This is the only nonfiction piece on my list, an essay more than a short story. I’m bending the rules because much of it is about a short story, ‘The House with the Horse and the Blue Canoe’, which Strayed wrote when she was 24. She won a prize with it and sent it off to Alice Munro, the great writer, who she’d admired for years. The essay is about what happens next and about how art inspires longing. 

“Her mother had died young too, and she haunts the pages of Munro’s stories the way my own mother began to haunt mine. I read Munro through my sorrow, rereading certain stories and scenes over and over again, memorizing particular sentences.”

Published in The Missouri Review, June 2009, available here