[stylist] Creative writing magazines

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Ashley,

A lot of online journals exist that are good. One I like that has
fiction, poetry and nonfiction, and publishes a lot of new writers, is
Identity Theory journal online. 
http://www.identitytheory.com/nonfiction/

Just do a Google search for online literary journals and magazines, and
you'll find a lot.

As mentioned before, creative nonfiction is a very broad genre. It
encompasses traditional nonfiction to more experimental nonfiction.
Generally though, it does include scenic development including dialogue,
descriptive language and it reaches for a universal; it's about more
than just telling your story or detailing an event. It takes a specific
experience and broadens it to become larger. Like in a film when the
camera focuses on one object then pans out to include more into the
frame.

A good book to check out is In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolfe. It's
available on BookShare. Good, good creative nonfiction memoir.

I'm pasting a short creative nonfiction piece. FYI, it does have
language.

The Kids Are Alright

	Over there, at the base of the long-long escalators, at this
edge of the casino, stands a crowd of children— teenagers maybe, but
just barely— curled in a half-moon shape around a single trashcan.
Their crowded closeness is such that their legs look tangled, their arms
could entwine, that if they stand there long enough they might grow into
Siamese siblings, their blood vessels all pumping together as part of
the same massive circulatory system.  They rock there for a moment,
their backs to the trashcan— a single escalator’s ride from an arcade, a
bowling alley, a movie theater— their soft, young faces shooting
scowling, suspicious looks at passersby.  
	Soon, their united front breaks and one girl steps out from the
pack, taking up her station as queen bee.  Queenie is blonde and is not
wearing enough clothes.  She is surrounded by young boys who are awed by
the faint rises and falls of the new curves of her body.  Grown men do
their best to avert their eyes as they walk by—she is a child playing
dress-up and that sexuality is not yet her own.  The boys descend to the
back of the group and form a smaller, tighter crowd around the gold
trashcan.  Atop the trashcan is an ashtray filled with gravelly mush
that swallows up the burning end of spent cigarettes.  And from the
mush, the boys search for nubs of cigarettes with potential for
re-lighting.
	There is a protocol.  The fat boy does most of the digging.  The
boy in the red shirt flicks the mush off the end of the cigarettes.  The
tall boy with blond hair hands the cigarette to Queenie and lights it
for her.  
	I sit here at this lit-up, Monopoly! penny slot machine, just
thirty feet away from Queenie’s crowd, and I feel so far outside their
circle that for a moment I forget.  Oh God, I think, how fucking
disgusting.  How unbelievable, what these children are doing.  I
convince myself that Queenie is the product of a changing desert town.
Because at this moment, Las Vegas is doing its best to drop the family
destination image they tried so hard to cultivate and bring back the
sin, the sex.  Poor girl.   
A million years ago, in my safe Nebraska town, I was fourteen and
started smoking cigarettes, passing joints and pipes around entire
roomfuls of people, drinking out of the same pilfered liquor bottle as
five other kids, kissing boys I barely knew in the backseats of cars and
dim-lit basements.  I remember all those transgressions and the warmth I
felt, the ease with which I made them.  How far away those sins feel
now, though they are only eight years in the past.  Still, I can recall
the taste of satisfaction—the sweetness of it, that mote of control I
marveled at, that sense of utter invincibility I so plainly believed in
while mounting my pitiful teenage rebellions.  And I wonder if such
iniquities taste just as sweet on the tongues of these kids standing
before me.   
So there Queenie stands.  And behind her, those boys are perched like
hyenas, plucking smokes from the silica slush; and, they’re laughing at
whatever Queenie says, watching her thin arm bend her tiny hand up to
her mouth, delivering each butt to her lips.  She pulls weak drags in
from each cigarette and makes a slight flourish with her hand, dancing
the cigarette away from her face as she pushes the puff from her mouth.
She saw this in a movie once, maybe, and it seemed glamorous or
mysterious or far away.  I wonder at the lengths she’ll go to get a car
when she turns sixteen.  I wonder if she’ll still want deliverance from
this town then, and if she already has plans of where she’ll escape to.
I wonder if her dreams are so naïve and desperate, that the slightest
obstacle will throw her confidence and she will hide herself away and
weep at how trapped she feels— just like I did, just like thousands of
other kids do.          
Queenie smokes the nubs slowly, as slowly as any person can smoke two
drags from the beat end of a cigarette, and she passes them back through
the hyena-boy crowd and the remains are dumped carelessly back into the
urn sand.  
Atop the penny slot where I sit, a klaxon sounds and there is beeping
and congratulatory buzzing— I’ve won something.  I don’t watch the
credits tack up and up.  I am impatient, or bored, and hit the “repeat
bet” button and the reels are spinning again.  And the boys are still
scavenging.  And Queenie, she’s still smoking.  She winces slightly, her
throat dries from smoking too many skeletal remains and the boys behind
her laugh and she does not know for sure if this is what being grown-up
feels like.    


Sincerely,
Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter
Read my blog at:
http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
 
"History is not what happened; history is what was written down."
The Expected One- Kathleen McGowan

Message: 6
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:30:11 -0400
From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: [stylist] writing magazines
Message-ID: <CDB26275C4D04D408C049623A3328EA2 at OwnerPC>
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Hi all,

I?d like to read more personal essays and creative nonfiction to get a
sense of the structure as well as to learn about people?s lives. 
Such personal accounts are quite interesting.
So are there magazines you can recommend? I plan to subscribe to the
Writer from  NLS. I don?t know if they have anymore writing magazines.

I think reading some literary magazines would be  beneficial. Someday,
I?d like to submit work to them as well. I can read braille. But other
accessible formats will work as well. I am thinking of subscribing to
Readers digest as well. Aph produces it.

Thanks for any ideas.

Ashley