Behold, I Am Alive

Exploring themes of sexual abuse, violence against women and animals, and religion, the stories in this collection, Behold, I Am Alive, follow characters who struggle to overcome trauma as they search for agency and a sense of belonging

Resurrection Realities

I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive forever more

Introduction

Introduction to the memoir Until Further Notice, I am Alive, by Tom Lubbock, art critic of the Independent. The work is a record of two years following diagnosis of a brain tumour. It is a meditation on language and mortality and was published by Granta in 2012 to great acclaim. I wrote the 2200 word introduction, giving the text the contextual framework of an experience both of us lived through

The Flood

I wake and I am alive but the wine in my glass from the night before is dead

still

Still concentrates on façade as a means of considering what we can see and what we decide to show. I am curious about the relationship between our memories and our photographs, and how only the latter is truly accessible to others. In order to communicate what I see before me as best as possible, I ask those who I photograph to be still so that their likeness may be translated faithfully. In our stillness we can become increasingly aware of our surroundings and of ourselves. Though “still” describes the absence of motion, it also describes a continuation from the past into and through the present. I am still making photographs. I am still learning. I am still alive

Sociotherapy took me out of my solitude

I am fifty-eight years old. I have been a widow since 1995. Because of the ethnic conflicts that reigned in Rwanda over a period of many years, I grew up and lived in different neighbouring countries. I returned to Rwanda in 1992, at the age of thirty-eight. I was born into a family of six children, four of whom died during the genocide. Only one sister and I are still alive. I married my husband in 1968 when I was fourteen years old. We had seven children together. Four are alive, the three others died during the genocide

What Love Looks Like, As I Recall

Excerpt: I am standing in a funeral home in Wichita, Kansas, looking at my grandmother\u27s face. It appears fuller than it did when I last saw it. When she was alive. Her gray hair is styled more formally than usual. Only her glasses look the same. Behind the lenses, however, her eyes show none of their usual sparkle, the way they seemed to twinkle when she made a joke or heard or read an insightful comment- or listened to me play my guitar. I am a junior in high school, and I have no clue how I\u27m going to go on without her

Religious Fundamentalism and an Ethics of Recognition

"Today, fundamentalism is not only alive and kicking in all the world religions including Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism but is also making inroads into politics. (...) I am trying to figure out what factors contributed to fundamentalism. Could they be the growth of science, atheism, agnosticism, secularity, foreign rule and so on? [...]", p.70-71

Non-Book Materials, Libraries and Librarians

Writing of one kind or another has been with us about 7,000 to 10,000 years; pictures, cave paintings, etc., as much as 50, 000 years. It has been only 35 years since educational motion pictures became a physical reality in the classroom; we have had cheap film, slides, etc. , only for the past 20 years. We have been using print in one or another form for only 500 years, and it too is now appearing in vastly changed and machinery- dependent forms. We are talking here about non-book materials: visual aids and aural aids, and the combination aural /visual such as motion pictures and television. A sine qua non of this definition, but not always so stated, is that all types of materials are necessary to us in our libraries as aids and supplements to the experiences stirred up and made alive by book materials. Therefore, in talking about non-book materials in libraries, I shall treat them as if they were as common to us as books, since I see no reason for their inclusion as part of our working tools if they are not considered as basic and vital for their particular purposes as are books for the things books can do. Let me pretend that for the next three or so paragraphs I am talking to an audio/visual class, and that I am presenting to them a part of the story as to why it is important to consider audio/visual materials in the learning process.published or submitted for publicatio