Alison Luterman | The Sun Magazine #5

Alison Luterman

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Alison Luterman lives, works, and coaches other writers from a hundred-year-old house in Oakland, California. For the past few years she’s been learning basic music theory and how to play piano and sing. She’s slowly making progress.

— From April 2024
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Secret Of My Success

For me, the answer to the question “When do you write?” is easy: I write when I’m avoiding some other important task.

November 2003
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Happiness Box

While they visited, that invisible beast Loneliness would shift on his paws and pad quietly out of the room, only to return faithfully when darkness fell and I crawled into a bed that was too big. Lucky for me, the kids always stayed as long as possible. Norah, especially, hated to leave. She’d cling to my hand or my neck with the ferocity of the early-abandoned.

March 2002
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Empty Sky

Reflections On 09.11.01

The Sun doesn’t usually report on current events, but September’s terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. marked a turning point for all of us. We put out a call to our writers, inviting them to reflect on the tragedy and its aftermath. The response was overwhelming. As word got around, we received submissions not only from regular contributors but from writers who are new to The Sun’s pages.

November 2001
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Purple Nails

At dinner, I was soft-spoken, laughed a lot, and didn’t delve immediately into the deepest possible level of conversation, the way I usually do. It was somehow easy to let my date pull out my chair for me, to wait politely while he served me first, to nod and smile and gracefully sip my wine. When I did talk, my fingertips floated and flashed in the air in front of me, trailing invisible purple sparks. I have no idea what either of us said.

June 2001
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