Joe Mackall, professor of English, and Dan Lehman, Trustees'
Distinguished Professor of English, have learned that two essays first
published in River Teeth: A Journal of
Nonfiction Narrative will be featured in Best American Essays 2013, the long-running series published by
Houghton Mifflin Books and edited by Robert Atwan.
The award-winning essays were written by authors with deep
roots in the Ashland University Master's of Fine Arts Program: Steve Harvey, an
honored graduate faculty member in the Ashland MFA, and Jon Kerstetter, a 2011
Ashland MFA graduate who was a combat physician and flight surgeon for the U.S.
Army and who completed three combat tours in Iraq.
Bestselling author Cheryl Strayed (Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail), the guest
editor of Best American Essays 2013,
chose Harvey's and Kerstetter's work from among the many hundreds of entries
that Atwan and she reviewed this year. That River
Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative contributed two of only twenty-five
pieces published in Best American Essays
2013 cements the journal's reputation at the forefront of literary
magazines published in the United States.
Now in its fifteenth year, River Teeth is co-edited by English professors Mackall and Lehman. Sarah
M. Wells, MFA administrative director, is managing editor of River Teeth. Wells coordinates the
journal's design and production and has raised the journal's profile significantly
with increased print subscriptions and a strong online presence that includes Kindle
editions and widespread library distribution through Project Muse at Johns
Hopkins University. The journal's acceptance rate is less than 2 percent of the
nearly 2,500 nonfiction submissions it reviews each year.
Steven Harvey's essay, "The Book of Knowledge," is
the opening chapter of his memoir in progress, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, which concerns the suicide of his
mother in 1961, when Harvey was 11 years old. The Ashland MFA faculty member subsequently
discovered 406 letters his mother had left behind and embarked on a writing
project that he says "has the feel of a detective story. Before I read the
letters, my mother had become little more than her death to me, but while
writing her story I discovered a woman who, despite her vulnerability to
depression, had a large capacity for wonder and a love of familiar things,
legacies that she passed on to me."
Jon Kerstetter's "Triage" concerns his experience
as a combat physician in Iraq on the day that Major General Jon Gallinetti, U.S. Marine Corps,
accompanied him on late-night clinical rounds. "The general laid his hand on the expectant
soldier’s leg—the leg whose strength I imagined was drifting like a
shape-shifting cloud moving against a dark umber sky—strength retreating into a
time before it carried a soldier," Kerstetter writes. "And I watched
the drifting of a man back into the womb of his mother, toward a time when a
leg was not a leg, a body not a body, toward a time when a soldier was only the
laughing between two young lovers—a man and a woman who could never imagine
that a leg-body-man-soldier would one day lie expectant and that that soldier
would be their son."
Harvey is a core faculty member who has taught creative
nonfiction in the Ashland University MFA program since its inception. He is
professor of English at Young Harris College in Georgia. Kerstetter was a
member of the Ashland MFA's third graduating class and raised funds for the
Wounded Warrior Project through a special pre-order of the River Teeth issue that published his essays about Iraq.
By Dan Lehman
