The Sun Interview

Throwing Away The Key: Michelle Alexander On How Prisons Have Become The New Jim Crow
“People in prison are largely invisible to the rest of us. We have more than 2 million inmates warehoused, but if you’re not one of them, or a family member of one of them, you scarcely notice.”
By Arnie Cooper

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Brother’s Keeper
Watching a sister grow up too fast
By Akhim Yuseff Cabey

The Nature Trail Closest To My House
The grass is green right here
By Rob Keast

Saving Danny James
A prisoner’s last days with his cellmate
By Saint James Harris Wood

Fiction

Higher Learning
“It’s an odd thing to realize: This child of his, the same flailing baby that he and Dianne brought into this world, is unlike the other girls milling about — and it’s not fatherly fondness clouding his vision.”
By Robin Romm

Poetry

Detroit As Barn
By Crystal Williams

Readers Write

Making It Last
A marriage, a piece of chocolate, a childhood blanket
Personal stories by our readers

Departments

Sy Safransky’s Notebook
“With pithy public-service announcements about the transitory nature of existence, I remind myself regularly not to get too comfortable here.”

Sunbeams
“Laws bind us. But it is important to remember the law is only what is popular. Not what’s right or wrong.”

“After the game, me and Gord duck out past curfew to the Belleville Pub, and I drink eight beers to Gord’s five, ten to his six, twelve to his eight. Two puck bunnies sit with us, and Gord talks to the prettier one. The one who should be mine is watching him instead while he tells them how he’s chasing the record for single-season points. I want to tell my girl that she’s cute, but my tongue feels sore and swollen in my head, and I wonder when I bit it and didn’t notice.”

More

Sun contributor and former associate publisher Angela Winter writes: “A river of beauty flows under the bloody ice in this slap shot of a story. The voice of the brutal, hockey-playing protagonist, Danny ‘Cementhead’ Ciemasko, rings true and compels me to empathize with him, though most of his actions are utterly reprehensible. In the fourteen years I’ve been reading The Sun, Danny remains the most vivid, memorable character — one who squeezes my heart.”

A workshop leader in Philadelphia reads “Written on the Bones,” Alison Luterman’s December interview with Kim Rosen, and finds in it an example of “the transformative power of language.”

An artist in Phoenix, Arizona, seeks to pare down his life and is reminded of a Readers Write piece on “Possessions” from June 2005.

1. Vital Signs: Dr. Andrew Weil Diagnoses Western Medicine
   Interview by David Kupfer
   (January 2011)
2. Do You Know How Much I Love You?
   Fiction by Annie Weatherwax
   (January 2011)
3. Medicine
   Personal stories by our readers
   (January 2011)
4. Brewing Up Trouble: Chip Berlet On The Tea Party And The Rise Of Right-Wing Populism
   By David Barsamian
   (November 2010)
5. At The Heart Of Healing: An Interview With Stephen Levine
   Interview by Ralph Earle
   (October 1989)

Into the Fire: The Sun Celebrates Personal Writing
Wildacres Retreat, Little Switzerland, North Carolina
April 8–10, 2011

We invite you to join Sun authors Joseph Bathanti, Krista Bremer, David Brendan Hopes, Pat MacEnulty, and Mark Smith-Soto, along with editor and publisher Sy Safransky, for a lively weekend of writing, reflection, and inspiration. The gathering will be held at Wildacres, a mountaintop retreat center situated on 1,600 acres of lush woodland near North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Parkway.

Click here for details.

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