I really dug Leath Tonino’s interview with John Davis [“Where the Wild Things Are,” February 2025]. I have always been passionate about wildlife and decided in my twenties not to have children simply because I did not want to displace wildlife by adding to the earth’s human population. Seeing houses go up in what was once fields, woods, and meadows has always disturbed me. Some people have judged me for my decision to remain childless, but I feel it’s been my greatest contribution to the planet. Although overall I do not feel hopeful about the plight of other species, I am proud that I made that commitment forty years ago.
In “Where the Wild Things Are” John Davis speaks about the difficulties cougars would encounter if they tried to move east from the Black Hills to the Appalachians and Adirondacks. I live in a South Dakota university town about three hundred miles east of the Black Hills and thirty-three miles west of the Minnesota border. In 2024 a security camera in town caught a cougar walking down the middle of the street. This was after uncorroborated reports of local sightings had been circulating for several years, so the cougars have at least made it this far on their own.
Imani Perry and Nick Martin [“Crossroads,” January 2025] offer a refreshing take on the South. What excited me most in the interview was their brief conversation about Indigenous people in North Carolina. As a scholar and as a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe, I open The Sun every month hoping to see something about the beautiful Indigenous people of your magazine’s home state. Here, at last, was a mention.
I only wish Perry and Martin could have engaged in a deeper analysis of the solidarity and intertwined histories of Black and Indigenous people in the South. Martin mentioned some anti-Blackness exhibited by members of my own community during a racial-justice protest. Anti-Blackness indeed exists within tribal communities. But it’s also true that a lot of Native people in the South and on the East Coast have been racialized as Black, which is one reason so many of their tribes don’t have federal recognition. It’s a complex topic. I wanted more!
In her poem “Cows in the Parking Lot of the Emergency Dentist” [January 2025] Angela Janda subtly captures the ambivalence we often feel when a relationship ends. Maybe we recognize the good traits in the other person, still admire the things that initially attracted us, and have a hard time letting go of the comfortable familiarity that has developed. But those things aren’t enough to make us stay.
“Hymn,” by Reese Menefee [January 2025], struck home with me. I loved the poet’s humility in admitting we are all flawed humans, begging for mercy from the divine. I remember crying out for help once when there seemed to be no way out of the hole I had dug myself into. All I can say is that, where I couldn’t fathom a solution, God found a way. The Scripture “Help me in my unbelief” (Mark 9:24) reminds me that we are never alone and are deeply loved.
I was incredibly moved by Elizabeth Miki Brina’s essay “The Work We Do” [December 2024]. I found myself cringing at times, even disgusted, as I read it, but I quickly realized the disgust was born from my own shame. In Brina’s experience I saw a part of myself I never had the courage to share with the world.
Like the author, I, too, grew up in a mixed-race family with a hardworking immigrant mother and a financially comfortable white father. I, too, reaped the benefits of my mother’s hard work while refusing to work myself. I, too, had a mother who needed me to need her. At thirty-five I am just now learning how to really support myself. My deepest thanks to Brina for her raw and searing work, and for the opportunity to see myself more clearly.
I often enjoy a good cry while reading The Sun, but the tears I experienced while reading “The Work We Do” were next-level. Like Elizabeth Miki Brina, I have a dysfunctional dynamic with my mother around money. I’ve had the experience of my mom “thrusting hundred-dollar bills at me, refusing—sometimes with tears in her eyes—to let me refuse.” I have gone to the mall with my mother countless times and let her buy me whatever I wanted, and I’ve felt the guilt that comes after. I was in my late thirties before I finally started taking responsibility for my own finances.
Yesterday I bought myself a couple of pairs of scrubs for my job as a medical assistant. In the past I would have asked my mom to help pay for them. When I got home, I set the scrubs on the dining table, where The Sun was still open to Brina’s essay. As I looked at my new scrubs, paid for with money I’d earned, and that I would wear to work, where I would earn more money, I felt a huge surge of pride and self-respect. It’s a feeling I want to keep chasing.
Your December 2024 issue went with my mom to the ICU, where she had surgery for stage IV lung cancer. I read a few pages sitting next to her as she tried to sleep. She read it in her bed in quiet moments, and I packed it in her overnight bag on the day of her discharge. She’d scribbled some notes on the back: phone numbers and how to pronounce her doctor’s name.
In the discharge area she had a pulmonary embolism and died instantly in my arms.
It took my sister and me a week to unpack our mom’s hospital bags. My sister wanted to throw the magazine away because it reminded her of sitting in that ICU room, but I kept it because it was the last thing our mom had read, and I was searching so hard for any sign of a connection.
I just read Susan Neville’s short story “The Wind Phone.” I think I found it.
Poet Erik Tschekunow [“This Call Is from an Inmate at a Federal Prison,” November 2024] writes in his contributor’s note that he is “released from prison and repentant, [and] is still searching for the right way to say he’s sorry.” But he has already found the right way—or, at least, one way: writing about his need to repent, acknowledging it, and being strong enough to do so publicly.
His poem provides insight into the experience of being incarcerated—something rarely found in mainstream publications, but very often found in The Sun. As a society we need to hear from the people who have made mistakes (haven’t we all?), paid their debts, and are striving to make amends.
At least twenty years ago I was attending a conference at the Lama Foundation north of Taos, New Mexico. There was a very nice outhouse overlooking the Rio Grande Gorge. While sitting in it, I picked up a magazine called The Sun, which introduced me to even-more-beautiful views.
I still read The Sun, and I keep it in my bathroom.
In lieu of bedtime books, I’ve been reading my nine-year-old twins The Sun. (I edit out the parts that aren’t age appropriate.) They listen intently and ask questions.
Today has been a particularly stressful and heavy day, as it is both Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the day of the presidential inauguration. After I finished reading to the twins tonight and fielding their existential inquiries, my son said, “Mom, can you just keep reading us The Sun?” I nodded, and they settled in, Keith on my left arm and Lauren on my right, to listen to more beautiful stories.
