Consider the stories we tell, the moral
or meaning lost over time. Perhaps it is culture
hindering the dog from learning
good etiquette. Colour as a cause. Naturally,
in a volte-face we can say it is a native’s
compliment because we advertise
for a fairer tint. In stories of war
the other is chimera, a shapeless
behemoth in need of a lesson.

— EXCERPT from An invitation to struggle
BY Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

A poet who believes in communicating clearly, Yang Zi’s writings are at times exulting and highly charged with emotions, other times elegiac or brooding. With a temperament firmly grounded in reality, he seeks not to write about some elusive Garden of Eden, but to respond explicitly to contemporary needs and social investigations. Incessantly probing into both objective and subjective truths, his poems carry a strong mix of lyrical voices and confessional tone…. Unafraid to doubt, or even condemn angrily and without reserve, they contain an attractive spontaneity and measure. Surrealist landscapes provide a background for many of the narratives in his work.

— EXCERPT FROM Another Kind of Surrealism:
Poetic Flare and Energies in Yang Zi’s Work

TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE
BY Ye Chun, Melissa Tuckey AND Fiona Sze-Lorrain

The land was originally grazed by several tribes in the area. When the French came, such land was confiscated and given to the French settlers. One of the colonists who got this land was reputedly a very nasty character, who always carried a rifle. He stole pieces of land right and left, was friendly with the French authorities who turned a blind eye. The locals were unable to say or do anything.

When the French came, such land was confiscated and given to the French settlers.

After Independence in 1956, the settlers left and the French gave the land to the new Moroccan state, rather than back to its previous owners. The land became a state farm. Its guardian was a man with a sad unshaven face. Badly dressed and often complaining, he was usually to be seen fumbling at things in corners. With his wife and large family he lived in poverty, his horizons hopelessly blocked.

— EXCERPT FROM Tales in a Moroccan Landscape II
BY Mary Byrne

On or about December 1891 the American character changed. As the annals of history show us, Dr. James Naismith, a young teacher from Canada, seeking an activity to keep his athletes in shape during snowy New England winters, hung peach baskets on opposite ends of an indoor gymnasium, bringing forth basketball, a game of humble birth that has become a multibillion dollar global event producing some of the largest and most lucrative athletes in sports history. The 1890s, a decade of radical transformation, with the United States loosening the corset of Victorianism, of Puritanism, and the nation beginning its love affair with sports. With this revolution, the soundtrack could be no other than ragtime urging possibility and infinite play. The world had sped up. With ragtime, the seeds of the Jazz Age were planted, bringing forth the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation…

— EXCERPT FROM “So Peculiarly American”:
Basketball and American Popular Music
BY Delano Greenidge-Copprue

The town of Shingō was a strange place indeed. It was nowhere, but it was everywhere at the same time. Every time the train stopped and the conductor came round to shout “the town of Shingō,” whatever was in front of me — be it the middle of the mountains or the seashore — would immediately be transformed into the town of Shingō. I would look for signs of the town, but strangely enough, there was nothing there but reddish cliffs alongside the tracks or seashores with lapping, white waves. Nonetheless, because the conductor had made his solemn declaration, I was compelled to think this must undoubtedly be the town of Shingō, and I conjured up visions of a town located there in the middle of nowhere. That was how I learned there were places outside this world which we cannot see with our eyes alone.

— EXCERPT FROM Communities Outside the World
BY Mutsuo Takahashi

TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE
BY Jeffrey Angles

She sat on her suitcase in the shade of the ruined minaret, waiting for a taxi, although a taxi was about the last thing you’d expect to see coming down this particular road —a bulldozer or a tank, maybe, or even a camel — but not a taxi. A horse galloped by, the rider’s robes flying, and she was enveloped in a cyclone of dust. Too late, she pulled the scarf she wore around her throat up to her face. She coughed hard behind it. Her eyes filled with tears.

On the other side of the road, a man in a filthy t-shirt and once-white cotton pants sat down in the dust. She was relieved to see, squinting over the top of her scarf, that he remained upright, staring at his bare feet in front of him. People attracted little attention here when they sat down and died on the side of the road. She had tried to file a story about it once…

— EXCERPT FROM Debriefing
BY Mary Helen Stefaniak

It’s 1979, and my parents are missionaries in Uganda. We moved here when I was one and my sister Sonja was four and Idi Amin was clinging to a bloody dictatorship. We moved here at a time when those with choices flooded across the border: leaving, leaving, leaving. Later, we left too, but before we did, in those waning days, we met Idi Amin at the airport and shook his hand. When Idi Amin fled to Libya, we returned to Uganda. We were glad to be back…

— EXCERPT FROM Ugandan Psalm
BY Sari Fordham

I started playing the erhu at the age of four. Yes, I was trained entirely by my father, Guo Junming, in the family tradition of apprenticeship, from one generation to another. You can say that I inherited the Guo family’s art of erhu. My father taught me the theories and performance of the art of erhu, literally from hand to hand, and from scratch. Although he cultivated my upbringing in erhu, he did not specifically expect that I would grow up to be like him, an erhu musician…. Concertizing with my father’s instrument is like an extension of my dialogues with him. It is at once intimate and deep, not just sentimental.

— EXCERPT FROM Making Each Day, Each Note Count —
Dialogue with Erhu Musician, Guo Gan
BY Greta Aart AND Guo Gan

I don’t know how to think about imagination apart from consciousness. What do we mean when we say someone is “imaginative?” My daughter is — she makes things up, she pretends in great detail and creates a world that never actually “happens” in time and space as we know it. Consciousness seems to be the word I’d favor — which is made up of so many aspects: memory, desire, stored knowledge, wonderings, image-making — and all the connections that occur in the act of writing. That seems to be the realm of what we call “fiction” writers and it’s a world I can’t imagine for myself. In my daughter’s un-pretend world she delights in wondering how or why and what if — that’s imagination too, of course. And that’s more the kind of imagination that might come into my poems. Consciousness seems to be the word I’d favor — which is made up of so many aspects: memory, desire, stored knowledge, wonderings, image-making — and all the connections that occur in the act of writing. But all of this that we are trying to talk about is fluid, ephemeral — ever passing and changing — clouds crossing an October sky. The miracle of writing is that in doing it something can occur that hasn’t happened yet. But I don’t know how to talk about what that is in words.

— EXCERPT FROM The Poetry of Marie Howe: Where the Wall Gives Way
BY Sally Molini AND Marie Howe

For any photographer light is a major element. Over the years I have learned to use light and have its meaning be useful in the picture. On occasion, light becomes the subject, or at least a major player. Not that I spend a great deal of time scheming those things. If you go out, most early evenings, anywhere in the world where the sun is shining, the light is fantastic. The shadows are longer, and you have this axial light, which strikes things.

— EXCERPT FROM Iconic Images: the Cultural-Sacred
Photographs of Linda Connor
BY James Smart AND Linda Connor