Showing results by narrator "Rebecca Van Volkinburg" in All Categories

You may think it matters what happens. But what if the only thing that matters is where you are experiencing from, where you are looking from? What if you could experience all of life from a spacious, open perspective where anything can happen and there is room for all of it, where there is no need to pick and choose, to put up barriers or resist any of it, where nothing is a problem and everything just adds to the richness of life?

Photographs Not Taken is a collection of photographers' essays about failed attempts to make a picture. Editor Will Steacy asked each photographer to abandon the conventional tools needed to make a photograph - camera, lens, film - and instead make a photograph using words, to capture the image (and its attendant memories) that never made it through the lens. In each essay, the photograph has been stripped down to its barest and most primitive form: the idea behind it.

Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on "Ethics and the Internet". The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well.

Hungary's fragile alliance with Germany kept Natalie, a renowned children's book author, and her family out of harm's way for most of the war. As the Führer's desperation grows during the waning years of the conflict, so does its threat. Natalie's younger sister, Ilona, married a Jewish man, putting both her and her young daughter, Mila, in peril; Natalie's twin sister, Anna, is losing her already tenuous hold on reality. As the streets of Budapest thrum with the pounding boots of Nazi soldiers, danger creeps to the doorstep where Natalie shields them all.

As one of America's young journalists, a best-selling author, and a first-generation American of Filipino descent, Malkin shows how every component of the US immigration system failed leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Ready or not, Invasion tells the truth about the dangers the US faces within its own borders.

Ten-year-old Chelsea Tennyson decides to take matters into her own hands and prove once and for all if an invisible God is really there. Chelsea's dad, Prince Tennyson - the nickname he earned for being so dashing in uniform - died last year in the Iraq war. After a mental breakdown, her mother moves the family to live with their grandmother in Phoenix. But before long, it becomes clear the entire family is suffering the loss of a man who was pivotal in the shaping of their lives. Her mom doesn't believe God exists anymore, but Chelsea is afraid to believe it, too.

Molly McNett couples laugh-out-loud dialogue and wry observation reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor with disquieting strains of dashed hope, troubled sexuality, and disillusionment. We meet McNett's endearing, often foolish characters at a point when their minds are open to manipulation by the people and events around them, and the conclusions they draw are heartbreaking. Yet throughout they find quiet moments of possibility, courage, and a return to faith and comfort.