NEW PUBLICATION: COMPLEX ALLEGIANCES: Constellations of Immigration, Citizenship & Belonging. READINGS AND COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS: May 22, 2012 Peace Resource Center, Seaside, CA; May 26, 2012 Adobe Books, San Francisco, CA; May 30, 2012 Charis Books, Atlanta, GA.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: DARING TO REPAIR:What It Takes, Who Does It, andWhy
NEW VIDEO: Complex Allegiances and Shifting Balance Sheets: Where, When, & Why Do We Say "We"?--A Community Conversation about Belonging.
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 creative acculturation, social forces and psychological resiliency, illness and meaning, spirituality and embodiment - and the complex challenges and lasting rewards of living up close and personal with pluralism in social, family, religious, and academic 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, including the use of the arts, movement, and other embodiment practices, that can help us change our patterns of direct personal interaction, so 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.
NATURALIZED CITIZENSHIP PROJECT NEW PUBLICATION
COMPLEX ALLEGIANCES Constellations of Immigration, Citizenship & Belonging A Wising Up Anthology
Charles D. Brockett, Heather Tosteson, Anna Steegman Editors
We invite you to listen with us as forty-six people from twenty-one countries on six continents thoughtfully explore through memoirs, essays, interviews, and poetry their complex relationships to U.S. citizenship, residency, and their individual sense of community and belonging—as birthright citizens with little direct acquaintance with the U.S., naturalized citizens, dual (or triple) citizens by birth or choice, serial citizens, asylees, diversity lottery winners, lifetime expats, U.S. or global families with differing citizenship statuses and cultural attachments, undocumented residents with a keen desire for citizenship, or lifetime permanent resident aliens with none. READ MORE. . .
SHIFTING BALANCE SHEETS Women's Stories of Naturalized Citizenship & Cultural Attachment A Wising Up Anthology
Heather Tosteson, Kerry Langan, Charles D. Brockett & Debra Gingerich, Editors
In this anthology, thirty-four women and girls from twenty countries, now living all across the U.S., reflect on their journeys to naturalized U.S. citizenship - journeys that invite all of us, native and foreign born, to consider what it means to choose to be an American. In Chinese Daughters: All-American Girls, American mothers whose Chinese daughters have become naturalized citizens through adoption, and these insightful teenagers themselves, ponder how their experiences of cross-national adoption with a unique gender imperative influences their sense of personal, cultural, national and global identity. In Natural Women: Naturalized Citizens, women from Australia, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Cuba, England, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Taiwan and Zambia describe their unique journeys to naturalized citizenship as adults - wondering what womanhood, family, love, cultural identification, intellectual curiosity, professional ambition, material need, war, revolution or chance have to do with it. . .
DARING TO REPAIR:What It Takes, Who Does It, and Why
What defines a good marriage? A loyal friendship? A healthy family? A cohesive community? A true self? More importantly, when our behaviors and life circumstances don't meet our ideals (or those of others), what do we do in response? Read more. . .
WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOST A WISING UP HOUSE READING or START A READING FOR RELATION GROUP?
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
LAST FLIGHT OUT: Living, Loving, & Leaving Phyllis A. Langton
Above all, Phyllis Langton's memoir, Last Flight Out: Living, Loving & Leaving, is a passionate love story, one that deepens as she and her husband George Thomas live their way into the experience of ALS, its unremitting losses and its surprising gifts, with dignity, keen humor, a fighter pilot's courage and a nurse's unsentimental pragmatism.. . . READ MORE
Phyllis Langton has had as illustrious a career as anyone in academia, but she has taken infinite pains now to write a different kind of book. Her story of her husband's life with and death from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) yields many a valuable lesson, but this lesson above all: that dying, whatever its pains, can be both a negative and a positive experience. Here love and mortality, laughter and sorrow are all but inseparable, and their inseparability may help lessen a reader's fear of death and dying. Anyone who enjoys a deeply moving story will want to read this wondrous, indispensable book, and anybody who faces adversity, that is to say everybody, will need to read it.
Jeffery Paine - author of Father India, Re-enchantment, Adventures with the Buddha, and Tales of Wonder (with Huston Smith). Judge for the Pulitzer Prize and former vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle.
Wising Up Writers Collective
A HYMN THAT MEANDERS Maria Nazos
In passionate, lyrical, funny, angry, and ecstatic poems that migrate from the heartland of the country to the Atlantic coast and beyond, this young poet searches the world within her and around her for intimate myths that will hold, stories that will heal, actions that can transform the restless quest for love into its steady practice, adolescence into adulthood. With sonorous cadences, with relentless honesty, and with deeply human truths, as well as deeply human humans infusing her poems, Maria Nazos has written a stunning first collection. Godspeed (like a bolt, like a bullet) A Hymn That Meanders into the world!
Thomas Lux, author of Particles: Poems, The Cradle Place, The Street of Clocks, and New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995.
THE SANCTITY OF THE MOMENT: Poems from Four Decades
This
powerful collection of poems spans the major stages of a woman's life - adolescence,
early marriage and divorce, single motherhood, family life and its dissolution,
late love, encroaching mortality, and the mysterious, obsessive, and ultimately
healing returns of early trauma - and does so with an equally tenacious sense
of the sanctity of this moment, and this one alone, in all its redeeming
particulars.
There
can be no other poet like Heather Tosteson, no other who strives so genuinely
to take so much into account. She sees "every one of us in this world
holding/. . .an enormous universe of feeling," and her lines do not
describe this universe but mesh with it. She does not witness the world, she
bears it. Hers is the grandest and most honorable ambition, to render without
violation "life's silky, staining patina." What an immense revelation
The Sanctity of the Moment is!
How admirable the revealer!
- Fred Chappell, Shadow Box,
Backsass, Family Gathering, Midquest,
winner of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, T.S. Eliot Prize, and Aiken Taylor
Award.
VIEW FROM THE BED: VIEW FROM THE BEDSIDE A Wising Up Anthology
Who is the
doctor or nurse who
for better, or worse, you can't forget? The patient who changed your
life?
Thirty-eight contemporary writers explore with memoir, story, and poetry
the
different ways we talk about, to - and through - each other at the
doctor's
office, hospital, or sickbed. One surgeon
celebrates his first surgical
success; another grieves the death of a patient. A nurse finds her
compassion
exhausted by a suicidal patient; another keeps an unsentimental
inventory of
those moments that make it all worthwhile. Patients transitioning from a
state
mental hospital collaborate with clinicians to write an essay about
their
experiences. A mother poignantly reviews her son's twenty-five years
with
congenital heart disease. . .
KEYS TO THE KINGDOM: Reflections on Music and the Mind
Keys to
the Kingdom: Reflections on Music and the Mind charts the course of an unusual odyssey. For
nearly a decade, Kathleen Housley played piano with Katrina Withey, a gifted
musician partially paralyzed from a stroke. To understand those times in their
playing when disabilities disappeared in a shimmer of grace, Housley wrote
brief reflections, turning to neuroscience and history for deeper insight.
I am
certain I will return to this book many times - to prevent music from becoming
solely intellectual, friendship simply casual, and life experiences reduced to
a progression of day-to-day events. Each chapter is a fresh and enlightening
look at the power of music throughout time, and a moving glimpse into evoking
the eternal power between friends.
Pamela J. Perry, D.M.A., Professor of
Music, Central Connecticut State University
The collective will be of interest to
writers who have published sufficiently to be confident of the literary
quality of their work, who appreciate both increased artistic control
and responsibility and the rigor of peer review, and who enjoy working
in community with other writers to foster broader social conversations
about themes of abiding interest to them and the larger society.
WISING UP GALLERY
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
