Notes from the Creative Literary Editor

Time can be lost on the wings of passion. In this issue, we offer poetry and short stories on passion. Passion sends us into complete delirium, both exhilarating and terrifying us at the same time. It makes us dance, sing, write, paint, laugh, and run wild. And in those incandescent moments, we feel most alive.

These poems and short stories show many facets of passion—in love, humor and playfulness, in an analyst's passion to heal a patient, the pains a ballerina goes through for art, first pangs of passion of a young boy, and how passion for music becomes a metaphor for a family.

As Matisse says, “Without passion there is no art.” Albert Einstein wrote, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Joss Whedon, American screenwriter, expressed it well. “Passion, it lies in all of us, sleeping … waiting … and though unwanted … unbidden … it will stir … open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us … guides us. … passion rules us all, and we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of loves … the clarity of hatred … and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion maybe we'd know some kind of peace … but we would be hollow … empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we'd be truly dead.”

Shakespeare has the last word, though, on the matter: “Then with passion would I shake the world.”

In May, Psychoanalytic Perspectives offered the second Creative Salon of its premiere season—My Simone: A One-Woman Play on Simone de Beauvoir, written by Bonnie Zindel and starring Andrea

Leigh from Actors Studio. Presented at the new Perspectives Theatre, it played to a sold-out audience. The story takes place in postwar Paris in the 1940s. Simone de Beauvoir has to decide between passion of the mind in an open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and passion of the heart in her commitment with a renegade writer, Nelson Algren. Brilliant, iconoclastic, and writi