1.  Brevity. Edited by Dinty W. Moore, Brevity is an excellent online magazine of brief nonfiction, from some of the best writers in the field.  From Brevity’s description:

“For more than a decade now, Brevity has published well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form, along with craft essays and book reviews. Though still committed to the mission of publishing new writers, Brevity has enjoyed an embarrassment of recent riches, including the work of two Pulitzer prize finalists, numerous NEA fellows, Pushcart winners, Best American authors, and writers from India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Malaysia, and Japan. Authors published in Brevity include Sherman Alexie, Lia Purpura, Terese Svoboda, John Calderazzo, Steven Barthelme, Mark Yakich, Ander Monson, Caitlin Horrocks, Jon Pineda, Brenda Miller, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robin Hemley, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Robin Behn, Abby Frucht, Barbara Hurd, Bret Lott, Ira Sukrungruang, Rigoberto González, Judith Kitchen, Michael Martone, and Diana Hume George.”

Work from Brevity has been anthologized and reprinted in venues including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Utne Reader, the Short Takes anthology, the Best Creative Nonfiction anthology from W.W. Norton, and many recent writing textbooks.

2. Brevity Blog.  For news and commentary about the form, nothing beats Brevity magazine’s blog, which is updated frequently.  Any time there’s a debate in the world of creative nonfiction, you can count on some smart blog posts from a variety of contributors.

3. Creative Nonfiction. There’s a temptation to call Creative Nonfiction “the magazine that started it all.”  That’s not entirely accurate—people were writing this type of stuff for centuries before Lee Gutkind founded this magazine almost twenty years ago.  Still, it’s impossible to understate the impact this magazine has had on our genre.  Their website has a pretty generous selection of online reprints of pieces that originally appeared in the print magazine. From their “About” page:

“Creative Nonfiction was the first and is still the largest literary magazine to publish, exclusively and on a regular basis, high quality nonfiction prose. The journal has consistently featured prominent authors from the United States and around the world and has helped launch the careers of some of the genre’s most exciting emerging writers, as well as helping establish the creative nonfiction genre as a worthy academic pursuit.”

4. Quotidiana.  This collection of classical essays available through public domain is curated by essayist Patrick Madden.  He writes:

“Quotidiana, from the word quotidian, is a website dedicated to the essay. Quotidiana includes my writing and teaching portfolios, an online workshop community for me and my fellow O. U. Bobcats, a set of conference papers and annotated bibliographies, a collection of interviews with some of my favorite contemporary essayists, a selection of the ‘Essayest American Essays,’ from recent years, and, most importantly and most substantially, an anthology of hundreds of classical essays, all published before 1923, all partakers of the ruminative, associative, idea-driven form that predates and surpasses the current ‘creative nonfiction’ trendy stuff. Although most of these essays are available online elsewhere, some are not, and already Quotidiana is one of the biggest online anthologies of classical essays anywhere.”

5. Sweet: A Literary Confection.  I keep thinking of Sweet —which was founded and is edited by Ira Sukrungruang, Katherine Riegel, and K.C. Wolfe—as “that new online magazine of poetry and creative nonfiction.”  It’s not really new at all—it’s been around for years.  And in those years, they’ve published some great works by the likes of Joe Bonomo, Lee Martin, Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Maureen Stanton, Nicole Walker, and many others.  About their magazine and themselves, Sweet’s editors write:

“There’s a reason ‘sweet’ has come to mean ‘awesome’ in slang. It comes back to the mouth, to pleasure. We don’t believe pleasure has to be light, as our issues show. But we also don’t want readers to go away thinking, ‘That was really hearty’ or ‘What a healthy collection!’ We want you to think, ‘Mmmm, sweeeeet.’ We want you to find something here that you need, something perhaps not as practical as a potato, but just as vital.”