Issue 496 | The Sun Magazine

April 2017

Readers Write

Almost

Keeping a promise, making amends, hitching a ride

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, / With conquering limbs astride from land to land; / Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand / A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

By Emma Lazarus
Quotations

Sunbeams

All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.

Pat Paulsen

The Sun Interview

An Open Mind

Sera Davidow Questions What We Think We Know About Mental Illness

I’ll tell you what we don’t do: we don’t call the person’s doctor, or dial 911, or drive people to the emergency room. We ask what’s going on for them — not what’s “wrong” with them or if they have been given a diagnosis. If they do mention a diagnosis, we ask what it means to them. If they talk about voices, visions, suicidal thoughts, or injuring themselves, we meet this with calm curiosity. We’ve found that what helps people move through such feelings is being able to talk openly about them. Unfortunately many people don’t talk openly in clinical environments for fear that alarms will be sounded.

By Tracy Frisch
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Art Of Aging

As you read this essay, you are aging. The older you get, the more you become an emissary from a vanished world — in my case, a world of black-and-white photographs taken by a Brownie camera, the sun bleaching the faces of the squinting subjects.

By Sparrow
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A List Of My Utopias

My mother is a wood thrush, and my father is a great snipe. They aren’t my parents in this utopia. They’re birds who met once, then drifted apart, as birds do, so they could lead their own lives and become who they were meant to be. They have no children, bird or otherwise, tugging them in a different, boring direction.

By Debbie Urbanski
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Foreign Coasts

It’s already sweltering at sunrise on this August Sunday morning in Norfolk, Virginia. My Lebanese grandfather is taking my brother and me fishing for blue crabs on the Elizabeth River. He stands on the dock and drops the oars into the flat-bottomed rowboat.

By David Zoby
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Steps One Through Four

While my father was stationed in Germany and dating my mother, he wrote her a letter saying, “Someday I’d like to have twins with blond hair and blue eyes.” Twenty-seven years later, here I am, one of his identical blond-haired, blue-eyed twin girls.

By Megan Denton Ray
Fiction

The Donkey At The Gates Of The Kingdom Of Heaven

Once, a donkey ascended to the shining gates of the kingdom of heaven. The gates were open. The donkey heard music more beautiful than anything he had ever imagined. Each note was a star going supernova, a pack of wolves running down an elk over snow. The song poured itself into the world. The donkey stood transfixed. Without thinking, he opened his mouth wide and brayed.

By David Rutschman
Fiction

Hallie Bang

Then Hallie meandered in twenty minutes late, glowing in bright colors — orange and green and purple. Her clothes looked like they’d been knitted by a blind person. She wore a scarf on her head and yellow combat boots, and I would give anything to experience that same fear and elation again, the feeling that we were starting something new together.

By Greg Ames
Poetry

The Diver

The Olympic moment I remember most / Does not involve gold medals / Or bright, enthusiastic faces in the Parade of Nations.

By Lynn Davis