Pat Ellis Taylor

Come Rain Or Come Shine

Twenty-Five Years Of The Sun

This month marks The Sun’s twenty-fifth anniversary. As the deadline for the January issue approached — and passed — we were still debating how to commemorate the occasion in print. We didn’t want to waste space on self-congratulation, but we also didn’t think we should let the moment pass unnoticed. At the eleventh hour, we came up with an idea: we would invite longtime contributors and current and former staff members to send us their thoughts, recollections, and anecdotes about The Sun. Maybe we would get enough to fill a few pages. What we got was enough to fill the entire magazine.

From The Holy Mother Of Jobs

(Formerly The Goddess Of Labor): A Report On A Poor Supplicant

Understanding comes like a delayed explosion in her head. Lightning has hit the fireworks stand and here she is thinking about it! Instead of being dead! Instead of flying through the sky with a fountain of fireworks a mile high!

Bearing Up In Winter

She begins to go through the store’s canceled checks, bank statements, and copies of federal employer’s quarterly tax returns, which I do not have enough of, according to the records in the file that Dolores has brought with her.

A Spell Without Books

Austin is built on a series of criss-crossing fault lines, the intersections of which cause parts of the city to sag into what might be called “seeps” or “sucks” — places where the earth breathes in and out, sometimes seeping and sometimes sucking.

Left-Handed Work: A Theory For Women

(perhaps for some men, too)

so i have been working these past two weeks, mulling and toiling and essaying and travailing, over what is now a large sheaf of rough draft garbage, complete and total crap. love’s labour lost.

When The War-Father Appears

i can see the worst all right — the earth exploding in some climactic chain reaction and all of us going off sparking out at the same time and i think i am going to like it if it happens that way after all we’ll be learning something together something massive that we’ve been trying to understand for a while and in that final sparking and arcing of the earth’s blow-up we’ll finally get it we’ll understand

A Clouded Visit With Rolling Thunder

well, rolling thunder wasn’t named that for nothing. he let me know for a good several minutes that he was displeased with my presence and my approach. he said i had no respect, and that was the trouble with white people.

Descent Into Brotherland

Now I’ve visited okie in the brig before, I’ve visited okie in the psychiatric wards, and I’ve visited okie in the oklahoma jail, and I’ve talked to the lawyers and jail wardens and policemen and psychiatric boards and judges. So I’m only a little bit nervous about talking to this va psychiatrist about okie’s va check which hasn’t been coming for the right amount of disability since he got out of jail.

News From El Corizon

In The Composing Room

Well you tell your mom you can sleep on the floor here tonight, I tell her, if nothing else turns up. And I’m thinking that blankets thrown down for them on a bare floor in the apartment of strangers isn’t much to offer, they will have to be pretty desperate to accept an offer like that.

Sermon On The Rat

Do you have a dog? he asks me. I say no, and he says well that’s good because dogs shed so much. And do you have cats? I say no. And he says well, you might think about getting one, they’re always good to keep the mice down. I don’t think too much about that until I start cleaning out the kitchen cabinets and find a spring trap about a foot long, large enough to cripple a horse.