January 9, 2026
from “Admit the Gravity”
in River Teeth Fall 2025
by Emma Bolden
“Even though voice cannot be taught, it can, sadly, be damaged, and even destroyed, especially in a young writer.”—THE
I had the honor of writing the “Editor’s Notes” to the fall 2025 edition of River Teeth journal, and for the month of January we will feature four essays from this issue.
I chose as my topic “voice” because the fall issue has such a wide variety of interesting voices. I agree with the poet William Stafford that voice is a gift that cannot be taught: “You already have a voice and don’t need to find one,” he once told a group of writers. But even if it cannot be taught, voice can be silenced, often through self-censorship. In “Admit the Gravity” Emma Bolden reclaims her voice by breaking a rule she learned in a writer’s workshop.
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You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
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The Paragraph of the Week
I fell to my knees on the kitchen tile. It didn’t seem possible. Nothing seemed possible, in the face of this. Less than an hour later we were standing, me and my aunts and uncles and my father and grandfather and the priest, around the bed in which her body lay, dead, one hand curled and claw-like. The priest blessed her body’s mouth and hands and feet. Last rites. Her final sacrament, received after her death. Later I sat on the front porch while an aunt walked into the front yard, yelled “goddamn” as loudly as she could, and told me I looked beautiful. She kissed me on the cheek. There were so many Honey Baked hams. It was my first real experience of familial grief and what I learned was what a shock it was, how strange it was, an ending, even when you think you know what’s coming.
—Emma Bolden
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Commentary
Even though voice cannot be taught, it can, sadly, be damaged, and even destroyed, especially in a young writer. Following the “not-entirely-unspoken rule” of never writing about “dead pets or dead grandmothers,” Emma Bolden was discouraged in workshops from writing about her grandmother. “Instead, I wrote poems that were poor copies of poets who themselves had died – cummings, Eliot, Dickinson, Sexton,” she explains. “It was how you learned, I was told: by listening to the voices that came before, not the voice that came from you.” The lesson sank in as a stultifying rebuke: “And anyway what did I have to say?” Fortunately, she realized over time that the only way to understand the events in her life is to “language them” in her own voice. In “Admit the Gravity” she finally finds her own words for the forbidden subject of her grandmother whose death “ghosts” her and keeps her up at night.
—THE
January 16, 2026
from “Best Pals”
by Rachel Cline
in River Teeth Fall 2025
“I learned several new pleasures...the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump.”
—Rachel Cline
Last fall, I had the honor of writing the “Editor’s Notes” of River Teeth magazine, and for the month of January we are featuring four essays from this issue. I chose as my topic “voice” because the fall issue has such a wide variety of interesting voices. Rachel Cline’s essay “Best Pals” shows how experiences in our youth shape our emerging voices.
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You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
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The Paragraph of the Week
The following summer, Nancy taught me a game she called “Body Comfort.” After lights out, she sat down on my butt and explained the rules: we each had a bank of 100 requests. For example, you might ask for ten shoulder rubs and when those were done, five arm tickles, and then fifteen karate chops. When you got to 100, it was the other person’s turn. You could ask for anything you wanted. I learned several new pleasures from her requests: the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump. Trading off meant that one gave generously in order to receive bounteously in return, and the countdown added an undercurrent of suspense. It was a game of never-ending interest.
—Rachel Cline
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Commentary
Reading no doubt influences our writerly voice, but the experience with language as we grow up largely shapes it because that is when we first see and feel the effect of words in action. We glimpse this process at work in “Best Pals” by Rachel Cline when she and her camping friends practice the art of being snarky after lights out by playing games such as “Body Comfort,” with silly names for ways to “pleasure each other” including “the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump.” Such verbal play—and the snickers and cringes it induces—is the real-life laboratory in which we learn how words work. Unfortunately, the hidden reality behind such wordplay is not always benign, and over the course of Cline’s essay we learn that a seemingly innocent game of naming bodily pleasures is the symptom of an unspeakable evil suffered by her “best pal” who became the victim of it.
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—THE
January 23, 2026
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from “Harvey”
by Lynda Rushing
in River Teeth Fall 2025
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“The interior voices we rarely reveal in public burn like fire inside the internal combustion engine of the personal essay.”—THE
Here is a section from another essay in the Fall 2025 Issue of River Teeth magazine that we have been featuring this month. In it Lynda Rushing, a schoolgirl with a crush on a mysterious fellow student, learns that he has clearly been taken by another. The story is an old one, but her recreation of her youthful thoughts, chastened by her adult voice, is fresh and winning.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.​
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The Paragraph of the Week
But what I’m sure of is this. The air I was breathing became very heavy, like air saturated with seawater on a planet with too much gravity. And it was suddenly very still. A length of time equal to a thousand racing heartbeats went by. The music kept playing, not missing a beat, but it had lost its rich timbre, sounding tinny and far away. The table was still there, solid and glittering with candles, but I felt as though I had somehow risen several inches above my chair. I had become untethered from the earth, floating like a piece of dust, twirling in the candlelight.
—Lynda Rushing
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Commentary
The interior voices we rarely reveal in public burn like fire inside the internal combustion engine of the personal essay. I hear the interior voice hidden subtly in the irony of Lynda Rushing writing about her childhood crush, her announcement of adolescent joy mildly rebuked in the retelling by the knowing tone, the hidden voice, of the writer as an adult: “It was finally going to happen—I would make myself talk to him and get to know him better. I would draw him out in my quiet way,” the teenager thinks coyly. “Maybe I could even dazzle him with my wit and surprise him with my profound understanding of life, years ahead of my chronological age.” “Quiet,” “dazzle,” “profound”—the author hears these words differently than does the girl she was, a girl clearly being set up for a fall. When she discovers the truth about her impossible love, the “air I was breathing became very heavy, like air saturated with seawater on a planet with too much gravity.”
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—THE
January 30, 2026
from “Who Are We Missing”
by L.C. Killingsworth
in River Teeth Fall 2025
“...the precise opposite of loneliness.”—L. C. Killingsworth
Our final feature from the Fall 2025 issue of River Teeth magazine is from “Who Are We Missing” by L. C. Killingsworth. It carefully describes an overwhelming emotion which the author experienced at a funeral after a long stretch of feeling bereft.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.​
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The Paragraph of the Week
I can only describe the feeling as the precise opposite of loneliness. Though I suppose the evangelicals surrounding me would label it more simply: the presence of God. The feeling that we are all grabbing onto the same bare wire, letting a high-voltage current of humanity rip through us. There is a fullness, a charge to the feeling that cracks me open. It makes me forget that Harper is watching me cry—or, rather, replaces my embarrassment with a joy. Joy that we are crying together, about the same thing.
—L. C. Killingsworth
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Commentary
The moment of recognition—that is what the personal essayist creates while looking within, generously sharing the hard-won discovery with us. Arriving at the funeral of a much-loved student from her past, L. C. Killingsworth hides the anger and sadness of her life behind a guarded persona. When asked what she has been up to by a former colleague before the service begins, she wonders what to say. “Most of my last decade has been spent expelling bodily fluids—vomit, milk, blood, my eternal soul—into a variety of receptacles, including human ones. Should I tell her about that?” Instead she says she has been doing nothing, “just, you know, working. Remotely.” When the service begins, though, emotion overwhelms her and she realizes in an epiphany that what she is feeling is what she has been missing. She recognizes it instantly, “the way a starving person knows the smell of food,” and suddenly understands why she has been furious and lost. As she and everyone else in the room focuses together on the young person who has died, “all feeling the shape of the same hole in the world,” she experiences “the precise opposite of loneliness,” an emotion that “cracks her open.” Any embarrassment about crying uncontrollably in public is replaced with joy. “Joy that we are crying together, about the same thing.” It is a privilege as a reader to listen in as a an essayist makes such an intimate, life-changing discovery.
—THE
