Instructions: How to Find Joy When Lost

Say your full name out loud like an announcer from above. If you have a long-unbuttoned shirt, peacoat, or duster that can billow behind, great. Leave sparks in your wake and in every...

Regarding Resilience, Portraits, and Stories

It explores responsive inner strength and perseverance, fragility, and vulnerability when confronted with emotional, physical, or cultural challenges that influenced and changed their lives.

Once in a Hundred Lifetimes

The fourth night I saw him laughing with friends and I thought to myself, “There you are! There you ARE. What took you so long?” not out of frustration, but with wonder.

The Eyes of a Clown

It’s hard, at sixty-five, to find beginnings. So many things seem to be tending the other way: one’s stamina, capacity for alcohol, tolerance for bullshit, and so on. My teaching...

The Mekong

I saw then how the river swelled, not with memories of the war, but with the promise of spring exploding in the laughing red firecrackers echoing from afar echoing from afar…

Dorothy Zbornak Is Happy

A stronger argument for happiness, for that theory of happy people remaining happy people throughout their lives, might be the sitcoms to which you keep returning. Take your favorite...

New Beginnings and Other Falsehoods

When we find out that we are about to welcome our newest guests on Guilford’s campus, we move fast. Usually, we only have two weeks to prepare. On some occasions, it is even shorter than...

A Good Private Eye

When we silence our stories, we are diminished as beings and poorer as nations. Scratch the ground under your feet and our foundational past is laying right there. Archeologists and...

Born Again Savoyard

A new lightness of being came over me and I found that I enjoyed working out new ways to use my voice and develop my characters. I had never allowed myself to do such things when I was a...

The Void

In this delicate world, the tree is a threat and a reminder. The tree is the void that never fills, that never finds its way to my lap to smile back at me.

New Beginnings

Even our daily walk from home to school was an adventure. The route took us through a market that came alive early in the morning and stayed busy all day. The bakers were there in the...

Spring 2024

Spring is synonymous with new beginnings, with the renewal of hope and energy, and the resilience to reemerge out of the dark night of winter. Our contributors’ stories span the spectrum of fresh starts: uprooting and resettlement in new towns or countries, finding a purpose in life again after a great loss or a major health crisis, or simply discovering the strength and joy needed to face the challenge of a new day.