Contributors

Christopher Bursk works in a county prison, and says he finds it “one of the few sane places to be in this country.” He is also helping Gloria Del Vecchio in “her fine, new, gutsy magazine, I Know.”

Karlton Kelm got his start as a writer on the old American Mercury when H.L. Mencken was still editing it. He has published more than fifty stories, two novels, and has sold three plays to Broadway. He lives in the garden spot of the Western world, Hoboken, New Jersey.

Brian Knave is a drummer who lives in Johnson City, Tennessee. He spends most of his time trying to keep his 1966 VW bus running and wants to know if anyone would like to buy it.

Howard Jay Rubin is a freelance writer who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Michael Shorb lives in San Francisco, California. He is the author of “Whale Walker’s Morning,” a book of poems (unpublished), children’s poetry (ditto), and stories for young readers. He is working on a collection of short stories, a detective novel, and a historical novel.

Sparrow sends us these New York City koans (a koan, in Zen Buddhism, is a paradoxical riddle used to trick the mind into enlightenment. The most famous is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”): (1) What subway line did you live near before you were born? (2) At cocktail parties, you only meet people who never go to cocktail parties. How can this be? (3) The phone rings. Your answering machine answers it. It is your friend’s answering machine calling. Who speaks first?

Brother David Steindl-Rast was born in Vienna, Austria, where he studied art, anthropology and psychology before coming to the United States. In 1953 he joined the Benedictine monastery of Mount Saviour in Elmira, New York. He is currently “hermit-in-residence” at the Benedictine Grange in West Redding, Connecticut.