Nikita Nelin

Story Weaver

Fiction.

Nonfiction..

Immersive Journalism…

Narrative Guide….

The Obligatory Bio in the 3rd-person:

Nikita Nelin was born in Moscow, Russia and immigrated to the U.S in 1989. He has lived in Austria and Italy, and has traveled the U.S extensively. He received the Sean O’Faolain prize for short fiction, the Summer Literary Seminars prize for nonfiction, and the Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction, as well as being chosen as a finalist for the Restless Books Immigrant prize and the Dzanc Books prize. His work has been published in print and online. Nikita has conducted research through the Harriman Institute as well as translation through Yale Press, and has written on the convergence between fringe and at-large cultural trends for the Hannah Arendt Center. He holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, is a 2019 Associate Fellow at The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, and is a member of the Southern Experience Collective.

For information on Personal Narrative Guide services please check the Narrative Guidance page of the site.

04/05/20 First Gear, Without Traffic

And today, suddenly, everything went quiet,

do you remember?

Not in that;

“hey, I just didn’t want to shout”

kind of way,

but

quiet,

like the neighbor’s dog went home.

quiet,

all of you’s in me,

went on strike;

no,

departed for an errant

without leaving a note,

fled recklessly

on a last minute holiday.

So quiet

I couldn’t drink my coffee

without interrogating it

grain by grain,

pleading with the HVAC system to give me a steady beat,

offered the salt bowl a story or two

and then asked it to dance –

it said no.

That kind of quiet;

have you seen it?

A complete strike in every exercise of thinking,

all of my wants sent to the gods;

quiet,

like

there was never any traffic,

only the memory of you

rushing by

rushing by

and a light stain

on the couch

Where someone once spilled

an ounce of wine,

and someone else,

thank god,

never bothered erasing the evidence

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels." 
                                                                                     Goya