NEW WEB CONTINUING CONVERSATION : STEPPING IN: Raising Our Chldren's Children
NEW PUBLICATIONS -- WISING UP ANTHOLOGIES
CROSSING CLASS: THE INVISIBLE WALL
SURPRISED BY JOY
NEW PUBLICATIONS - MEMOIR
GREEN CARD & OTHER ESSAYS
by Áine Greaney
JOURNEYS WITH A THOUSAND HEROES: A Child Oncologist's Story
by John Graham-Pole
NEW PUBLICATION - NOVEL
THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF MARIA VAN LEEUWENHOEK, ANTONI'S DOCHTER by Heather Tosteson
NEW EBOOK: CITIZEN/SCHOLAR REPORT
THE 2018 IMMIGRATION DEBATE: TRUMP FACES PUBLIC OPINION by Charles Brockett
NEW WEB ANTHOLOGY
LONGER THAN EXPECTED: Adulthood After Life-Threatening Childhood Illness
New Kindle Editions Available . . . Love After 70 . . . Siblings: Our First Macrocosm . . . Families: The Frontline of Pluralism
NEW PHOTO GALLERIES
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:
Re-Creating Our Common Chord - A Wising Up Listening Project The Lasting Weight of Felony - A Wising Up Listening Project
A WELCOMING PHILOSOPHY
The aim of Universal Table is to promote tolerance and social trust along many dimensions of life - or those are the words we have been using in our official mission statement. But each time we use them, we realize we are trying to describe something far broader - something that encompasses welcome, difference, surprise and inclusion, truthfulness and authenticity, and an equal place for each of us and what we hold most dear. These are the true goals of Universal Table: Finding the We in Them, the Us in You.
Our major activities are the books we create and publish through Wising Up Press, and the Universal Table workshops and research projects that both develop and support them. Our areas of particular interest are social justice & inclusion, immigration & belonging, pluralism in families, illness & meaning, social and psychological resiliency, creative aging, listening across faiths - and the many other complex challenges and lasting rewards of living up close and personal with pluralism in social, family, religious, and civic life.
What distinguishes our approach is an equal emphasis on the why and the how of living well with difference. Through our research projects, we are developing new interpretations of chronic areas of social discord, interpretations that make it safer for us to interact from a position of respect and appreciation with people who have very different world views and value systems.
We are equally interested in specific techniques, especially the use of story and other art forms, to help us change our patterns of direct personal interaction, so that we can live out our best intentions. What ways of thinking, imagining, listening, speaking and being with one another truly expand our worlds? For real, sustainable change takes place at the day by day, person by person, word by word, gesture by gesture level - and it isn't easy and it isn't simple. But fascinating, rewarding, energizing, inspiring, and worth all the effort - without a doubt.
CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS
Re-Creating Our Common Chord A Wising Up Anthology and Listening Project
Deadline: May 1, 2019
At a time when polarizing rhetoric is pervasive, we invite you to do something quite different: Discover and share through stories, memoir, creative non-fiction, and poetry what you have learned in your own life about the opposite dynamic—about what it takes to create genuine harmony with someone who feels challengingly different from you, what it takes to re-create a common chord in our increasingly contentious and intolerant world.
We are extending the deadline for submissions for the Re-Creating Our Common Chord anthology and listening project until May 1, 2019. We feel this topic—What allows us to live faithfully and constructively with people who may never think the way we do?—is so important that we would like to get the word out as broadly as possible. Please share this call with anyone who you think would find it of interest. We all have something to contribute to the understanding of this crucial dynamic.
STEPPING IN: Raising Our Children's Children A WISING UP WEB CONVERSATION
What does it mean to find ourselves—when we thought we were well beyond our child-bearing, child-rearing years—taking on the same parental roles we played twenty or more years ago? Can we step into our adult children's shoes when, for often tragic reasons, they are not able to fill them? Do the things we learned first time around have any bearing here?
We share stories by Nancy Kay Brown and Melodie Corrigall to get the conversation started. . .
In Green Card & Other Essays, Áine Greaney invites her readers to follow her three-decades' long journey from Irish citizen and resident to new immigrant and green card holder to dual citizenship that now includes naturalized U.S. citizenship.
What exactly does it mean to be shaped by class? How does this shaping affect what we long for, strive for, believe is possible—not just for us but for those around us and the world at large? What happens to our understanding of class, of our society and of ourselves, when we cross class boundaries upwards or downwards, willingly or unwillingly, through education, employment, marriage, divorce, friendships and other meaningful relationships, immigration or emigration, illness, economic or political upheaval? Join thirty contemporary writers as they explore the impact of class and inequality through fiction, memoir, poetry—and some graphs.
JOY. It's out of our control—unpredictable, illogical, transitory, all-consuming. It can shatter our most basic assumptions. It can heal. . . . In this anthology forty-three contemporary writers help us explore, through fiction, poetry, and memoir, how experiences of joy help shape us and our relationship with the world around us.
JOURNEYS WITH A THOUSAND HEROES: A Child Oncologist's Story
John Graham-Pole
John Graham-Pole’s thoughtful, moving and surprisingly open memoir traces the arc of his long career as a pediatric oncologist from its origins in the early loss of his mother to cancer, through his early medical training in Britain, his role in the dramatic evolution of cancer treatments in the U.S., especially stem cell treatments, to a more holistic idea of the practice of medicine that includes the use of the arts and end-of-life hospice care.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF MARIA VAN LEEUWENHOEK, ANTONI'S DOCHTER (1668-1696) : Including accounts of novel discoveries made in Delft that bear upon the oft vexing mysteries of sexual generation, particularly as they apply to the fate and purpose of women HEATHER TOSTESON
The 2018 Immigration Debate: Trump Faces Public Opinion Charles D. Brockett
Current public preferences concerning immigration provide sound guidance for a resilient compromise on many aspects of the 2018 immigration debate. READ MORE . . .
NEW WEB ANTHOLOGY
LONGER THAN EXPECTED:
Adulthood After Life-Threatening Childhood Illness
WOULD YOU LIKE TO USE AN ANTHOLOGY TO START A CONVERSATION?
We see our books, especially our Wising Up Anthologies, as catalysts for community, a way of deepening the conversations that develop through the shared experience of reading, especially around areas of sticky, or strident, social concern . . . Read More
Stephanie Hart: Contributing author and discussion leader
The Kindness of Strangers NYC Discussion Group
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
THE LASTING WEIGHT OF FELONY A Wising Up Listening Project
To explore the lasting social consequences of felony convictions, we are creating a book that combines first person accounts of people with felony convictions—both when serving their sentences and afterwards, including those who have successfully reintegrated and those who have not—along with the stories of the many other people involved in these cases.READ MORE
Kerry Langan's warm and generous third short story collection, My Name Is Your Name, includes stories of women at all ages—from little girls to old women whose long lives are now only fleeting memories. READ MORE
Our 12th Wising Up Anthology. . . THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS A Wising Up Anthology
In this Wising Up Anthology, forty-eight contemporary authors explore through stories, memoir, and poetry how the kindness of strangers has informed and transformed their lives. They describe how we are often surprised into kindness; discover unexpected abilities and compatibilities through it; retreat from it; act on it at times grudgingly; are saved by it in times of illness; and through its practice find our best selves. READ MORE . . . DISCUSSION GUIDE
SIBLINGS: Our First Macrocosm A Wising Up Anthology
Our families, especially our siblings, provide our first macrocosm. How much of that experience do we carry out into the world as part of our deepest, inchoate expectations of the world or of ourselves? What happens to us as adults when we return to these first numinous macrocosms trying to understand how they still shape our ways of being? Read more. . . Book Trailer NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE
KINDLE EDITIONS NOW AVAILABLE. . . WISING UP ANTHOLOGIES. . . .
