New Wising Up Writers Collective Publication: Germs of Truth by Heather Tosteson New Wising Up Anthology: Daring to Repair: What Is It, Who Does It & Why? Visit the Wising Up Press channel on YouTube New Calls for Submissions: Wising Up Anthologies: I-Thou in an Up-Down World: Lasting Friendships Across Deep Divides Love Before: Love After Wising Up Writers Collective: July Reading Period
A WELCOMING PHILOSOPHY
The aim of Universal Table is to promote tolerance and social trust along many dimensions of life - or those are the words we have been using in our official mission statement. But each time we use them, we realize we are trying to describe something far broader - something that encompasses welcome, difference, surprise and inclusion, truthfulness and authenticity, and an equal place for each of us and what we hold most dear. These are the true goals of Universal Table: Finding the We in Them, the Us in You.
Our major activities are the books we create and publish through Wising Up Press, and the Universal Table workshops and research projects that both develop and support them. Our areas of particular interest are immigration & belonging, pluralism in familes, illness & meaning, social and psychological resiliency, creative aging, and listening across faiths - and the many other complex challenges and lasting rewards of living up close and personal with pluralism in social, family, religious, and civic life.
What distinguishes our approach is an equal emphasis on the why and the how of living well with difference. Through our research projects, we are developing new interpretations of chronic areas of social discord, interpretations that make it safer for us to interact from a position of respect and appreciation with people who have very different world views and value systems.
We are equally interested in specific techniques, especially the use of story and other art forms, to help us change our patterns of direct personal interaction, so that we can live out our best intentions. What ways of thinking, imagining, listening, speaking and being with one another truly expand our worlds? For real, sustainable change takes place at the day by day, person by person, word by word, gesture by gesture level - and it isn't easy and it isn't simple. But fascinating, rewarding, energizing, inspiring, and worth all the effort - without a doubt.
New Publication
GERMS OF TRUTH A book about life, death, families of all ages, stages, and orientation—and sperm banks.
In this engaging and thoughtful collection of short stories, we find people of all ages trying to make sense—poignant, often funny, sometimes wise—of the many, changing ways they intersect as parents, children, and families from conception to death.
I-THOU IN AN UP-DOWN WORLD: Lasting Friendships Across Deep Divides Deadline: July 15, 2013
We are interested in stories, memoirs, poetry, and creative non-fiction from and about people who have successfully maintained long term friendships across deep divides. What inspires these friendships? What are their rewards? What are the special challenges they bring? READ MORE
LOVE BEFORE: LOVE AFTER Deadline: August 15, 2013
What is love like before and after adolescence, adulthood, professional success or failure, illness, marriage, betrayal, divorce, parenthood, bereavement, large and small dislocations in place, culture, or belief? We invite submissions of poetry, fiction, memoir, and creative non-fiction for an anthology that explores what changes and what remains the same in our affection for each other as we go through life's great changes. READ MORE
WISING UP WRITERS COLLECTIVE BOOK MANUSCRIPTS
SUBMISSION PERIOD: July 1-31, 2013
We consider completed, individually authored manuscripts: novels, short story collections, memoirs, creative non-fiction, and full-length poetry collections. FOR FULL GUIDELINES
The collective is designed to publish books with talented writers who have published sufficiently to be confident of the literary quality of their work and who enjoy the synergy of publishing in community with other writers whose work resonates well with the subject areas of the press and its social commitment to Finding the We in Them, the Us in You.
In this intriguing anthology of poetry, memoir, and story, forty-five talented writers ages twenty to eighty explore repair in many forms: between adults and their parents, parents and their children, in romantic relationships, marriage, divorce, bereavement because of the death of a parent, spouse, or grandchild, and in relationship to broader social conditions as well, like poverty, addiction, racism, war, physical differences, disease. . . . LOOK INSIDE BUY NOW
In her second book of stories Kerry Langan explores, through characters drawn from academe and the wider world, the myths that unconsciously shape our behavior and our sense of possibility. In Live Your Life, an unemployed philosophy major fresh from college tries to live out his utopia, a teenage telemarketer learns success is more than cold calls and sales volume, a jilted groom stumbles into a full life, a soap opera star finally learns where his character ends and he begins. . . . READ MORE BUY NOW
NATURALIZED CITIZENSHIP PROJECT COMPLEX ALLEGIANCES Constellations of Immigration, Citizenship & Belonging A Wising Up Anthology Charles D. Brockett, Heather Tosteson, Anna Steegman Editors
We invite you to listen with us as forty-six people from twenty-one countries on six continents thoughtfully explore through memoirs, essays, interviews, and poetry their complex relationships to U.S. citizenship, residency, and their individual sense of community and belonging—as birthright citizens with little direct acquaintance with the U.S., naturalized citizens, dual (or triple) citizens by birth or choice, serial citizens, asylees, diversity lottery winners, lifetime expats, U.S. or global families with differing citizenship statuses and cultural attachments, undocumented residents with a keen desire for citizenship, or lifetime permanent resident aliens with none. READ MORE. . . BUY NOW
SHIFTING BALANCE SHEETS Women's Stories of Naturalized Citizenship & Cultural Attachment A Wising Up Anthology
Heather Tosteson, Kerry Langan, Charles D. Brockett & Debra Gingerich, Editors
In this anthology, thirty-four women and girls from twenty countries, now living all across the U.S., reflect on their journeys to naturalized U.S. citizenship - journeys that invite all of us, native and foreign born, to consider what it means to choose to be an American. In Chinese Daughters: All-American Girls, American mothers whose Chinese daughters have become naturalized citizens through adoption, and these insightful teenagers themselves, ponder how their experiences of cross-national adoption with a unique gender imperative influences their sense of personal, cultural, national and global identity. In Natural Women: Naturalized Citizens, women from Australia, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Cuba, England, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Taiwan and Zambia describe their unique journeys to naturalized citizenship as adults - wondering what womanhood, family, love, cultural identification, intellectual curiosity, professional ambition, material need, war, revolution or chance have to do with it. . .
WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOST A WISING UP HOUSE READING or START A READING FOR RELATION GROUP?
We see our books, especially our
Wising Up Anthologies, as catalysts for community, a way of deepening the
conversations that develop through the shared experience of reading, especially
around areas of sticky, or strident, social concern . . . Read More
Universal Table Finding the We in Them, the Us in You. Wising Up Press
www.universaltable.org P.O. Box 2122, Decatur, GA 30031-2122 404-276-6046
