First, Chip Livingston recounts his transformational experiences with Reiki and alternative healing practices in the Saturday Essay. A shocking recording of a tarot reading empowers Livingston to feel hope again for his ailing lover, Ash, who is HIV positive. Then, Livingston learns a new way of healing at a Native American conference that complements his tarot reading.
Next, a forlorn man in the desert is happy to have one companion in Brandon Hicks’s “The Cactus.”
Finally, Lori Ostlund talks to her partner Anne Raeff, author of Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection The Jungle Around Us, in the Sunday Interview. The legacy of the Holocaust, her relationships with her grandparents, and her interest in “big moral questions” help to create Raeff’s identity as an author.
