Buckshot

By Suzanne Martin

Issue 44 • Fall 2021 • Nonfiction

1st Place Nonfiction
2021 Summer Contest

How the story we tell ourselves of who we are is a cumulating text of Martin’s multi-media essay—how one moment, one sentence, one sensitivity can layer upon the other until what lies beneath is no longer something as benign as a pea but something more sinister, hardened by experience and injury into a tensile threat. “Buckshot” is fabulous in its conception and even more fascinating in its execution, the writing spare and lovely, the images vivid and arresting…and always that sense of tension building, weight bearing down, our speaker “clinging like a tree frog,” ready to spring.

– Kim Barnes

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Suzanne Martin

Suzanne Martin is a writer from Ohio.

Nina Tichava

Nina Tichava was raised in both rural northern New Mexico and the Bay Area in California. She was influenced by her father, a construction worker and mathematician, and by her mother, who was an artist and designer. The reflections of these dualities—country to city, pragmatist to artist, nature to technology—are essential to and evident in her paintings.