—

Nicole Chung is the author of All You Can Ever Know (available from Catapult on October 2, 2018), a memoir about her experience as a Korean adoptee raised by white parents. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, GQ,Shondaland, ELLE, Longreads, BuzzFeed, Vulture, and Hazlitt, among others. Chung is the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine and the former managing editor of The Toast. Find her on Twitter @nicole_soojung.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Nicole Chung appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

Miranda K. Pennington is the author of A Girl Walks into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me about Life, Love, and Women’s Work (Seal Press, 2017). Her work has appeared on The Toast, The American Scholar online, The Ploughshares blog, and The Catapult Podcast. Pennington received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University, where she also was a University Writing Instructor. In addition, she has taught academic writing at Touro College, SUNY Empire State, and the LEDA Institute, and she has led creative writing workshops for the AmpLit festival and Uptown Stories. This fall, Pennington will join the writing faculty of American University in Washington, D.C.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Miranda K. Pennington appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

Lily Brooks-Dalton is the author of Motorcycles I’ve Loved: A Memoir(Riverhead Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. In addition to her memoir, Brooks-Dalton has written for The Toast, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. Her debut novel, Good Morning, Midnight, will be published by Random House on August 9, 2016.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Lily Brooks-Dalton appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

In college, I was a terrible Russian language and literature major. I never finished reading Crime and Punishment, I still haven’t touched War and Peace, and I never went to the public Russian baths. Even though I spent a significant amount of time in the Motherland — a month living in a Siberian village on Lake Baikal, fourteen months in St. Petersburg, and a month studying in Moscow — I never had a proper public banya experience.

The post Freedom, My Dear appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

In fourth grade, I was the new student in school. While I liked many of my classmates, I felt shy when it came to having people over to my house or accepting birthday party invitations. Only by the very end of the year had I begun to feel like I made a couple friends, including a sweet, quiet, freckly girl named Meredith, whom everyone called Meri. Meri and I became friends after a hypothetical question about our dream pets posed to the class by our teacher: we both said we would like to have a ferret. We bonded further when we realized we both drool a lot in our sleep. While neither Meri nor I ever got a ferret, at the end of fourth grade, Meri adopted an orange and white hamster named Chuckie from another classmate of ours. Chuckie was already a couple years old, which is well past middle age for a hamster, plus he had a hard life before he arrived in Meri’s warm, caring arms. Our classmate’s older brother liked to jump over the squirmy, scrawny fistful of fur with his skateboard. When our classmate decided that perhaps Chuckie would be happier living in a household without such traumas – a rodent heart attack couldn’t be far off if the skate tricks kept up – Meri took him in. Already strongly maternal at nine, Meri showered Chuckie with affection, and in no time at all, he had fattened up and calmed down: a fuzzy sphere with tiny, white hand-claws, shiny black eyes, thin brown ears. His favorite activity was rolling around on the floor inside a transparent blue ball.

The post Chuckie the Hamster: Dead Pet Chronicles appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

“Are fish supposed to look like this?”

My two roommates appeared by my side, our faces almost touching as we peered into the tank, so close our breath fogged the plastic. The three of us peered into the one-gallon tank on my dresser, full of neon pink rocks, a fake plant, a gray plastic castle, and a purple-maroon Betta, our beloved Wanda, the mascot of Claflin Hall, room 107, who was not doing well.

“She looks… swollen,” Anna said.

“Kind of puffy,” said Leigh.

“Why are her scales sticking out like that?”

Wanda floated in her tank, barely bothering to swish her fins, ignoring the flakes of food I sprinkled on the surface above her enlarged head. Her scales – normally a bright, shiny metallic purple – were muted and protruding, no longer lying flat against her skin.

Leigh, on the premed track, turned to her computer. After a few minutes of research, she had the diagnosis:

“Dropsy. It’s definitely dropsy.”

The post A Fish Formerly Called Wanda: Dead Pet Chronicles appeared first on E.B. Bartels.