A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.
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In our June 2020 interview, “The Power of Story,” Jared Seide discusses how listening to each other can restore our humanity. For readers interested in learning more, he offers this reading list of essential books on navigating vulnerability, working with compassion, and the power of listening from the heart.
We asked Louisa Willcox and David Mattson to share a few additional resources about grizzly bears and to suggest ways readers might be able to help.
Since Astra Taylor cited so many authors during our discussion for the November 2019 interview, we asked her to give us a list of books that have inspired her work as an activist and an artist.