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At forty, you may have half your life in front of you; at fifty-two, it’s not likely. In your thirties you may worry about losing your looks; in your fifties you worry about losing your capacities.
By Michael VenturaMay 1998I approached the microphone to deliver my acceptance speech, but the dean held me back while the awards for “scholarship” and “service” were presented. As it turned out, I never was allowed to say anything. So this, without further ado, is my acceptance speech.
By Jake GaskinsMarch 1998I wasn’t going to run in 1996, until Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire Republican primary. For ten days, the leftist agony came over me — the certainty that Bakunin was right: the ruling class does wish to extinguish us! I saw vividly a white-supremacist army occupying the White House, closing our borders, and setting up Christian reeducation camps. I knew I had to act swiftly. So, on March 4, I declared my candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.
By SparrowMay 1997A few days after my father, poet William Stafford, died, I was sleeping alone at my parents’ house when something woke me at around 4 A.M. My mother, who was away, had told me that she, too, had been wakened since his death at this, my father’s customary writing time.
By Kim StaffordApril 1997The key is to clear yourself in order to become a conduit for creativity. In my book Expect a Miracle, Ann Nadel, a San Francisco painter and sculptor, said that when the work is really coming, there’s something flowing through you that’s not you. To me, that feeling is tangible proof of the existence of spirit: something we can tap into that’s beyond ourselves and our senses. The highest goal we can aspire to is to become transmitters of that.
By D. Patrick MillerApril 1997April 1997It’s very possible that your life in art — your successful life in art — might be a struggle from start to finish.
Sally Warner
When the door has been slammed behind him for the first time, the prisoner stands in the middle of the cell and looks round. I fancy that everyone must behave in more or less the same way.
By Siobhan DowdOctober 1996Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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