I started getting The Sun about 6 months ago, most likely to make myself feel like I was around an interesting lot while in the safe confines of my cozy home, away from the rebel flags, W stickers, and church ladies that make up this southern enclave.
And it worked.
I love this magazine. Readers write, writers write, and it is all compellingly honest and straight forward and thought provoking and human. There are no ads. Sy Safransky, a New Yorker and journalist who now lives in Chapel Hill, NC, is the editor. In the back of his magazine, he provides Sy Safransky’s Notebook, which is actually quite like a blog, but started way before blogging. I’ll say it. Sy Safransky is and continues to be visionary. And brave. From his notebook:
When I was a newspaper reporter in the 1960’s, I frequently wrote about race and poverty. I interviewed scholars. I spent time in poor black neighborhoods talking with teachers and social workers and advocates for welfare rights. But I wasn’t black, and I wasn’t poor…So what can someone like me really know about being black and poor in America – about the way racism crushes a man like a monstrous wave, and poverty, like a razor wind, strips him to the bone?
Sy sold The Sun’s first copies for a quarter, peddling them on the streets of Chapel Hill. I am a sucker for that underdog scrappiness and all or nothing entrepreneurial spirit. And I definitely need to incorporate more of that into my own gamebook. With the scrappiness fully covered, all I need now are the cajones I seemed to have lost somewhere between Colorado and Chicago, in the breadth of my twenties.