art ~ spirit ~ transformation
e*lix*ir

e*lix*ir   #4
autumn / winter 2016
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Editorial

  • The Spiritual Lives of Children

  • Fiction

  • The Imperfect Pilgrim
    by Ron Tomanio
  • “Maggie’s Forever Friend”
    by Patti Rae Tomarelli
  • The Red Roan Stallion
    by Beverlee Patton

  • Poetry

  • Three Poems
    by Susan Engle
  • “Advice to a Daughter”
    by Sandra Lynn Hutchison

  • Picture Books

  • The Painting

  • Essays

  • Two Decades of Spirit of Children: A Retrospective
    by Allison Grover Khoury
  • Brilliant Star: Looking Back on 36 Years of an Award-Winning Children’s Magazine
    by Susan Engle

  • Interviews

  • Interview with Mary Victoria, author of Chronicles of the Tree

  • Looking Back on Books

  • Lilly and Peggy
    by Ronald Tomanio
  • Maggie Celebrates Ayyám-i-Há
    by Patti Rae Tomarelli
  • Kamal’s Day
    by Leona Hosack

  • Art

  • Paintings
    by Jeannie Hunt

  • Translations

  • “He is God! O God,I am an innocent child.”
    translated by Shahin Mowzoon

  • Voices of Iran

  • Children of Destiny
    by Basir Samimi


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    Painting by Jeannie Hunt

    SANDRA LYNN HUTCHISON

    Advice to a Daughter

    Hold fast to growing things! Study resilient roots
    that dream through winter storms,
    Survive the bitter winds.

    Anything washed by rain is clean, unstained.
    Catch it in your net. Plant it. Watch it bud,
    Its leaves unfurl in early spring.

    Time grows, too, and blueberries thrive in scrub
    and stone, where on the blood-colored rock
    you found a home, your first under the moon.

    Seaweed, you might think it homely as a weed,
    Like dandelion growth, overabundant, untamed,
    A thing you cannot love. Just touch it.

    The touch of a thing furnishes the mind with food
    and drink. Never forget trees — faithful lovers
    they abide with you until the end.

    Wait for a big wind to blow away your sadness
    as you lie in the cradling grass alone,
    Nothing but clouds to take you home.

    A bird is the best guide. Ever frugal, it uses
    ordinary things — a blade of grass, a leaf,
    As it calls to its mate to come join the feast.

    A garden is a well of joy. Dive in. Planting,
    a straight path to follow without fear.
    Hold fast to growing things!

    A green world thrives where friends stand,
    hands uplifted, fingers intertwined,
    Twin branches reaching to the sky.


    Sandra Lynn Hutchison

    Bio:   Sandra Lynn Hutchison is the author of two books: Chinese Brushstrokes (Turnstone Press, 1996), a collection of stories about China in the prelude to and aftermath of the Tiananmen Uprising, and The Art of Nesting (GR Books, 2008), a book of poetry.

    Her stories have been anthologized in a variety of publications, including Chinese Ink, Western Pen: The Oxford Anthology of Stories About China (Oxford U. Press, 2000). She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in English literature and has been the recipient of various academic and literary awards, including a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship, an Emily Dickinson Poetry Prize from Universities West Press and a Jane Kenyon Poetry Scholarship from Bennington College, where she did work towards an MFA in Poetry.

    She lives and teaches in Orono, Maine, where she is working on a memoir and a novel.