This is a recurring series to introduce, celebrate, and elevate our amazing crew of volunteers.
In this installment of the Meet the Team series we talk to Annie Rehill, who joined our flash reading team in late 2023. Annie’s book The Apocalypse Is Everywhere: A Popular History of America’s Favorite Nightmare explores the end-of-world mindset that permeates even the environmental movement, and Backwoodsmen As Ecocritical Motif in French Canadian Literature is based on her dissertation.
What made you volunteer to read for Hippocampus?
I attended a Hippocampus Magazine online event about what editors were looking for [in flash creative nonfiction]. They were so honest, open, and helpful! I loved it and decided, right there in the workshop, that I’d join this team somehow if they could use me.
Aside from Hippocampus (which is obviously the bee’s knees), what other literary mags and organizations rock your world?
The Sun, The Writer’s Center. I will be discovering more, as I continue to transition from primarily academic writing back to the CNF that was my first and enduring passion.
If you were a particular form of creative nonfiction (CNF) what would you be and why?
Braided. Because you can weave in different perspectives, even stories, to leave the reader with one beautiful or otherwise striking effect.
What have you written that you are most proud of, and why?
“Assisting Science” in the Potomac Review (2004). This personal essay about helping my biologist husband in the field comes closest to the type of CNF I’m continuing to explore going forward.
What are you writing now that excites you, and why?
I’m working on several stories from both the past and the present. As a relentlessly maturing woman raised in an intercultural, geographically changing (continually) environment with a large, scrappy, very close family, some of my experiences connect with the universal human trajectory, physically or spiritually (mentally). Also, since marrying 34 1/2 years ago, we’ve lived in three states in 11 dwellings, home bases for our explorations and work lives. Geographical movement has characterized my life, while at the same time I’ve been drawn to the elusive search for why humans are here on Earth in the first place, and what we actually are besides animals (if anything). I try to interweave such big questions with things like the amazement of watching a bluebird hop into flight from a branch.
What piece of creative nonfiction (whether book or short form) do you think everyone should read?
Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments.
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Thanks, Annie, for all your work with Hippocampus Magazine. Readers, stay tuned for more Meet the Team features here and, in abbreviated form, on Instagram. In the meantime, learn more about our all-volunteer staff here.
