It's hard to think of another role with as much impact as being a mother and father. For almost every other position, we are replaceable in the long term. Someone else will do our job, for better or worse, if we're not there to do it. Someone else will eventually start our company or make our invention or sketch out our idea. Maybe it won't happen for a long time; maybe it would have happened earlier, if we weren't around to slow things down. But eventually, society makes progress, and the niches of innovation — in business or technology, art or politics — are filled.
The stories we're featuring on the site now touch upon the impact that fathers have — even in their absence. In Learned at My Father's Feet, Kae Dickson remembers her experience caring for her "Daddy" at the end of his life, as dementia robbed him of his memories and independence. In A Circle, Broken, Amy O'Loughlin reviews a family memoir by CNN journalist Mark Whitaker, who describes his complicated relationship with his absentee father, an African American scholar who blazed trails only to see his career burn out amid his struggles with alcoholism.
Lost Decades
This week the magazine is featuring a trio of articles about prisons, real and psychological. In Freed, but Scarred, Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald describes the post-prison lives of three men who spent, among them, forty-three years in New York penitentiaries for crimes they did not commit. In an accompanying photo essay, Life after Innocence, Dana Ullman presents intimate portraits of the three men and their families, still scarred by absences and regrets. Finally, in Across Oceans, Haunted by Memories, Susan M. Lee reviews the novel "The Reeducation of Cherry Truong," a tale of two Vietnamese families flung across the globe, chased by their war-era remembrances of traumas endured and wrongs perpetrated — at times, on each other.
The End of the Road
Hitchhiking has become an anachronism in many parts of the world, along with the trust of strangers that makes it possible, but in The Road Less Traveled, Lita Wong hitches her way through rural Cuba and finds herself relying in unexpected ways on the kindness and decency of the people she meets on the road. Also check out Havel: An Authentic Life, Jan Vihan's essay on the plays of Vaclav Havel, the Czech statesman, revolutionary, and writer who died at the end of last year.
Archives
We have added a link to our old site in the sidebar, so that readers have access again to the stories we published between 2001 and 2010. We hope to add the entire collection of past stories to the new site eventually, as soon as our volunteer staff finds the time. Thanks for bearing with us.
A Dog’s Life
A new year is a time for new beginnings, and in Girl's Best Friend, Rebecca Leisher describes how friendship helped her to overcome a self-destructive lifestyle and learn to face life with an authentic confidence. (In Rebecca's case, her friends were dogs.)
‘Only Love Can Make Us Listen to the Truth of Another Person’
Here are words worth pondering from the recent funeral service for Czech president Václav Havel. "Truth, seen in a narrow, self-centered way as the one and only truth, is the cause of discord and intolerance. That is why he took “Truth and Love” as his motto, as only love can make us listen to the truth of another person, to the truth of others. Such love teaches us to be humble, and Václav Havel had more humility than we all do. This is the deep meaning of the motto “Truth and Love," a motto for which he was sometimes ridiculed and so much criticized. And yet, it expresses the very substance of human struggle."
Cheating Death
Ben Breedlove died on Christmas. The Austin teen suffered from a heart condition that brought him to the verge of death multiple times over his eighteen years. He described his near-death experiences in this two-part video, posted a week before the heart attack that killed him. In the video he doesn't speak, but tells his story with note cards, from time to time flashing a smile that hints at the things his scribbled words leave out. In Ben's telling, what he felt as he drew close to death was an overwhelming feeling of peace. "I had no worries at all, like nothing else in the world mattered," he wrote of a near-death experience when he was four. "I can't even describe the peace, how peaceful it was."
In The Fray 2.0
Welcome to the new In The Fray.
We've been on hiatus for a while, and we've used that time to update the site, our editorial approach, and our nonprofit organization. We hope you'll enjoy reading the new magazine. Ever since we founded ITF ten years ago, we've published stories that help readers understand other people and empathize with their struggles and triumphs. This will continue, but we've streamlined both the look and content of the magazine in ways that make our mission clearer and our work more compelling.
We've been on hiatus for a while, and we've used that time to update the site, our editorial approach, and our nonprofit organization. We hope you'll enjoy reading the new magazine. Ever since we founded ITF ten years ago, we've published stories that help readers understand other people and empathize with their struggles and triumphs. This will continue, but we've streamlined both the look and content of the magazine in ways that make our mission clearer and our work more compelling.
Best of ITF 2010
It is hard to believe that another year has come and gone, and harder that I'm writing and believing such clichés. I used to think that only old people marveled at how quickly years passed, and now I find myself doing it as well. I suppose it is the way of the world. 2011 will bring many changes for ITF. We're getting ready to unveil a new site design, and will be welcoming several new staff members in the coming months. Looking back on 2010, we featured a lot of great pieces, but here's a few of what we thought was our best.
Best of ITF 2009
It is somehow fitting that the new year begins in the dead of winter. The silence of the snowy landscape, the frozen lakes and the darkness all seem to reinforce a single depressing message: the world is dead. Give up. There is nothing more to hope for. For the last week, overnight lows here along the north shore of Lake Superior have reached -25°F, which, for those who use a temperature scale that makes sense, is awfully, miserably cold. Still, with the dawning of a new year, I am reminded that the world is not dead, that spring will come again and that life is a circle, endlessly repeating.
It is in the tradition of this time of year to take stock of what has come to pass in the previous year, and we at In The Fray do not feel the urge to stray from that tradition. It is with this in mind that we look back over the previous year and select some of our favorite pieces.
It is in the tradition of this time of year to take stock of what has come to pass in the previous year, and we at In The Fray do not feel the urge to stray from that tradition. It is with this in mind that we look back over the previous year and select some of our favorite pieces.
