Sy Safransky | The Sun Magazine #6

Sy Safransky

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Sy Safransky is founder and editor of The Sun. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

— From December 2023
Sy Safransky's Notebook

November 2007

My father’s parents, who lived with us throughout my childhood, fled Russia in 1905 to escape poverty and the state-sponsored massacres of Jews, called pogroms. They told me about the elation they’d felt when, after an arduous three-week ocean journey, they’d glimpsed the majestic statue in New York Harbor for the first time.

November 2007
Sy Safransky's Notebook

October 2007

If I sit here waiting for the perfect sentence to show up, I’ve got a long wait ahead of me. Maybe the perfect sentence doesn’t want me to wait. Maybe the perfect sentence is tired of one-night stands with writers who fall in love too easily, who can’t be trusted to stick around when the perfect sentence turns out to be not so perfect after all.

October 2007
Sy Safransky's Notebook

September 2007

When I try too hard to get my life into order, I forget the order that gives rise to this life — an order born of mystery, but an order nonetheless.

September 2007
Sy Safransky's Notebook

August 2007

Waking in the dark this morning, I’m grateful that the sun will soon be up; now, there’s something I don’t question, no matter how convincingly the light fled the night before.

August 2007
Sy Safransky's Notebook

July 2007

No, I don’t like demonstrations. But, to my mind, showing up for a march like this is the civic equivalent of doing the dishes or emptying the trash: the dirty, unglamorous work of living in a democracy.

July 2007
Sy Safransky's Notebook

June 2007

And the perfect sentence wandered through a foreign city where no one understood a word she said.

June 2007
Sy Safransky's Notebook

May 2007

I inadvertently stepped on my cat Nimbus in the dark this morning. I’ve already apologized, and she doesn’t appear hurt, but I feel as if I’ve started the day by invading another country. Would a jury of my peers convict me for such a careless act?

May 2007
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Thousand Elephants

This is The Sun’s thirty-third anniversary issue. How grateful I am that this improbable dream continues; that my ardor for the work is undiminished. I’m married to The Sun, I expect, till death do us part.

January 2007
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Full Catastrophe

Unless you show up to write, you don’t get to experience the heartache and the joy of writing; you don’t get to drop into a place without words and then, miraculously, find just the right words for what you discover there.

December 2006
Sy Safransky's Notebook

November 2006

If terrorism is a threat to democracy, so is errorism: refusing to admit blunders; twisting other people’s words; consistently making statements known to be untrue.

November 2006
Sy Safransky's Notebook

October 2006

The rain hits the tin roof, a sound Norma loves. Too loud, I insist, unable to sleep. What do you call the rain when two people can’t agree what the rain sounds like?

October 2006
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