There’s nothing quite like the feel of a fat package in your mailbox—especially when it contains contributor copies of Grain Magazine. I’m thrilled to announce that my essay “Brahman is the Charioteer” is in the Spring 2017 issue of this eclectic Canadian literary journal.
Grain Magazine, Spring 2017. Cover art by Winnie Truong.
Editor Adam Pottle has dubbed this issue “Relativity of Zen,” and it features writers and artists exploring, in Pottle’s words, “many different approaches to achieving Zen.”
His editor’s note begins:
Finding peace has become a vital endeavour. Not just between nations and people, but in the small morsels within our daily routines, those in-between moments where we transition from one activity to another: when we take the bus home, or after we put the kids to bed, or when we’re doing the dishes after a big dinner. It seems that peace within our own lives is difficult to find and almost impossible to sustain, so to hope for a better future appears fantastical.
This Zen-themed issue feels like the perfect home for my essay, which is about my late mother’s love of Sanskrit and our complex relationship with spirituality—and each other. The essay contains chapter segments of a book-length memoir I’m working on; it’s a coming-of-age story about a girl with cystic fibrosis struggling to live up to the utopian ideals of her spiritual community in Iowa, and the mother who brought her to live there.
More on that later. For now, I hope you’ll head to your nearest bookstore and get Grained!