I stopped subscribing to The Sun a couple of years ago when the topics covered in your pages were just too dark for me to handle. Inspired to dive in again this morning, I read Teri Stein’s essay “Penumbra” [October 2024] and was drawn to its truth. The manner in which she weaved together Roe v. Wade, her personal trauma, the shortcomings of our legal system, and ingrained racism was masterful. I’ve shared her essay with others—despite not usually sharing articles that make me sad or angry—because all the women I know should read this.
“Penumbra” is both educational and deeply moving, especially for someone like me who took his time maturing, then became the father of two girls. My daughters have lived through the same time period Teri Stein describes so well. She has done readers a great service by sharing her experience with us.
As a man, I have often read with sadness about the ways men mistreat women and with anger about the ways the law polices women’s bodies. Teri Stein extraordinarily describes both in “Penumbra.” But I was relieved to read that she has nonetheless met a “confident and kind man” with whom she can “joyfully use [her] Eisenstadt-sanctioned contraceptives.” I admire her ability to cherish that joy without for a moment letting us forget the obstacles so often put in the way of women’s happiness.
I have been a subscriber for many years, but after Sy Safransky retired as editor, I didn’t renew because there was one issue that just didn’t resonate with me. Still I’ve kept getting the remainder of my subscription. This week I received the October issue. I opted to read Teri Stein’s “Penumbra” first. Not only is the writing brilliant, but the topic is timely and relevant as the 2024 election approaches. Too many people—including misguided women—intend to vote for a party that doesn’t care if women suffer or die.I read Stein’s essay twice. I folded down the corner so I could read it again in the future. Then, as I used to do, I read every page of the magazine in one sitting. After two cups of coffee and a lot of thinking, I am renewing my subscription—primarily because of her piece, but also because this issue spoke to me as others had in the past. Thanks for continuing to carry on Sy’s worthy and necessary project.
The Sun is contagious! In the years I have subscribed, I’ve turned my brother-in-law, my son, and my sister into avid readers of your magazine. I feel refreshed when I read it. It hits my heart because the writers, whether I agree with them or not, make their stories real.
In “Thoreau and Me” [October 2024] Sparrow (or should I say “Sparreau”?) has brought me healing, revelations, and joy. He encourages me to believe I can survive learning that all my idols have their human imperfections. I hope I can also survive confessing my own flaws
God bless Sparrow for admitting that even his disciplined approach to Thoreau leaves time to binge-watch Saturday Night Live on YouTube. He has validated my own guilty pleasures. I bet even Henry David himself would approve.
I received my October issue in the mail this morning, and as an incarcerated writer, I have a problem with the back cover—specifically the sentence “A poem about a conversation with an inmate.” This tells me that you do not have many conversations with incarcerated people. Inmate is an antiquated term, similar to slave versus enslaved person. As I’ve explained to many, if you are called “fat” all day long, how do you feel at night? Words are important. People are more than their criminal convictions
Todd Davis’s “The Next Peak” [October 2024] is as luscious as those huckleberries at the end of the essay.
I’ve never seen myself so clearly in the life of another as I did in Sy Safransky’s essay “Enemies of Freedom” [The Dog-Eared Page, October 2024]. I was a college student in 1961. My Oregon campus was also scheduled to host a communist speaker, but it bowed to community pressure and canceled the engagement. I was living off campus, so, rather than marching in protest, I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper. When someone called my home in response to my letter and suggested that I be shipped off to Russia, my father laughed it off, then shared with me his own exploration of communist thought during his hobo days in the Great Depression.
Since that time, I have written hundreds of letters to newspapers, to politicians, and to my heroes and opponents alike. Be it wise or foolish to do so, I treasure this freedom as my right as an American citizen. Sy said it well: “Win or lose, I know I have to keep struggling against the tyranny from without, and from within.”
It seems to me you are including more explicitly sexual writing in your magazine recently. Thank you! Based on other letters to the editor, I imagine this is unsettling to some of your readers and maybe has even lost you some subscribers, but whoever made this decision should be applauded. We are sexual creatures. Divorcing bodily experience from the search for meaning and redemption and spiritual development is the stuff of patriarchal, organized religion and the purity standards used to repress pleasure and control people. The themes found in The Sun deserve a sexual lens. Thank you especially for including queer and promiscuous voices. They have something to teach those who find them “indecent.”
For many years I have found your magazine to be indispensable reading. I tell friends that there is always something to excite me—and quite often to offend me—in The Sun, and that’s OK. But Peter Stenson’s story [“Bone Frag”] in your October 2024 issue has no redeeming features. I read the whole thing believing that surely there would be something of value. But there was nothing. Awful.
I regularly volunteer as an election worker. Our local elections officials are kind and efficient, my fellow volunteers jovial and focused, but the days are super long, and we’re limited in how we are allowed to pass the time. Good reading material is a necessity, so I always bring my latest copies of The Sun. In the waning hours of the 2024 general election, I was reading Peter Stenson’s “Bone Frag.” Gross and weird and funny and terrifying, the story has stuck with me in the intervening days, as I and millions of others grapple with a future we didn’t choose, yet must live through. Like the protagonist in the story, I wonder how long we can normalize the horrific.Thanks for giving me something to hang my anxiety on as I ride the waves of the coming storm. At least there’s no human flesh falling from the sky—yet
