The Kindness of Strangers

by Heather Tosteson (Editor), Charles D. Brockett (Editor), Anusha V.R.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS A Wising Up Anthology

Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett, Editors



The kindness of strangers . . . It isn't earned. It isn't a right. It cannot happen in the same way in the same place twice. It can change your life. Even if we sometimes can't remember it clearly in times of conflict or unmet need, we have all experienced the kindness of strangers, either in the giving or receiving, most often in both. It makes a difference, it resets us somehow, so that the give and take of circumstance, our own vulnerabilities and fears, are less consuming, world-defining. It presumes the simplest and most radical kind of similarity: shared humanity and good faith. It isn't the least naive. It stands up to scrutiny, indeed expands, flowers with the attention we give it, even when the act is small, the consequences not what we intended.

In this collection, forty-eight contemporary writers explore through stories, memoir, and poetry how the kindness of strangers has informed and transformed their lives. They describe how we are often surprised into kindness; discover unexpected abilities and compatibilities, new identities, and inner freedom through it; how we retreat from it; act on it at times grudgingly; are saved by it in times of illness; and through its practice find ourselves, often without noticing, developing larger and more sustaining communities and an unanticipated sense of belonging.

CONTRIBUTORS: Susan Austin, Rachel Squires Bloom, Katie Glauber Bush, William Cass, Laura Chaignon, Teetle Clawson, Susan Clayton-Goldner, Shireen Day, Norita Dittberner-Jax, Alethea Eason, Rupert Fike, Meia Geddes, Frank Haberle, Patrick Cabello Hansel, Stephanie Hart, Margaret Hasse, Paul Hostovsky, Lowell Jaeger, Pauline Kaldas, Murali Kamma, Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, John King, Laurie Klein, Norman Klein, Steve Koppman, Rick Krizman, Robert J. Kus, Linda Maxwell, Jessica Naab, Jason A. Ney, Marianne Peel, Dorothy Oliver Pirovano, MK Punky, Wilderness Sarchild, George J. Searles, Patti See, Pegi Deitz Shea, Karen Skolfield, Darcy Smith, Ken Staley, Rebecca Taksel, Jennifer Thornburg, John Timm, Johnny Townsend, Gina ValdEs, Anusha VR, Joel Wachman, Jana Zvibleman

Genres: Poetry

342 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2016

About the author

HEATHER TOSTESON, a fiction writer, poet and visual artist, is the author most recently of the poetry collection, Source Notes: Seventh Decade. She is also the author of the novels The Philosophical Transactions of Maria van Leeuwenhoek, Antoni's Dochter (1668-1696), which explores questions of sexual generation. She is also the author of the novel Visible Signs, and two collections of short stories, Germs of Truth and Hearts as Big as Fists & Other Stories. Her other two books of poetry are The Sanctity of the Moment: Poems from Four Decades, and Breathing in Portuguese, Living in English.

She is also the author and co-author of two non-fiction Wising Up Listening projects, most recently Sharing the Burden of Repair: Reentry After Mass Incarceration which looks at reentry from multiple perspectives. God Speaks My Language, Can You? explores spiritual journeys across many faith traditions.

She has co-edited and illustrated seventeen Wising Up anthologies, including most recently Flip Sides, Goodness, and Re-Creating Our Common Chord.

She has received a Nation/Discovery prize for her poetry and fellowships for poetry, fiction, and photography from MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA and Hambidge. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (UNC-Greensboro) and Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing (Ohio University). She has worked extensively in the public health and the health sciences as a writer, editor, and researcher. She is the founder, with Charles Brockett, of Wising Up Press and the Wising Up Press Writers Collective.