Issue 493 | The Sun Magazine

January 2017

Readers Write

Making Friends

Late-night smokes, swearing lessons, the facts of life

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

A Politics Of Hope

It is that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, and yet still come together as one American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.

By Barack Obama
Quotations

Sunbeams

After baseball, America’s favorite pastime may be the process of reinventing itself, continuously redefining its identity and searching for its soul.

Brenda Payton

The Sun Interview

Every Reason To Stay

Eva Saulitis’s Life With Whales

I have to say, what kept me there was not the science but the place. I wanted to be there in a way that had purpose. I didn’t want to visit or go on long kayak trips. I wanted to spend my life in Prince William Sound. For five years I lived at a field camp for three or four months at a time. The work gave me a purpose for being there: a part to play in protecting the ecosystem.

By Christine Byl
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Pedal, Pedal, Pedal

On a bike I have wings and a kingdom. On a bike I’m a taller, stronger, wiser version of myself — the person I wish to be on land. It’s always been this way.

By Heather Sellers
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Edge Of The World

The wide sweep of the northern Gulf of Mexico and the Apalachee Bay is in perpetual motion, reshaping, and at times reclaiming, my front yard. Alligator Harbor, with its clear shallows and deceptive currents — pulled by the moon, the sun, the trickster we call weather — defines and sculpts my backyard, revising boundaries and property lines, confounding appraisers and owners alike.

By Connie May Fowler
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

In The Body That Once Was Mine

There are many ways of not knowing, not seeing, and there are equally many ways of knowing, of coming to know deep in your body, embodying knowledge the way my ancestors embodied culture, the way the earth embodies language and spiritual belief and insult. Or maybe what I want to say is that it takes many ways of knowing to overcome your brain’s many refusals. To admit you know a thing like cancer resides — is seizing control — inside your body.

By Eva Saulitis
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Scotty

The story begins with a message on Facebook: “I’m looking for Wayne Scott from the Baltimore area. A Navy veteran, about seventy-two or seventy-three. A relative of yours by any chance?” A phone call to my mother confirms that my father, whose name I inherited and who was close-lipped about his past, had dropped out of high school and joined the Navy when he was seventeen.

By Wayne Scott
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My Jets Cap

One day a woman on a subway platform called out to me, “Go, Jets!” while raising her fist. Puzzled, I looked behind me and saw no one. Then I remembered: I was wearing a Jets cap.

By Sparrow
Fiction

Pretty Women

Later I showed my evidence. I had text messages of course; everyone always has text messages. The text message is now the lipstick on the collar, and the worst thing is that, much like the lipstick, it only hints at what really is going on.

By Lisa Taddeo
Poetry

Selected Poems

from “Wanting” | Wanting’s the thing, not the thing itself. / The thing itself no longer calls to me

By Mark Smith-Soto