Topics | Incarceration | The Sun Magazine #17

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Incarceration

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Release

I cannot write how it was. The world shifted me too fast with each event passing before me, inflicting my nerves with flash-bulb rapidity. I was quietly startled at the fresh novelty. Numb still to the fact I was leaving, disbelieving, an embryo in limbo, sins forgiven, the timelessness suddenly and violently meaning something concrete.

By Jimmy Santiago Baca February 1979
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Cain’s Fate

Book Review

Cheever’s narrative details the later history. It tells the story of the wanderer, the outcast, the man cursed from the ground. It is a story not just of the fate of Cain, but also of the society which condemns him.

By David M. Guy May 1977
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Inside Out

A Spiritual Manual For Prison Life

The anger will go through; there will be no place in you it can hang its hat. The sticky thing in you is your model of who you think you are. But if you think of yourself as a soul going to God, then other people’s criticism either of your personality or of your body has no real effect on you.

By Ram Dass & Bo Lozoff May 1977
Photography

Drawings By Carl Harp 126-516

Being is my every breath, the truth I bathe in; Reality is my all even when it tears at me behind these walls. I will not look away, I have seen all the games, and though I am not perfect (who is?) I am not needing those things for they are not lasting.

By Carl Harp May 1977
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Freedom And Other Prisons

There are many prisons — illness, poverty, insanity. Life itself. We create our own realities; if we bleed for one another, so must we laugh. But it’s no less the prison for our having laid the brick.

By Sy Safransky November 1976