Issue 29 | The Sun Magazine
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Kicking The Corpse, Or Is This Love?

I’m having a hard time writing this. I think I’ve figured out why. I want it to be a eulogy, but I can’t stop kicking the corpse. I want you to care that another American newspaper has expired. But I wonder if I care.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Temple Sweeper

Warm summer weather and more time outdoors bring with them predictable health problems, mostly minor, but nonetheless annoying. I would like to share some “home remedies” which are based mainly on herbal or holistic approaches.

By Val Staples
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Banana By Any Other Name

The Case Against Brand-Name Vegetables

Four years after the Chiquita campaign had been launched, United had captured nearly a third of the country’s market at prices 10 to 15% higher than other bananas. Through brand name promotion, United had convinced consumers to pay more for Chiquitas than other bananas and to like doing it.

By Cary Fowler
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

In Joy

Joy is a spark, an energy of newness that lives in the moment. Joy moves me out of myself, out of that part of the universe I am identifying with and calling me.

By Hannah Baggins
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Remembering The Bicentennial

This is all in service of an excuse to reissue a bunch of bicentennial humor that ran on WDBS from the fall of ’75 to July 4, 1976. There were well over a hundred different “bicentennial minutes,” and what follows was excerpted from the worst of them.

By David Searls
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Afrikaner

Following through on an attempt to understand white South Africa’s control and manipulation of the Black/Colored/Asian majority is a journey that invokes a logical progression of disbelief sliding to horror, then, finally, a half step beyond to revulsion.

By William Gaither
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Relative Poverty And Frugality

The attempt of this essay is to show relative poverty not as an expedient toward a certain goal but as the brick and mortar for the construction of a condition of equity and transcendence through a lean ecological-theological congruence.

By Paolo Soleri
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Journal

The paradox of trying to educate yourself and then live within the environment your ideals have dictated is: try but don’t try.

By Betsy Campbell Blackwell
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Secret Garden

Herbal beauty treatments are fun to create, and it’s comforting to know they are pure. Consider the difference between synthetic drugstore preparations and the fresh ingredients of homemade concoctions. I’d rather make my own, thanks.

By Lucia Peck
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Monstrosity And Beauty

Book Review

The October light in Vermont that gives the novel its title is variously seen. Lewis Hicks at one point sees it casting beauty over the landscape; James Page, in a moment of despair, believes it exposes all the world’s rottenness.

By David M. Guy
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Shadow Dancing

We open our hearts at different rates. Often we are afraid of touching the parts of ourselves that we still don’t love or accept, where the lifetimes of pain lay buried.

By Leaf Diamant
Fiction

The Vampire Of Menitz

The people of Menitz could never remember a time when there had not been a vampire. So of course it was hard for them to remember the details of the good old days.

By Randee Russell Ascher