Recently, I had the honour to contribute a short-short to “Beautiful Things”, the online section of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. River Teeth is one of the most well-known creative nonfiction publications around, and in my opinion has the most inspired name. On its origin:

“…there are hard, cross-grained whorls of human experience that remain inexplicably lodged in us, long after the straight-grained narrative material that housed them has washed away. Most of these whorls are not stories, exactly: more often they’re self-contained images of shock or of inordinate empathy; moments of violence, uncaught dishonesty, tomfoolery; of mystical terror; lust; joy. These are our “river teeth”-the knots of experience that once tapped into our heartwood, and now defy the passing of time.”

– David James Duncan

On what “Beautiful Things” look like:

“Glimpses, glimmers, meditations, moments, reflections, refractions, interrupted shadows, river shimmers, darkened mirrors, keyholes, kaleidoscopes, earring hoops, slabs of cracked granite, cracks where the light gets in. Beautiful things.”

– River Teeth’s website

I won’t spoil “What Matters” since it’s less than 250 words, but I will admit that I was tickled when the editor told me that she would have never thought to see “Cthulu” and “meatloaf” in the same sentence. Sort of. You’ll see. Happy reading.

Read the Piece Here

Featured image by popejon2 at Wikimedia commons.