CNF: Five Years After my Rape, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham Addresses Me Directly from the TV in my Living Room
by Sarah Cheshire
[Editor’s Note: Click on the image below to view it at full size.]
Sarah Cheshire is of the author of Unravelings, winner of the 2016 Etchings Press Prize Chapbook Prize. Her writing can be found in Scalawag Magazine, Brevity, River Teeth, Creative Nonfiction‘s anthology Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly, and forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review. She is the winner of the 2018 AWP Kurt Brown Award in Creative Nonfiction, a finalist for the 2018 Disquiet International Literary Prize, and a semi-finalist for the 2017 American Short(er) Fiction Contest. She currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and serves as the nonfiction editor for Black Warrior Review.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “CNF: Five Years After my Rape, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham Addresses Me Directly from the TV in my Living Room”? My own histories with sexual trauma made watching the Kavanaugh hearings on C-SPAN a heavily visceral experience. Throughout the testimonies, I found myself constantly retreating into own body, barely registering the words coming out of the TV. After Kavanaugh’s confirmation, I spent hours sifting through The Washington Post’s transcripts of the hearings, trying to peel back layers of political pandering in order to reveal what I had originally felt while listening. I realize now that doing so was an effort to subvert the erasure that many members of the senate judiciary committee were imposing (and continue to impose) onto me and other sexual violence survivors through their own rhetorical strategies; to find noise under silence.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD