Issue 89 | Correspondence | The Sun Magazine

Correspondence

The drawing, opposite, and the letter, below, arrived too late for our February issue, but so what? This is the second Valentine in as many years we’ve received from Bob Bissland, who says:

Dear Sy,

I sent a Valentine last year and you graciously responded with a card in May and I was honored and overwhelmed. Susan and I were at that time whirling in a vortex of pure indecision of life, on life. We got your card while living on a friend’s farm in Pennsylvania and somewhere in that Northern Appalachian coal country we picked up bad waves or negative energy and fleeing that and looking on the bright side we headed to Utah and soon the bad waves emerged. Evidently they had flowed into the boxes, under the brown paper wrapping tape and settled into a page of a book here or maybe the pocket of a wool shirt there nestling in amongst the lint and cloves and as we opened the boxes those waves were liberated and encompassed our house and filled our new Utah life with quarreling days that seemed to last too long. One Wednesday friends dropped in from Montana headed to Tucson after reading a Gary Snyder poem on brewing up stew on the desert floor and that sounded ideal to them and on their way down they stopped in and they are positive energy dynamos. Genuinely happy and the bad waves vanished while they (our friends) were here. Bad Waves/Negative Energy where do they go? Out of our minds riding glistening water down the sewer, out to the settling ponds, down the Bear River, to the Colorado, then out to sea and there they are purified by coral and they become positive energy? Or maybe the waves just slipped out in a rush of air from an open winter door and through that dark night lighted on the icy goo in the transmission of an idle grain truck, only to lie in wait to bind up the gears when it’s thoroughly warm, around the end of July when wheat harvest is gearing up to full swing. Maybe that Negative Energy is always around us like tetanus waiting for perfect conditions before they arise and reproduce. Wherever they are they are gone from here. Thank heavens they didn’t get into our bottle of vanilla from Mexico. I’m preparing a small portfolio of drawings to send even though I’m a year late. Things have settled down for awhile now. Susan is still spinning and after a year’s absence we are again receiving THE SUN. Happy Valentine’s Day and remember that Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate love.

The drawing mentioned above is available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Bob Bissland Richmond, Utah

Friends who were here learning to build wooden boats introduced us to your magazine, then sent us a gift subscription after they moved on.

Everyone who works at this natural food store enjoys THE SUN and we put it out for customers to browse through. It’s a very stimulating magazine — full of reminders of the positive, amazing aspects of the adventure of life.

Paula Green The Grainery
Bath, Maine

My subscription to THE SUN was a gift from a well-meaning but misunderstanding friend. She writes and so do I. I guess she sees THE SUN as a literary magazine.

I read the first six issues, or more, becoming more and more disinterested. Each was written in a tone that was consistently sappy and arrogant, and the subject matter of your feature stories stayed consistently banal. I was a hippie for a while, but my THC level is down, I haven’t taken large quantities of LSD in years, and I’m more in touch with reality than I used to be. I wish I could say the same for your writers; they all seem to be stranded in some land that time forgot. I’m newly unemployed. Last weekend two of my friends got beat up for their political (radical left) views. Some other of my friends put out a wickedly witty atheist review called Catholic Guilt. I like new music and bands with names like “Millions of Dead Cops” and “The Dead Kennedys.” Last month there was a rape two blocks from my house at 9 in the evening.

If you’re totally bewildered about what these facts of my life have to do with my failure to renew, maybe I can put it more clearly if I say that the “New Age” Aquarian peace-love-look-for-the-rainbow fatuousness of THE SUN’s writing has no relevance to my life. It was especially disturbing to read, on the inside cover, every month, one of Sy’s pieces, contrivedly casual, whiney, mundane to the point of acute mediocrity, or just plain stupid.

San Albers Madison, Wisconsin

I’ve wanted to tell you for some time how much I enjoy THE SUN but have not because of just plain laziness. That will now be corrected: THE SUN after all these years is one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I have, second only to a letter from a good friend. In fact THE SUN and CoEvolution Quarterly are the only two periodicals I find worth supporting with subscription and sincere word-of-mouth referral. Keep it up.

Kurt Grubaugh Scottsdale, Arizona
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