Issue 531 | The Sun Magazine

March 2020

Readers Write

Shortcuts

Along the shoreline, through a neighbor’s yard, in a back alley

By Our Readers
One Nation, Indivisible

March 2020

Featuring Joel Dyer, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Kingsolver, and more.

The Dog-Eared Page

One’s Place Upon The Earth

As I strolled through a glide of water clear as air, my fisherman’s heart did a somersault when I sighted, not twenty feet away, two chinook salmon easily twenty times the size of the trout I’d been happily catching and releasing.

By David James Duncan
Quotations

Sunbeams

My uncles . . . are farmers in Minooka, Illinois. I grew up with them and their pickup trucks and mustaches, and to me that was masculinity: big, hairy, sweaty guys who could pick up a bus.

Nick Offerman

The Sun Interview

Blind Hate

Randy Blazak On Why White Supremacy Persists

Generation Z, my daughter’s generation, is the most racially mixed and most diverse, and they are the worst nightmare of the old white supremacists.

By Thacher Schmid
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Orange Appreciation Award

I keep a few backyard oranges mixed in with the baseballs in the bucket I take to practice. Every time one of my teammates peeks in, he’s like, “Oranges?” question mark, when it really ought to be “Oranges!” EXCLAMATION POINT!

By Mark Gozonsky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Recipe For Strawberry Bliss

Learn the word ennui. Resolve to do something meaningful with your life. Do something selfish and stupid instead. Go to prison.

By Steven Stampone
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

How It Ends

It begins like this: You drop your son off at kindergarten. His first day of school. You think that nothing in your life will be as big as this: the moment he drops your hand, he who has clung to you since birth, since that first breath of air, first scream, first frantic rooting for the breast.

By Louise A. Blum
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

100 Dollars

Are you thirsty? Do you like to drink water? Are you from a generation that thinks it’s OK to drink water out of single-use plastic bottles? Then the world works for you!

By Daniel Uncapher
Fiction

Mark On The Cross

MARK HOHN, a handwritten sign said. DEC. 19, 2013. 17 YRS. Here’s what struck me like a bus. It happened to be Dec. 19. He’d died exactly two years earlier. I sat on the ground before the cross and told myself to pay attention, that this was no coincidence.

By Maria Black
Poetry

Staccato

I’m trying to work at this coffee shop / while a young woman with blue hair / and chiseled biceps, two tables away, / holds forth about how no one / should ever take medication / for anxiety and depression

By Alison Luterman
Poetry

Baptism

My daughter writes on her Father’s Day card, / “Thanks for baptizing me in the stream / and planting the seed of nature-love in my soul.” / Wow. I am a lucky man.

By Howard Nelson
Poetry

Selected Poems

from “After He Left” | I returned home from work and stood / alone in the darkest / room in the house in my blouse / and skirt, barefoot.

By Heather Sellers