Featured Selections | The Sun Magazine

Featured Selections

From the Archives

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Pedal, Pedal, Pedal

On a bike I have wings and a kingdom. On a bike I’m a taller, stronger, wiser version of myself — the person I wish to be on land. It’s always been this way.

By Heather Sellers January 2017
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Ramshackle Garden Of Affection

Dear Ross: How can you miss on purpose? If I’m late getting back on defense, you’ll bounce the ball off the bottom of the rim and catch the “rebound” for a point. Alone under the basket. Missing.

Dear Noah: Bouncing the ball off the bottom of the rim is, as you say, a poorly missed shot, but also a perfectly missed one, because it results in a point in our game, which means it’s a way for me to stay on the court. If there were a way I could stay on the court without cheating — without those perfectly, beautifully missed shots — believe me, I would do it.

By Ross Gay & Noah Davis June 2020
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Meeting The Sky

Golf was my father’s true beloved — more so, sadly, than I, or my mother, or anyone else. He embodied the very essence of the game. He was long, quiet stretches filled with difficult, sticky areas that one could navigate only after years of practice.

By Julie Burke March 2001
Poetry

Eternal Moment Of Running Wicked Fast

We run so fast these letters should be slanted, fastest at dusk when our breaths burn hot coals, sweat soaking our T-shirts, sneakers slapping pavement

By Jim Daniels February 2017
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Labor Day

The point is, I am not like the rest of you, who don’t spend every moment fearing the worst. I think you are ostriches with your heads in the sand, and I envy you for it. You wake in the morning and don’t imagine all the ways in which the people you love might die. Or perhaps you do. If so, call me, but not before 8 AM, or else I will think someone I love has died.

By Lisa Taddeo November 2015
Poetry

Leaving Home

Opening my legs for her wasn’t easy. / She was hunched and burnt-looking. / Her whole face puckered toward her mouth. / She spoke with words like “dirty shame” / while she gave her absolution — / a small, white cloth inserted / into my womb.

By Cedar Koons June 1988
Fiction

Any Comments Or Questions?

Girlie slid out like a hot buttered noodle on that Indian-summer night in October — her father’s birthday, in fact.

By Dulcie Leimbach November 2000
Poetry

June 1954

I was conceived / in a shack by the sea, / its shingles bleached / and beaten nickel gray. / There were waves that day / washing over the foundations / of the old saltworks.

By Mary-Beth O’Shea-Noonan October 1997
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Cherish This Ecstasy

The peregrine falcon was brought back from the brink of extinction by a ban on DDT, but also by a peregrine-falcon mating hat invented by an ornithologist at Cornell University. If you can’t buy this, Google it.

By David James Duncan July 2008
The Sun Interview

When A Tree Falls In The Forest

An Interview With John Seed

Let me give an example of the scale of the destruction that’s going on. We know that the amount of solar energy necessary to sustain the hydrological cycle in the Amazon jungle — the energy necessary to lift that water into the atmosphere — is equivalent to the energy put out by two thousand hydrogen bombs a day. The vegetation that grows there captures that much energy. It creates a huge heat engine that drives the winds of the world, those winds that the ancient mariners knew, and the same winds that deliver moisture regularly and predictably to North America and to Europe. Those winds don’t simply exist — they’re continuously being created and maintained by large biological systems. The Amazon is one of the vital organs of the living planet.

By Ram Dass January 1993