Writing Professor's Work Chosen for 'Best American Essays' List, Journals

An essay by Dr. Nancy McCabe, associate professor of writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, is among those chosen for the Best American Essays 2010 notable list, and three current issues of literary journals feature McCabe essays.

The notable essay, “Still Dancing,” appeared in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts in 2008. McCabe has had essays appear on the Best American Essays notable list three other times, in 1999, 2000 and 2009.

“Still Dancing” focuses on female body image and weaves together strands about the adult tap dance class at Peggy Johnson’s studio in Bradford and the story of McCabe’s mother’s breast cancer the first year she danced.

New essays by McCabe, who directs the writing program at Pitt-Bradford, also appear in the spring issues of three magazines, Fourth Genre, Colorado Review and the Bellingham Review.

“All three of them are experiments with form,” McCabe said.

“Notes on a Dancing Daughter” appears in the spring/summer 2010 issue of Fourth Genre, one of the leading creative nonfiction journals, and includes fragmented reflections on taking a trip with her adopted daughter to Chinese Heritage Camp.

“This essay is about genetic and cultural heritage, the ways we pass those on, the difficulties we face when we don’t have easy access to information about them, as with international adoption,” she said.

“The Art of Losing” appears in the spring/summer issue of Colorado Review. “This is a short, lyric essay about the necklace my mother, literally on her deathbed, gave to my daughter, who then lost it a few months later on my mother’s birthday,” McCabe said.

“The loss of the necklace made me think about how those small losses are linked to bigger ones.”

Finally, “Can This Troubled Marriage be Saved: A Quiz” is included in the spring issue of Bellingham Review and combines the format of quizzes in women’s magazines and the “Can This Marriage be Saved” columns McCabe read in her mother’s Ladies’ Home Journals as a child.

“It was a sort of risky approach to putting together parts of a marriage memoir I’ve been working on for a long time, but I liked the way it turned out,” she said.

McCabe has published two books of creative nonfiction, “After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening” and “Meeting Sophie: A Memoir of Adoption.” Her work has appeared in literary journals and mainstream media, and she has won several awards, including a Pushcart Prize for memoir.

In addition to her teaching at Pitt-Bradford, McCabe teaches in the brief-residency master of fine arts program in creative writing at Spalding University.

She and her daughter, Sophie, live in Bradford.