Issue 23 | The Sun Magazine
The Sun Interview

An Interview With Jerry Solfvin

Rather than go into detail about how parapsychology got started on the survival question, let me just say that we are currently approaching the question through what we call altered states of consciousness research. It’s kind of a back door approach, you might say, to this question.

By Julia Hardy
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Jimmy Carter And The South

Speaking over a year ago at Duke University, Congressman Andrew Young of Georgia made the far fetched prediction that the next President of the United States would be a Southerner. All of us at Duke thought that he was speaking of Terry Sanford. Young was speaking of his friend from Georgia.

By William H. Willimon
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

This Message Was Brought To You By . . .

I make most of my money from advertising. I know, I know. A lower form of enterprise is hard for many to imagine. Especially for a writer. Well, I’ll tell you this: for a writer unencumbered by ideological purity, it can be a damn fine business.

By David Searls
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Right Livelihood

Food Co-ops

Food co-ops became popular during the past decade as an alternative to supermarkets and retail natural food stores. What draws people to them are lower prices, democratic participation, friendly atmosphere, higher quality, and other factors.

By Hal Richman
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Life And Times

My recent experience as guest poet to two sixth-grade classes at the Frank Porter Graham School proved to be a successful and enjoyable learning experience for the students as well as a fresh poetic breath for me.

By Marilyn Michael
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Channel One

I believe that this universe cares about us. Everything that happens to us serves a purpose in our growth, our realization of who we are. We are not autumn leaves blowing in a cold and careless wind, but are travellers on the mysterious and wonder-filled paths of our lives.

By Leaf Diamant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Reflections On Re-Reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

Book Review

Reading The Idiot again after five years I am struck by what does not fit into the usual critical categories, a certain kind of truth in the writing, the erratic unnameable of vision. I begin to see there is no proper category for the vivid, an impulse to reveal, an edging toward light.

By John Rosenthal
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Journal

I have noticed that there are those who give spontaneously, unself-consciously. There are also those who have the same ability, but become distracted and brought down by the shadow of their own personalities, and a wavering results. In that instant of wavering, the gift melts. A state of listening grace evolves from instinctive setting aside of self.

By Betsy Campbell Blackwell
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

On Selling Advertising

Advertising, hmmm. Never thought I’d be an advertising salesman, but it comes with the territory. When COSMEP South — the newsletter of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers — asked for my thoughts on advertising, I pulled this out of my bottom drawer.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Another Appetite

The days of my life are inscribed in autumn’s diary; the leaves are pages burnished by experiences: some fiery red, some golden yellow, some mellow green, some dull brown.

By Judy Bratten
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

South Africa’s Dark Heart

South Africa first entered into the American national consciousness this past summer when the sprawling, million person ghetto of Soweto rose up in protests that the police and army quickly turned into bloody riot.

By William Gaither
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Mountain And I

To me the most natural form of exercise is running; to run you need no equipment but yourself, you need no shelter but the sky, you need no teacher but your instincts. Your energy goes directly into learning how to move with ease and grace.

By David Royle
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

An Open Letter To President-Elect Carter

As a bodily illness tells us something about the body of our thoughts, so are our national ills a sign we give ourselves, a challenge we fashion for our own awakening. The relationship between leader and led is intimate and profound, a delicate feedback system the Founding Fathers intuitively understood, and which it is our challenge to understand again, and more fully. The politics of consciousness.

By Sy Safransky
Fiction

Journey To Ishpeming

The person they called The Wizard and I were standing in the grimy men’s room of the Greyhound Bus Station in Ishpeming, Michigan. This is where The Wizard met visitors.

By Karl Grossman