80 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
une of 2016 found me lying on a twin-sized daybed
on the third floor of an unfinished house in Marquette,
Nebraska—a village of 230 whose sole purpose seemed to
be the two-step monoculture of corn and soy. Flies slipped
through the shoddy screens to explore every available surface.
I had pointed a fan directly at myself in an attempt to abate the
ninety-degree heat. The room had no real ceiling, just sheets of
Styrofoam resting on wood beams, beyond which I could see
the rafters in the attic, and in one corner, if I looked up at just
the right angle, I could see beyond walls to the blue sky. Half
the wood flooring was covered with raw squares of plywood.
A hole in the floor allowed me, if I pressed my eye to the open-
ing, to view the bed in the room below mine. At night, the
light from the hallway intruded. Privacy was an impossibility.
Everyone could hear me tell my boyfriend over the phone,
“This place is so weird.”J
RACHEL MABE is at work on a book
about the existential agonies of
growing up female in America. Her
work has appeared in the Atlantic,
the Paris Review, the Washington
Post, and others.To Retreat, or
Not to Retreat?
Writers and other creative people need a space of their own, but they
also need to be in the world. Ever y writer needs to find their own balance.
In this issue, RACHEL MABE discovers she’s not cut out for the classic
residency, and CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN learns to embrace the
loneliness of the writing life.WRITERS AT WORK
Getting Away from Getting
Away from It All
RACHEL MABE