Writing

The Good End of Pleasant Street

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

When our landlords came by to introduce themselves, they stood beside a shelf of our books on how to avoid suffering: “Develop a mind that clings to nothing,” said the Buddhist Diamond Sutra; Be Here Now, read the spine of a Ram Dass book. Dan was a general contractor and wore a flat cap and a half grin. Or a sneer. I wasn’t sure which.

My Bowstring Heart

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

On the field I was all animal instinct and brute force—a bruiser, a bone breaker. Every tackle was a rebuke against a life where fathers die. When I played rugby, I wasn’t a broke, lost little girl. I wasn’t a struggling amateur writer. I had goals. I was a winner. I was MVP. I was someone.

Practice Losing Everything

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.

The Coast of Nowhere II

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Sleet and black rain / pelting the eaves, the kind of predawn / that reaches through the window, hissing, / Your heart never was a bird let alone / a bright-red singing one.

Eating Free

leathtonino@gmail.com — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Perhaps this isn’t the case at all Embassy Suites, but in Flagstaff, Arizona, between 5 and 7 pm, the hotel provides unlimited snacks and beer, gratis. I’ll repeat that: unlimited. Granted, I never imbibed more than three Michelobs and a cubic yard of Chex mix, but still. The possibility of unlimited is delectable.

The Fourth Estate

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:45 -0500

I don’t believe we’re confined to the media business models that we know. As the information landscape evolves, there will still be journalism about what is happening now, and that will help people in the future who are trying to make sense of it. This work has value.

Sunbeams

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

The press must be free. It has always been so, and much evil has been corrected by it. If government finds itself annoyed by it, let it examine its own conduct, and it will find the cause.

Thomas Erskine

The Danish

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Then I felt a small admiration for the Man With The Danish, who hoped to give away excess food rather than throw it in the trash. Maybe I should have accepted the Danish, although I didn’t want it. By turning it down resentfully, I might have discouraged him from ever offering food to a stranger again. But there’s no time to think when someone thrusts a sudden dessert in your face.

The Body Eats

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

I want to keep eating. I want life. More life. I want to turn from the simple facts of my existence to consider bigger mysteries, to fret about what might be, to remember what is no more. I want to imagine something other than this food in front of me, already a commodity on some assembly line, moving away from me.

Become a Friend of The Sun

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Putting this magazine together has remained a profoundly human endeavor, the work of many hands, even as the media landscape has become more automated.

The Cat Who Woke Me Up

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

The hierarchy that places humans above cats has broken down. I know, in a way I once didn’t, that cats and dogs and birds and bees and every living creature are conscious in a way that’s too hard for most of us to acknowledge. We’re all a bunch of narcissists who imagine that no life-form is quite as appealing as this one we call human. We’re unable to share the stage unless the animals are the supporting players.

Eight Tenets

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

This morning I tell myself, Everything is possible—the first tenet of qigong, the Chinese practice where you stand or sit and start scooping energy out of the air like it’s invisible ice cream. Reaching out and scooping, pulling back and placing energy on your heart, energy that allows good things to happen in all situations. This makes me feel super ninja and ready to meet the day.

There, Here, Jazz

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

The first time I walked into our new old house, it was the light / that surprised me—how much of it fell through the four windows / facing south and landed wide across the floorboards . . .

Become a Friend of The Sun

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

My dad and I joke that reading The Sun is a family tradition, passed down through generations. Dad received his first gift subscription in the 1980s from his mom, whom I called Gan. Gan was the family matriarch, full of strong opinions on everything from the Reagan-infused politics of the day to the best way to brew a cup of tea.

Conversations With A Banana Spider

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

The smell of wild honeysuckle was everywhere, and the mango trees sagged with the weight of their fruit. I’d often hear the ripe ones fall to the street with a heavy, wet thud, or else bang off the metal roofs of outbuildings where homeless wanderers sometimes slept. This abundance of fruit made Loreto seem like an impossible place to starve, yet I saw a few souls who looked like they were trying their best to do just that. Was it legal, I wondered, to simply reach up and pull a ripe mango from someone else’s tree? Being a foreigner with money, I didn’t need to find out.

This Is Hard To Write

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

I’m learning that crying is what it is, not bad, not good. And that dementia is what it is, not bad, not good. And anything can happen in anyone’s life, anywhere, anytime. Not bad, not good.

Become a Friend of The Sun

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0500

There’s something about art that too often goes unnoticed: art requires we engage. Each month we receive thousands of submissions of prose, poetry, and photography from people hoping to be published in The Sun. And we engage with each submission in hopes of finding those that will resonate most with you. Our commitment is to bring you the best we can find, the writing and photography that help to unwrap the layers of gauze we wind around ourselves and which obscure the things that matter most. We are profoundly grateful for your support.

Love and Other Pandemics

jhnelson427@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The thing about the apocalypse is that nobody said it would be so beautiful. Spring is letting down her hair. The air is warm, sweet, and clear. Moss drapes over a storm drain, parting for the rush of early-morning runoff. A heavy quiet has descended since we took to our homes, save for the shrieking hawks circling the shuttered strip-mall parking lot next door to my mother’s house outside of Philadelphia.

Sunbeams

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

History is a very tricky thing. To begin with, you can’t get it mixed up with the past. The past actually happened, but history is only what someone wrote down.

A. Whitney Brown

Thoreau and Me

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Thoreau was the same sort of hippie I am. The main difference between us is that I do not want my writing to be as absolutely sexless as his. I want to be a Thoreauvian capable of lust.

Enemies of Freedom

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Like the breeze that blew through the campus that day, whipping up the leaves and our hair, the student strike had stirred me, as if from sleep. Certainly, in deciding to march despite my fears, I woke up a little: I saw more clearly than I had before that my teachers weren’t my parents and my parents weren’t God and that I could risk a little disapproval without my world falling apart.

Gift Shops of the American Wild

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:01:00 -0400

The Paradise Inn sits at 5,400 feet on the south slope of Mount Rainier, the highest peak in Washington State. Up here the air is thin and crisp, the colors are saturated, and every breeze carries an aroma of pine and the trill of birdsong. Even immersed in such concentrated beauty, my heart aches. For the hundredth time today I think of Jack, a fellow writer in the graduate program I recently completed. We bonded over our love of books and our homesickness for the Midwest.

Become a Friend of The Sun

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The Sun is not immune to the relentless business pressures and tectonic shifts in the media landscape over the last two decades. And while I am grateful these changes have underscored what is vital and unique about The Sun, it seems that every week I read about a worthy publication having to close its doors. We are committed to bringing our readers the best writing and photography, free from the distraction of advertising. With this choice comes the reality that the price of a subscription doesn’t come close to what it costs to print and distribute the magazine and curate the website. As we have throughout our history, we are asking you again, with great humility, to be our partner on this journey and formally become a Friend of The Sun.

Two Guys Walk into a Bar

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

But I’m talking about joke structure; you’re asking about the purpose of comedy as a whole. When my first book came out, people would ask me in interviews, “Why is comedy important?” I don’t know that it is. There are lots of people, believe it or not, who don’t care about comedy. And they can live to the age of eighty or ninety.

Abandon All Expectations

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0500

The fish is now thrashing at the surface. Unlike every other captain I have seen, Cuervo uses a net, not a gaff, to bring it aboard. He has enough experience to know that, by the time a full-grown yellowtail is brought to the boat, it has essentially fought itself to death. Rich lets the captain take over, and Cuervo handles the marvelous creature with a tenderness that has been missing from most of my charter-fishing experiences.

This Month In Sun History

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

The most important December in Sun history is, well, this one: the month in which Sy Safransky, after fifty years of laboring to put out the magazine he founded, steps away from his desk and becomes, deservingly, editor emeritus.

A Letter From Sy’s Desk

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

In January my implausible idea of working at the magazine for fifty years will have come to pass, and I will comfortably step into a new role as editor emeritus. That having been said, it’s hard for me to say goodbye.

Become A Friend Of The Sun

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

Every person around us contains a whole universe. The Sun has always seemed to me like a place where we throw a bunch of universes together and see what happens. . . . If you value the way The Sun brings a variety of voices to your ear — some candid, some cajoling, some joyous, and all of them looking you in the eye and telling the capital-T Truth — then I hope you’ll consider making a donation and becoming A Friend of The Sun. Any amount you give helps bring us together in the magazine’s pages month after month.

Sunbeams

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

The challenge of running The Sun continues to occupy me. Sometimes it occupies me like a conquering army, sometimes like the Holy Ghost. Either way I’m grateful for the chance to do this work month after month, year after year — a man happy to have found his cross to bear. Yes, even living your dream can feel like a burden now and then. But, my oh my, to live your dream! And not just when you’re sleeping, but every morning when you open your eyes. Then you sit in the dark and write a few words. Then the sun comes up.

Sy Safransky’s Notebook, May 2006

Selected Poems

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0400

For two years The Sun was a lighthouse that guided me through rough, dark waters: Every line of mine that Sy [Safransky] published penetrated a little more of the fog called imprisonment. Every poem revealed my wrecked spirit dashed against the reef. Not only had Sy loved them, but Sun readers sent letters of appreciation, which Sy printed in the magazine. I’d never been complimented for anything, much less a literary contribution. My life had some hope in it now.