Has it always been this way? We tell ourselves the tyranny’s crumbling— this global crisis will be the last. And the last and the last and the last again—but it’s always been this way in the end…
Category: <span>Jeff Charest</span>
A traveler was out looking for a certain tree, reputed to be magic. Why he was looking for it, or what he hoped to find, he didn’t know; all he knew was that he had heard of it & curiosity wouldn’t leave him alone. Why did people mention it so often yet say so little about it? Was it a special tree or was it any tree? Did it exist, & what did it do?
This is the intro to a book of short stories by Dr. Jeffery P. Charest, using the English-language form of Arabic Saj’. Al-Saj’ is an ancient Arabic literary form whose origins lie in the pre-Islamic, or Jāhilīyya period. Jeff perceived the form as a possible way to access and express a mode of consciousness that Western literature approaches (but only remotely) in the free verse of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg…