Reading David Malouf’s “An Imaginary Life” amid disaster in the state where I was born and where my father died n An Imaginary Life, his novel about Ovid’s exile from Rome in the 1st century, Australian author David Malouf examines how separation from a beloved landscape can offer fertile ground for the imagination.
Until the summer my grandmother was dying, my children were the only people I had ever watched sleep. I used to lie beside them at nap time, taking shallow breaths, while I waited for a thumb to fall away from a mouth or for a jaw to drop open: the signal that they had drifted off. …
Published in Freight Stories #7, 2011 The set up to the joke was bad enough: What was lower than a guy rifling through an ex-girlfriend’s trash? The answer was obviously being that guy, especially in Friday Harbor where anyone who spotted me would spread it all over town by lunch. On an island of just over …
Adoption, until recently a hidden subject, has become an open field of psychological study, policy debate, and ethical interest. Family Wanted is an honest, heartwarming, and heartbreaking collection featuring important authors personally involved in all sides of adoption. Here are more than twenty pieces, many published for the first time. Among the contributors are Paula Fox, an adoptee …
Jenny Alexander has sought refuge from a troubled past on tiny, verdant San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington State. There — surrounded by the cold water of the Puget Sound — she does her best to raise her girls, innocent Frankie and thrill-seeking Lilly, in a tight-knit year-round community of eccentrics and dreamers. When …
In a workshop on narrative in public health in Lomé, Togo, I ask participants—ministry of health workers and representatives from nongovernmental agencies—to share examples of stories they use in their work. These include theatre pieces and personal illness narratives employed for community health promotion, examples which reflect the long-standing use, worldwide, of narrative to promote health. …
‘Only Connect’: The Case for Public Health Humanities Read More »