Debbie Foster

"The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring." ~ Carl Sandburg

Today, self-creation is no longer something some of us can do to set ourselves apart from the people we see as the masses, the crowd, or ‘la foule.’ Instead, it has become something that all of us ‘must’ do in order to maintain our financial and social position in a culture that sees reality as up for grabs, to garner the attention central to so

A hermit crab essay, named by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their craft book ‘Tell It Slant,’ gets its name from the crab that is born without a protective shell, so must scavenge one and make a home inside it. A hermit crab essay takes on an existing form as a container for the essay, such as an obituary, a recipe, or a social media post. The

I begin my writing time by reading, pen in hand, because I know what is likely to happen: A word, phrase, sentence, or idea will open a door for me. Behind that door, if I'm lucky, might be a poem or an essay of my own.

They had discussed the sacredness of stares before. They're the brain's sensory deprivation tank, she'd said; an enclosed, restorative, floating paralysis that should be as uninterruptible and respected as prayer. When Adjoua stared at something long enough for it to start moving—the brick wall, the swirl of grain in the wooden floors, the uneven

After the latent content of a dream has been translated into the manifest content, the dream narrative might be subject to secondary revision. The logical part of the mind is still functioning, and it attempts to make the dream more intelligible. It acts like a newspaper editor making last-minute changes to an article before publication.

in the fascist imagination, there must be a victim to be protected and an invasive enemy on the attack: if young people are adopting beliefs in multiculturalism, gender fluidity, and socialism, then someone must be forcing these ideas on their innocence.

The question is how to feel about everything, about the whole of existence and the place of humankind within it

All quality is a structure, not a function, a process, or a computation. One implication is that consciousness is nonalgorithmic; it is not (Turing) computable.