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October/November 2014 Cover Image

The Poet’s Arts: Empathy, “Spiritual Endurance,” & Witness: An Interview with Cyrus Cassells

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Christopher Hennessy
My impulse as an artist is to move to beauty as a healing approach to things that are really horrific or challenging.
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The World of the Story

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Eileen Pollack
To be an insider in a certain world is to be privy to the literal and metaphoric handshakes that denote membership in that clan.
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Foundational Documents and the Nature of Lyric

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Gregory Orr
Not every great mind has to appreciate poetry—Freud didn’t care for lyric poetry at all. Never mind that Plato had himself written some beautiful love lyrics once, or that the strongest passages in his dialogues were parables...
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More Scope & Kindness & Power in My Books: An Interview with George Saunders

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Heather Sappenfield
The most important thing I learned was that good writing is about good writing. Not travel or attitude or repartee or personal wildness or anything else.
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The Last Word: On Rejection & Resurrection

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Donald Hall
I know I made mistakes. I was arrogant. At the age of twenty-five I felt cheekier about my taste than I have felt in the sixty years after. Probably I was narrower, more dogmatic, and better.
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Ars Poetica and the Talking Cure: Poetry, Therapy, & the Quest to Create

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Lisa C. Krueger
For me, the golden vein of poetry runs through psychology just as the golden vein of psychology runs through poetry. I have written poems since childhood and maintained a therapy practice as a clinical psychologist for twenty-five years. Both of these endeavors hold power as clarifying, enlightening, and transformative processes.

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Memoir with a View: The Window, as Motif and Metaphor, in Creative Nonfiction

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Sue William Silverman
Given poetry’s reliance on the luminosity of images that embody heightened emotional states, it’s no surprise that the window, as portal to the emotions, is also a staple in verse.
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