News & Notes

December: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th Year of Publication

The most important December in Sun history is, well, this one: the month in which Sy Safransky, after fifty years of laboring to put out the magazine he founded, steps away from his desk and becomes, deservingly, editor emeritus.

Upcoming Readers Write Deadlines

Uniforms, Shaving, and Fuel

There’s still time to submit to Readers Write on “Uniforms”! Be sure to get your entry to us by December 1—we’ve suggested a few potential prompts if you still need to get your creative juices flowing. And it’s never too early to start your first draft for an upcoming topic. . . .

An American Disease

Anders Carlson-Wee on Dumpster Diving in a Culture of Waste

For ten years Anders Carlson-Wee got almost everything he needed from the trash: food, clothes, furniture, lamps. He wrote about his experiences in his essay “The Salmonella Special,” which appears in our November issue, and in his new poetry collection, Disease of Kings, released this October by W.W. Norton. When we spoke over Zoom, I asked him to tell me more about this lifestyle. We talked about capitalism, loneliness, freedom, and one of the greatest hauls of his dumpster-diving career.

November: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th Year of Publication

Forty-four years ago this month, we offered a special holiday rate on gift subscriptions. That was the first time, and it’s a tradition we’ve continued every year since. The announcement of that original offer in 1979 described The Sun as “the ideal gift for friends who’d share your enthusiasm for a totally independent journal, a forum for those who lead lives of intensity and impact” — a description that, happily, has remained true.

The Ghostly and the Ghastly

Selections from the Archives

In this month’s interview [“Local Haunts,” interview by David Mahaffey], historian Colin Dickey examines why certain locations become associated with the supernatural. We’ve highlighted archive selections that explore the ghostly — and the ghastly — through shades of a graveyard, the horrors of Jaws and embarrassing parents, and email spam from the other side.

Upcoming Readers Write Deadlines

Taste, Uniforms, and Shaving

There’s still time to submit to Readers Write on “Taste”! Be sure to get your entry to us by November 1 — we’ve suggested a few potential prompts if you still need to get your creative juices flowing. And it’s never too early to start your first draft for an upcoming topic. . . .

A web-exclusive poem from Erin Hoover’s new collection

We are celebrating the release of Erin Hoover’s second book of poetry, No Spare People, out today from Black Lawrence Press, with an exclusive online publication of the book’s concluding poem, “What If Pain No Longer Ordered the Narrative.” Hoover’s poetry collection looks at parenting from the lens of an unpartnered, queer mother in the U.S. South and questions dominate narratives of gender, class, and race.

A Game We Play

Leona Sevick on the Craft of Poetry

By her own admission, Leona Sevick is a latecomer to poetry. She was trained as an American literature scholar and never took a creative-writing class. We published her poem “I Eat My Words” in our October 2023 issue. Leona and I met on Zoom, and we spoke about bamboo wives, pregnancy pains, and poetic meter. At the end of our conversation she read her poem out loud, and even though I knew how it ended, I still got chills.

The Sun on TV

This month Sun readers wrote to tell us about their experiences with “Television,” but that’s not the first time we’ve explored the little — or perhaps big — black box that resides in (most) everyone’s living room. In fact we’ve printed Readers Writes on “Television” and “Watching TV” in 1979 and 1996, respectively, and have published poems, essays, interviews, and photo essays on the subject. Here are just a few memorable examples of when The Sun and its contributors crossed paths with the small screen.

Transformation

Jen Silverman on Writing for Different Mediums

I caught up with Jen Silverman late this summer, after we finished the edits on “Scale,” their new short story in our October issue. Jen was a few months into returning to New York City from Japan, where they worked as a producer and writer on the Max series Tokyo Vice. Jen had just switched gears back to theater, working on the book for a new musical with the composer Dave Malloy, workshopping an upcoming new play called Spain about propaganda, and wondering how long the writers’ strike in Hollywood (which has since ended) would keep a number of other projects on hold.