What Are You Waiting For?

I sometimes let my Sun subscription lapse because the material is too sad for me. Today on the BART train I was reading the January issue, which has my essay “The Seed” in it. The two essays after mine — “Incredible Hulk Saving Souls,” by Doug Crandell, and “My Friend and Bruce Springsteen,” by Jane Schapiro, were surprisingly upbeat. Wouldn’t it be ironic, I thought, if the most depressing piece in this issue is my own essay?

Then I got to Athena Stevens’s short story “What Are You Waiting For?” It really hurt. I know there must be value in such a story — in imagining what life would be like after the kidnapping and loss of a child. And part of what readers respect The Sun for is its willingness to print such stories.

My question is: Why is it important to be reminded of such things? I know such situations exist, but is it somehow spiritually necessary for me to contemplate them? Stories like this one are hard to shake. I am still hurting for a fictional young girl and her parents.

Marc Polonsky Oakland, California

Athena Stevens’s “What Are You Waiting For?” is well written, but I’m not sure the “mother-blinks-and-child-disappears” plot is healthy for our collective imagination. Books on Oprah’s list specialize in this genre: A momentary attraction to an old flame triggers a kidnapping. A dalliance with a husband’s brother leads to a child being swept overboard. Even mere daydreaming dooms kids. Fathers should never be trusted with their children, these books imply. Woe to the mother who sleeps in while her husband takes the daughter shopping. Aren’t we frightened enough?

Tereza Coraggio Santa Cruz, California

Athena Stevens responds:

In writing “What Are You Waiting For?” I wanted to draw readers into the interior of a couple’s experience as they move through a shared tragedy. I hoped to illustrate something much deeper than a cautionary tale. And I wanted readers to feel something unexpected as a result. To me this kind of contemplation fosters a sense of connection, and perhaps a deeper capacity to love. As such, I think stories like this one are spiritually necessary — and good for the collective imagination.

Brent Winter is a freelance proofreader for The Sun.

— Ed.

In the April 2007 Correspondence, Marc Polonsky says that it hurt to read Athena Stevens’s short story about the loss of a child [“What Are You Waiting For?” January 2007]. “Why is it important to be reminded of such things?” he writes.

I don’t take Polonsky’s pain lightly, but I disagree with the assumption that seems to underlie his question: that Stevens wrote her story to remind us that there is suffering in the world. Literature’s primary purpose is not to remind us of anything or to be therapeutic. Rather, I think the purpose of literature is to evoke and participate in the human experience — all of it. If we decided that painful aspects of human experience should be excluded, what would we have left?

A literature without pain would be impoverished to the point of destitution. I am glad that writers like Stevens and magazines like The Sun are willing to give us writing that partakes of the full spectrum of what it means to be human.

Brent Winter Carrboro, North Carolina