By Rachael Greene

Everything you think you might do in a threatening situation melts away. This is it, I thought. Though my mind could not quite accept what it was. My hands raised of their own volition, pointlessly, to shield my more vulnerable parts, and my mouth uttered, like an invocation, the name of the only person who could hear me.

By Mandira Pattnaik

Let’s accept that your infobahn alias is a pariah, and let’s assume that you’ve begun to acknowledge three things: That ghosts haunt your computer, your internet, and everything that exists in a parallel non-physical plane. That ghosts are malleable, can take any form, just like social media profiles and bios. That ghosts aren’t bothered by your rules and/or miscellaneous conventions and laws of the land.

By Noah Grey Rosenzweig

My boyfriend gets out of the back seat, pulling his phone out of his back pocket as he straightens up, tapping “record” with a slim finger. His voice is steady when he asks me, the phone held between us, “What are we doing today?” I look up at the camera and tilt my head, squinting against the sun and the fear.

“Getting top surgery,” I say.

“Talk the fire out” is what they called it. In that small place of green crops and clapboard churches, it was a power kept among washed-in-The-Blood types. A kind of faith-healing passed down from one family member to another. I heard tell of a man who melted his hand with fireworks; it healed in a few days with no scar. A woman who spilled hot grease on her leg but the blisters faded without a lick of pain. I’d never seen it done, but we all knew about this power.

In this interview, nonfiction MFA candidate Rachel Rueckert spoke to Terry Tempest Williams about her upcoming essay collection, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. In Erosion, Williams explores her connection to the American West, particularly her home state of Utah, as evolutionary process and how our undoing—of the self, self-centeredness, extractive capitalism, fear, tribalism—can also be our becoming, creating room for change and progress.