The Rising Sun Neighborhood is a book of words and pictures by Anne Herbert and Kathleen O’Neill that will be published by Random House later this year. Portions of it have appeared in The Next Whole Earth Catalog and in CoEvolution Quarterly, where Anne and Kathleen work. Anne sent us this excerpt, which we’re pleased to print. She also writes:

I have so much to tell you of the new life that grew out of a windy fall day, half-way through the century, on the banks of a soft brown river, turned foaming with the storm. I am abed, on a porch, beside the moaning camphor trees. The screens oh and sigh, canvas cords cry out in the wind, and Icannot rise. The doctor comes, with his black bag, in the storm, to tell us what is happening to that part of myself Icall body. The doctor comes, with his bag, to give us that black knowledge, of the virus, of the body dying, on that day when the wind tears Spanish moss from the long-leaf pine, and the camphor trees howl, and the branches of my body come crashing down, turning slowly in the wind gone mad and wrong.

A boy was born in a hospital. All around him were children in little wagons.