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Writing
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Newfoundland
Whereas other memoirists seem to have unlimited drilling rights in the rich territory of childhood, I am largely reduced to mining the immediate past — Memoirs of the Month, as it were. My childhood is a metal milk crate, a parquet floor, a lighted button in an elevator. If only I could recall something I haven’t already remembered, one brand-new memory never before fondled, unraveled, torn, and patched.
June 2014
The Sun Interview
The Moral Universe
Barbara Kingsolver On Writing, Politics, And Human Nature
This isn’t about “paper or plastic” or some vision of self-congratulatory parsimony. It’s about replacing material gratifications with spiritual ones. I don’t know how much carbon I’m offsetting with my choices. I just prefer to be a good animal rather than one that fouls its nest.
March 2014
Quotations
Sunbeams
February 2014I have twenty-one pages, unusable, unprintable, destructive of the book as my mind still partly sees it, contradictory of character and inconsistent in tone. But I am undoubtedly started.
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
February 2014
So I can’t say I was surprised when I got pulled over yesterday for doing forty-seven miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone. The policeman let me off with a warning, which was more mercy than I deserved. What do I think I’m doing, rushing through these precious, unrepeatable days?
February 2014The Sun Interview
High Plains Drifter
Poe Ballantine On Writing, Madness, And His Journey From Vagabond To Family Man
My point is that good writers are after the truth. We’re trying to draw the blood from real life and use it to make the words come alive, and that kind of alchemical process can be, you know, hazardous. But if you don’t get into trouble, if you don’t gamble, if you don’t present a sticky situation, if you’re not facing a monster, then you’re simply not going to be interesting, from a commercial or an artistic point of view. If you want to make a difference and stand out, you’re obliged to sound the depths.
February 2014
The Sun Interview
Beginner’s Mind
Sy Safransky On God, LSD, And The Magazine He Founded
The Sun has always been bigger than me. Wiser than me. Steadier than me. One of the satisfactions of publishing it for all these years is that I’ve gotten to see what happens when like-minded people work together toward a common goal.
January 2014
Anniversary
Countless Labors
Our subscriber list has grown far beyond what it was then; we now have seventy-two thousand names on it. The staff is larger. The look of the magazine may have changed, but its content hasn’t traveled far from its roots. It continues to explore those big, unwieldy themes, offering glimpses of the mysterious and maddening and magnificent experiences that connect us.
January 2014Poetry
Unselected Poems
You’ve published enough books, old man. / Let someone else have a turn. / The letter doesn’t say that, / but it might as well.
January 2014Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Finishing Touch
When I was nineteen, I thought, If I haven’t published a novel by the time I’m twenty-one, I’ll be all washed up. While studying creative writing in graduate school, I thought, If I haven’t published a novel by the time I’m twenty-five, I’ll be all washed up. At thirty-five I quit drinking and thought, Now I really have to publish a novel, or I’m all washed up.
January 2014
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