Holiday Offer

I recently tried to figure out how many hours our editorial staff devotes to a single issue of The Sun — sifting through the hundreds of submissions that arrive here each month, editing and proofreading the material we’ve selected, designing the pages. It’s harder to calculate how much time goes into the writing itself, since it doesn’t even happen at the office but on crowded desks and messy kitchen tables and quiet back porches all around the country.

A thousand hours, I figured. A thousand hours of steady, intent work to create an issue it takes you a few hours to read.

Correspondence

You say in your “Holiday Offer” that you don’t want The Sun to be self-consciously spiritual. I think you have succeeded. When I think of spiritual, I think of something appealing to the positive aspects of the soul; if not something inspiring, then at least something to provoke analytical thought or healthy introspection. To me, your ideals and goals seem to have become muddled in grousing and complaining. Even a Zen master might contemplate his shit, but he’s unlikely to show it to everyone.

Many of your articles are depressing and dispirited. Your writers dwell on their injuries and psychic scars, the sorrows and disappointments of their lives. This may be some people’s way of getting over and getting on, but it seems too often they are lingering on those unresolved slights, injuries, and painful times. Something tells me that aspiring to self-determination and reason is preferable to continual brooding.

I don’t need a sugar-coated brand of realism to provide me with happiness. But your editorial content, from letters, to articles, to Sunbeam quotes, leaves something to be desired in maturity and taste and artistic appreciation for what is “spiritual.” Just because you choose to be scatological or depressing doesn’t make you provocative.

James R. Wiley Akron, Ohio

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Also In This Issue

November 1994