Jill Christman is the author of two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood, as well as essays in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Longreads, TriQuarterly, and True Story. Her essays have appeared in many anthologies including Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, River Teeth: Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction, and The Best of Brevity: Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction, and her awards include a 2019 NEA Prose Fellowship and the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction. A senior editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and executive producer of the podcast Indelible: Campus Sexual Violence, she teaches at Ball State University. Find her on Twitter @jill_christman. Christman explains that “Falling” is one of those essays triggered by an event: “In November 2016, five days after the election, my eight-year-old son Henry fell out of a bright yellow maple tree. He fell far, his father and I were there to watch it happen, and because this very disaster was something I’d been dreading all of his life, I was deeply shaken and started taking down notes in the days right after the accident—not necessarily to write an essay, but to make some sense of what I had seen. I’d long been fascinated by Philippe Petit’s wire-walking feats, and so when Alex Honnold free-soloed El Capitan the next spring, the threads started to come together, and I wove them into the first draft of this essay. However, when I asked Henry, he said he preferred I didn’t tell this story publicly, so I put the project away for a few years—during which time, Free Solo came out, and Alex Honnold appeared at the Oscars. I thought about “Falling,” waiting on my hard drive in a file marked “2017 Essays.” Last summer, I asked Henry again if he would mind if I told the story of the tree, and this time, he gave me the go-ahead. So I pulled it out and spruced it up. This one’s for Henry.”
Jill Christman