non.fiction.

As I pulled into my backyard earlier, I was listening to the first song on my End of the World mix CD. It's by Johnny Cash and I can never turn it off before it's played through completely. So I sat in the front seat of my car listening to the father hen will call his chickens home until the pale horse comes at the end, and Hell followed with him. When I opened the door and stepped out, I'd been sitting with the engine off for a few minutes. Turning and starting toward the iron stairs, I was stopped in my tracks by a pack of dogs. They were all tawny colored, German shepherds, lab mixes, mutts. They rushed through the wooden gate and I followed dumbly behind, not quite grasping what or how this was happening.

As I pushed the gate wider and trudged through the thick gravel stones, they paused in the front yard and one started toward me, growling. I kept moving forward, and they turned and ambled across the street, all five staying within inches of each other, a golden brown stream of fur and tails. I pulled a few envelopes from my mailbox on the porch and walked back down to the front yard, fumbling in my purse for my camera. When I stepped into the street toward them, they looked at me and began to stand. One came forward again as if to challenge me. I stopped before the sidewalk, looking at the pack lying next to each other in someone else's backyard. I couldn't get my camera to focus and I wanted to get closer. But I knew I was inviting some kind of disaster, so I tried to snap a few more pictures until they had all gotten back to their feet, and then I turned and walked back to my house and up the stairs to my apartment.

In the last few days, I've heard stories that seem like things that only happen on TV. A restaurant owner got locked inside the walk-in cooler of a place my friends and I had just gone to brunch last month. The button to unlock it was broken and left outside the cooler. He went in after hours and they found him the next day, dead. A friend's old neighbor came upon a motorcycle moving down the highway without a rider. He'd apparently just been thrown and the bike hadn't come to a stop yet, though it did just after. A ghost rider, it seemed. She saw them pull the sheet over his body as his wife was saying he should have listened and worn a helmet.

I've been making my way through every nonfiction piece submitted to NR in May. Although I'm the editor, I've never read all the submissions on my own. But in this between time, before the new students get to Nashville and I can reel them in, it's just me and 40 stories. The more that I read, the more I wonder at what it takes to make a good true story. In a week, I've got to have a statement prepared for what it is we look for in nonfiction. For what I look for in nonfiction. But what is it? The more I read, the less I know how to articulate it. I can see it. I know when it's on the page, but it's even more difficult to put into words than what makes a poem good, although I do think they're related. Something about layers. The truth being stranger than fiction. The extraordinary events in everyday life. A good story doesn't have to be a tragedy, but why does it feel like the best involve some kind of loss? Change? Recognition of a shift without dwelling in it completely. Why do I get so many essays about New Orleans, each with something vital and different to say? Good writing makes the strange seem universal, the universal seem unique.