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Phantom Limb
Phantom Limb is a wise and courageous memoir that moves between past and present, chronicling an adult daughter’s journey through the final years of her parents’ lives. A story of discovering love through adversity as well as an inquiry into contemporary neurology and spiritual life, Phantom Limb is a moving meditation on the struggle to make peace with physical and emotional ghosts of the past. Janet Sternburg writes with such warmth and honesty that loss itself becomes luminous: “This is the grace of the last years, the children coming to understand the contradictions in their parents, not to reconcile them but encompass them in a larger love.”
148 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2002
About the author
Janet Sternburg
9 books7 followersJanet Sternburg is a writer of memoir, essays, poetry and plays, as well as a fine-art photographer. Her books include two memoirs, White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine (Hawthorne Books) and Phantom Limb: A Meditation on Memory (University of Nebraska Press and Foreverland Press), as well as the classic two volumes of The Writer on Her Work (W.W. Norton) described by Poets & Writers as "groundbreaking...a landmark," and Optic Nerve: Photopoems (Red Hen Press).
White Matter (September, 2015) has been selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the "BIG INDIE BOOKS OF FALL."
Her work in theatre and film has included directing and producing films, among them the award-winning "Virginia Woolf: The Moment Whole" and "El Teatro Campesino," both broadcast on public television; serving as Director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club; curating two 13-part cable television series of independent films; and writing the play "The Fifth String," performed in workshop in Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York,scheduled for a full production in 2017 at New York's La Mama Theater.
In 1998, she picked up a camera and began another life as a photographer. Her work has now been shown at museums and galleries around the world, with solo shows in Berlin, Munich, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, and Korea, where she was commissioned by The Seoul Institute of the Arts to create a full-building installation. Portfolios of her work have been published in Aperture and Art Journal. In 2016, Distanz Verlag (Berlin) will publish Overspilling World, a book of her photographs.
She lives in Los Angeles and is married to Steven D. Lavine, President of the California Institute of the Arts, traveling
worldwide with him on behalf of the Institute and serving as partner on many of its ventures. Part of each year she lives in
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Her honors include fellowships and residencies, among them from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Embassy in Berlin, The MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Programs. She was selected by The Utne Reader as one of 40 creative people in the United States and Europe described as "innovative. . . with depth, resonance. . . full of ideas and insights that challenge us to live more fully."
Excerpts of her writing and photography can be found at janetsternburg.com
Author Photo: James Jansen
White Matter (September, 2015) has been selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the "BIG INDIE BOOKS OF FALL."
Her work in theatre and film has included directing and producing films, among them the award-winning "Virginia Woolf: The Moment Whole" and "El Teatro Campesino," both broadcast on public television; serving as Director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club; curating two 13-part cable television series of independent films; and writing the play "The Fifth String," performed in workshop in Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York,scheduled for a full production in 2017 at New York's La Mama Theater.
In 1998, she picked up a camera and began another life as a photographer. Her work has now been shown at museums and galleries around the world, with solo shows in Berlin, Munich, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, and Korea, where she was commissioned by The Seoul Institute of the Arts to create a full-building installation. Portfolios of her work have been published in Aperture and Art Journal. In 2016, Distanz Verlag (Berlin) will publish Overspilling World, a book of her photographs.
She lives in Los Angeles and is married to Steven D. Lavine, President of the California Institute of the Arts, traveling
worldwide with him on behalf of the Institute and serving as partner on many of its ventures. Part of each year she lives in
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Her honors include fellowships and residencies, among them from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Embassy in Berlin, The MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Programs. She was selected by The Utne Reader as one of 40 creative people in the United States and Europe described as "innovative. . . with depth, resonance. . . full of ideas and insights that challenge us to live more fully."
Excerpts of her writing and photography can be found at janetsternburg.com
Author Photo: James Jansen
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 20, 2018
A memoir by a daughter of her mother and aunts' aging and death. Kind of eh.
Displaying 1 of 1 review