NEW PUBLICATIONS: Creativity & Constraint God Speaks My Language, Can You? Revised Edition
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Siblings: Our First Macrocosm - Deadline March 1, 2015
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: The Lasting Weight of Felony - A Wising Up Listening Project NEW GUIDELINES - Wising Up Press Writers Collective
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 familes, 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.
Readings from the Wising Up Anthologies Bluestockings 172 Allen Street, Manhattan February 1, 2015 7-9 pm
SIBLINGS: OUR FIRST MACROCOSM A Wising Up Anthology
We invite writers of all ages and cultures to share fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir and poetry on the theme of siblings—whole, half, step, foster, twins, triplets, sextuplets, or soul, cherished, rejected, reconciled, recently discovered, physically distant or near, living or dead—and the world as we came to know it through these relationships. . . .
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
We often think of true creativity as unfettered liberty—but is creativity something that only takes root, flourishes, within bounds? What happens to our ideas if they must work their way through the material world—often being materially changed in the process?
Join forty writers of poetry, fiction and memoir as they muse on the various permutations of creativity and constraint in their own lives and in their artistic process. Read more. . .
Based on over one hundred interviews with people across all faith traditions, this is, above all, a book of stories, each fascinating and unique. We are invited to read with the express intention of feeling what we have in common with the people whose life stories we find here, whether they are conservative Christian housewives or liberal young Muslim immigrants, Buddhist musicians, or Harley-riding shamans. . . . Read More. . . Available now on Kindle
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
Universal Table Finding the We in Them, the Us in You. Wising Up Press
www.universaltable.org P.O. Box 2122, Decatur, GA 30031-2122 404-276-6046
