“Did you hear about the accident at the atomic energy station?” Olya asks me.

“Accident?” I say. I feel like the cartoon coyote that’s just run off a cliff.

“Oh, yes. At Kuznetsovsk. It’s about 70 kilometers from here.”

Read on: It’s the “say what?” moment from my essay on Ukraine in the Spring 2012 edition of Creative Nonfiction, “Accidents will happen: Lessons on honey, smoked pig fat, atomic disaster, and the half-life of truth.” It recounts what it’s like to be inside the envelope of fear as word spreads of an accident a nearby nuclear power station—in the land of Chernobyl, where no one is going to trust what the government says.

For online readers, the journal Places has inaugurated a series jointly publishing material from CNF with my essay. So you can find it online here, with some fabulous photos from Ukraine.