Issue 37 | The Sun Magazine

July 1978

Readers Write

Male And Female

Mr. Right, a vampire, a house-husband

By Our Readers
Sy Safransky's Notebook

July 1978

Does The Sun Have A Future?

Does THE SUN have a future? The question is not rhetorical. THE SUN may not have a future. That’s something I don’t like to contemplate, but no one likes to think about the death of someone, or something, he loves.

By Sy Safransky
Quotations

Sunbeams

We have to be utterly broken before we can realize that it is impossible to better the truth. It is the truth that we deny which so tenderly and forgivingly picks up the fragments and puts them together again.

Laurens Van der Post

The Sun Interview

An Interview With Robert Bly

The sixties seem to have been a disaster period as far as relationships between men and women go, though one thing did come forward. Women began to feel much more confidence in their own energies.

By Jeffery Beame & Robert Donnan
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

That Little Guy In The Corner Needs A Drink

Book Review

His novels are often wildly funny, with a kind of humor that is even more striking on a second reading, once it has had time to sink in. He is not the life of the party, but the enormously funny little man off in the corner whom only a few people know about.

By David M. Guy
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What Is A Poet?

The poet has a mind capable of raising for us all crops of words, dense with meaning, rich in symbols, exactly expressive for us all of what our lives are like, what our human condition means, what we feel, why we keep struggling, why we sometimes can’t go on.

By Judy Hogan
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Whether Blind Or Seeing

When I was still young I experienced a look which opened deeply, darkly, vitally inward: I knew then that infinite reality does not work only by extension outward, but, also, inward.

By Will Inman
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Last Barrier

A Journey Through The World Of Sufi Teaching

“Today we are going together to meet the Perfect Man, the Master who has come to love God so perfectly that God’s attributes pour out through him into the world with no veil between.”

By Reshad Feild
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Tobacco Town: Durham’s Beginnings

The rising lust for smoking tobacco made Durham and Duke. In 1870, a year after it was incorporated, the one-square mile village had a population of 256. There were 3,000 residents by 1884, 6,679 by 1900, and an estimated 18,000 by 1907.

By Barry Jacobs
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Tarnished Gold

Our Seed Stock Is In Jeopardy, But Do The Seed Companies Care?

Corn is the most valuable United States crop. When a few companies, or a few varieties, dominate its seed market, conditions are ripe for economic and ecological disaster.

By Dan McCurry
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

An Appreciation

He is a poet of immediacy, of the nearness of all things to us in the inner and outer worlds, and of those things we bury, by our blindness, in the rich compost of our lives. When I experience a Bly poem, I enter the miraculous energy of life and the awesome closeness and beauty of death.

By Jeffery Beame
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

An Evening With Robert Bly

Every poet, when he grows up in this country, has to face that issue. Is he going to go with the English or is he going to go against them? It takes a long time to fight that out. I, myself, was with the English three or four years after I got out of college. I was writing sonnets.

By Robert Bly
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

I Never Noticed They Were Poems

His poems entered his conversation almost unannounced, and you were unsure whether he was still talking or had started on a poem, a seeming change in his bodily weight sometimes the only clue (he began that weightless dance with every poem).

By Betsy Campbell Blackwell
Fiction

Stories

Hitched to the University of the South at Sewannee, Tennessee. School was out and there were few people around — my last visit I stayed at Beta Phi fraternity — so checked it out again — no one around, but back door conveniently open, so I made myself at home.

By Nyle Frank
Photography

Cartoons By Jim Thornton

The cartoons in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

By Jim Thornton
Photography

Photographs By Priscilla Rich Safransky

The photographs in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

By Priscilla Rich
Photography

Photograph By Syd Nisbet

The photograph in this selection is available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

By Syd Nisbet