Staci Kleinmaier

Tucked in the southeast corner of the JC Raulston Arboretum is a living laboratory, where over 700 varieties of perennial, annual and edible plants grow in trial beds. Some of these plants will eventually be available for purchase, but the only way to see them now is to visit a testing garden.

For most of his life my dad lived on his family’s farm outside a small town where everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew my dad was an alcoholic.

Some of my earliest memories are of going to bars and liquor stores with my dad. He’d pick me up from my mom’s house for our weekend visit, and we’d stop at the liquor store on the way to the farm. In his house there were always bottles of whiskey stashed in the laundry hamper, the back-porch cupboard, or the deep freezer.

Several years ago I discovered The Sun on the shelves of a small bookstore in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was in the habit of wandering around bookstores and libraries, searching other people’s writing for answers to questions like Who am I? and How should I live my life? I would optimistically bring home books, but they always ended up decorating my nightstand, unread beyond the first few pages.

At that time I was worn a little thin. My family and I had moved nine hundred mile...

Our August issue looks at the way endings and beginnings are intertwined. Derek Askey talks with Suzanne Kelly about green burial, a practice that allows the human body to decompose and literally return to the earth. In his poem “Better Yet” Jim Moore imagines going back to the day before he was born, to be, as he puts it “about to be.” And Sun senior editor Andrew Snee reflects on the sale of the Sun office building and how the magazine is made now.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about seas...

I have always loved January—not for the weather (I’m originally from the Midwest) but for the sense of new beginning that it brings. It’s like an unmarked notebook, untrod snow, a fresh stick of butter. I can make my life whatever I want it to be, I always think. Of course, this both is and isn’t true. I’m not sure which has a larger influence over my life: my will or my surroundings.


Our January 2024 issue looks at how our environments and circumstances shape us and how we are shaping our...