Featured Selections | The Sun Magazine #27

Featured Selections

From the Archives

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Ward

The first noise was hardly audible, like the whimper of a child so hurt that the wounds had to speak, a primal crying that went far deeper than language. The hurt had lost all anger and selfishness; it spoke only of its existence, incapable of any control, gurgling its rawness.

By Bruce Mitchell March 1992
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Californicated, Santa Crucified

I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a place that hasn’t been identified as a psychic window, and that includes 16 different cities and towns. Which means either that my very presence bestows some sort of divine grace, or else that some of these places are faking.

By Rob Brezsny September 1979
The Sun Interview

At The Heart Of Healing

An Interview With Stephen Levine

What we’ve really come to see is that healing is not limited to the body. The body may live or die, but the healing we took birth for occurs in the heart; if that quality of heart is not there, no matter what happens to the body, healing is absent.

By Ralph Earle October 1989
The Sun Interview

The Silent Mind

An Interview With Jehangir Chubb

You don’t set up an ideal of what you want to be and try to become it. You become aware of what you are, and in that very process you become or realize the ideal.

By Sy Safransky July 1981
Fiction

What We Came For

They had to wait a long time for the harvest to begin. Gerard talked to Kate of nothing else for weeks. He imagined the two of them working their way across Canada, then down the West Coast of the U.S., picking fruit and living like gypsies.

By Alison Luterman October 1996
The Sun Interview

Going Against The Dragon

An Interview With Robert Bly

Some dragons don’t want to be lifted up into the heart area. That’s their place down where they are. You go down and meet them on their ground. “I’m going to lift you up and bathe you in the violet light of the heart.” What do they care about that?

By Sy Safransky November 1983
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Instrument Of The Immortals

Miss Eva Hodges, my piano teacher for eight years, now deceased, would be gratified to learn that I bought the Steinway. She’d be proud of me.

By Jake Gaskins March 1991
Fiction

What Miss Lena Prays For

Miss Lena goes into the dressing room, closes the folding three-way mirror, gets down on her knees, and prays. I wonder if she’s really praying for customers, as she tells me, or if she’s praying for bigger things, like peace in Yugoslavia, where she is from and which she calls Yugo, or maybe an end to homelessness. It seems to me you shouldn’t waste a prayer on attracting customers.

By Jessica Anya Blau September 1998
Fiction

The Mayfly Glimmer Before Last Call

Jackie was nineteen, a cocktail waitress in Niagara Falls, New York. She worked in a bar on the other side of town and would come into our place with the other waitresses after her shift was up. Jackie was something else, the way she shook her hair.

By Poe Ballantine November 1998
The Sun Interview

Saving The Indigenous Soul

An Interview With Martín Prechtel

The Mayans say that the other world sings us into being. We are its song. We’re made of sound, and as the sound passes through the sieve between this world and the other world, it takes the shape of birds, grass, tables — all these things are made of sound. Human beings, with our own sounds, can feed the other world in return, to fatten those in the other world up, so they can continue to sing.

By Derrick Jensen April 2001