, the cheeps, or flutters. Martone never really took to bird watching or birding though the idea of collecting, of putting together a “life list,” is attractive. Martone likes to collect many things, has a collection of collections. Most people who collect books like to collect first editions of books for example, a kind of life list. But Martone, if he collected books, would collect them in another way. He would collect every edition of one title, of Owen Wister's The Virginian, for example. There are over 730 editions of the novel. Today, Martone, the birder, birds in that way. He doesn't take note of all the different birds he's seen, near 1,000 species in North America alone, but lists instead all the murmurations of starlings he has witnessed over the years, the smoky ropes of black birds in the hundreds, expanding and contracting as they swoop and climb. Starlings, an invasive species that thrives on the cleared glacial plains beneath the low paralleling flat clouds of northeastern Indiana.Shannon McCarthy is a writer and educator living in South County, RI. She received her MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, where she served as an editorial assistant for the Lindenwood Review. She is a founder and co-facilitator of the South County Writers Group, a community writing group for writers of all ages, disciplines, and experience levels. Her creative nonfiction has been published in River Teeth and her fiction has previously appeared in the Onion River Review.Andi Myles is a Washington DC area science writer by day, poet in the in between times. Her favorite space is the fine line between essay and poetry. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Tahoma Literary Review, and B O D Y, among others.Mekiya Outini is an author, editor, MacDowell fellow, and co-founder of The DateKeepers, a full-service author support platform. His short story “Baptism by Earth” won the 55th New Millennium Award, and his work has appeared in Coachella Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. The first two chapters of his novel, Ashes, Ashes, were featured in the West Trade Review, and a chapter of his wife's memoir, which he is co-authoring, is forthcoming in the North American Review. “Incomplete Nurture” belongs to a collection about growing up in what might qualify as a cult if his parents weren't the only two members.Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is the author of the poetry collections The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons and Chord Box. Her essays have appeared in Missouri Review, the Rumpus, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Born and raised in North Carolina, she is an assistant professor at Oberlin College and leads the Writers in the Schools program in Oberlin, Ohio.Erin Ruble's essays and short fiction have appeared in Boulevard, Green Mountains Review, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She lives in Vermont with her husband and children. You can find her at erinruble.wordpress.com.Anne Rudig has been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloom, Memoir Monday, and elsewhere. She writes fiction and nonfiction in a tiny rural town where an armadillo wanders the yard.Jane Salisbury has always lived in the West, in small towns and big cities. She worked in public libraries for decades, and is now free to write, walk, garden, read, and wander about.Arya Samuelson is a writer and editor living in Northampton, MA. She is the winner of New Ohio Review's 2023 Nonfiction Contest and CutBank's Montana Prize in Nonfiction awarded by Cheryl Strayed. Her work has also been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Columbia Journal, the Millions, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a memoir in essays and a novel. Her website is www.aryasamuelson.com.Miel Sloan is the pen name for a poet and writer who is publishing under a pseudonym to protect her son. She is currently writing a memoir about raising a son with mental illness; the title piece “Mother Matter” is in the current edition of Alaska Quarterly Review. Her essay “Letter to the Insurance Company Psychiatrist” recently appeared in Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine and her “Letter to My Suicidal Son, Take Three” was a runner up in the 2023 WOW writing contest.Carrie Lee South earned her MFA at the University of Central Arkansas, and when she's not reading and writing, she's spending time with birds. Her writing has appeared in f(r)iction, Iron Horse Literary Review, Opus Comics, the Dread Machine, Tales to Terrify, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her novel in progress made the shortlist for Uncharted Magazine's Novel Excerpt Prize. Read more at carrieleesouth.com.Jessie van Eerden is the author of two essay collections, Yoke & Feather and The Long Weeping, and three novels: Glorybound, My Radio Radio, and Call It Horses which won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Oxford American, AGNI, Image, New England Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She has been awarded the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award, the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, the Milton Fellowship, and a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Jessie holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Hollins University.K. Van Wert teaches English and writing at a college in the upper Midwest. Her literary scholarship has appeared in various journals and edited collections. This is her first memoir.Julie Marie Wade writes and publishes poetry, prose, and hybrid forms. Her recent and forthcoming collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.