Issue 17 | The Sun Magazine
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Another Appetite

Little Rebecca has inherited her mother’s desire to explore foreign places. She can sit in the car happily singing, sleeping or just watching the world go by for ten hours as long as she is moving on to new people and places. Some morning she’ll run to the car demanding to “go, go, go someplace.”

By Judy Bratten
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Seymour Dueless Says

Let’s see, travel. I abhor it as a general rule. No, that’s not true. I like to travel. If I were rich I would probably go to Europe. Nowadays, it’s pretty much the trip into town and whether or not the brake job I did myself is going to . . . well.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Searls Speaks

Making Sense Of Seth

One of Seth’s main points is that each of us has a personality that is far deeper and more complex than our senses lead us to think. Each of us has lived many lives, he says, and the physical reality that we are focused in is but one aspect of personal being that operates on many levels.

By David Searls
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Small Is Beautiful

Many writers, dazzled by the growth in size and power of national governments and corporate enterprises, make the mistake of calling for a single, global organ to coordinate human affairs. Their idea is to free industry from national shackles and supercharge the market by way of central organization.

By Ted Marsh
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Housing

From The Bottom Up

Contemporary builders have a set procedure for doing business. It may prove expedient and trustworthy to some and expensive and cumbersome to others. Generally it reflects the way in which we run our society in a caste system: white collar – blue collar.

By Stephen Martin
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Channel One

We all dream. Research begun in the 1950s shows that all people dream — even people who remember no dreams. “Non-dreamers” will recall dreams if they are awakened during periods of rapid eye movement (REM). These occur during periods of light sleep when the eyeballs move rapidly back and forth under closed lids, and the brain is very active. We usually have three or four REM periods a night.

By Leaf Diamant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

From The People Who Brought You Law An’ Order

In his unceasing quest to keep this country great by returning himself to office in November, Gerald Ford has been making some very troubling noises about national security lately. Initially, many of us were willing to regard speeches of this sort as little more than political necessity; a Republican candidate paying homage to the more rigid, “spare the rod, spoil the Dow Jones” spirits in the conservative camp.

By William Gaither
Fiction

Off The Road

Studying astronomy, as a child, I was fascinated by the Earth’s movement, its rotation on its axis, its orbit around the sun, its sweep, with the rest of the galaxy, through space. Despite the evidence of my senses, nothing stood still. 

By Sy Safransky
Fiction

Eat Your Heart Out

My friend, Arnold, is having a fight with the stewardess. “I will make you into salami!” he is screaming. I’m making believe I don’t know Arnold. I bury my face in a magazine, “Modern Maturity,” a few seats back from his. We are flying Astral Coach to Venus.

By Karl Grossman
Fiction

Little Soapy And Big Jim

We’re sailin up the Limpopo River from Fool’s Tide to Pope’s Eye. In some places we can reach out and touch the dried old balls of priests hanging from the trees way out over the river.

By Little Soapy
Fiction

The Wanderer

I was walking with a friend a few nights ago, sharing tales of lusty, high adventure drawn from a mid-winter’s odyssey to Boston, when Joe offered a remarkable insight: “You know, it’s the settled man who keeps the wanderer on the road.”

By Robert Donnan
Fiction

A Short History Of Part Of North Carolina

With Some Names Changed To Protect The Innocent, The Guilty, & The Dead

They had locked chains around Lester’s skinny ankles. The faded blue prison shirt and pants fitted poorly on Lester’s five-eight body, all of a hundred pounds. “Lester won’t come out,” Bambi said. She was right. Lester hanged himself in his cell within the year.

By C.B. Clark
Photography

Photo Essay By Rick Doble

The photographs from this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

My main subject, as a photographer, is Durham, the community in which I live. I like also to display and publish these images within the area because it is extremely satisfying to listen to a response from people who live here.

By Rick Doble
Poetry

Dialogue With My Shell

as a turtle of eternity, to abstract within mySelf is evo­lutional prerogative. from such a featherstance, un­moored and let loose on the seas of cognition, my essen­tial faculties explore the relics of significance lodged within a correspondent synchronicity which has no mercy for distortions.

By Jainindriya