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June Stories: World Tale: How the Sun Came to Be (Aboriginal/Australia)
Judgments change as new experience offers opportunity to reflect. The Stories, Wheat Germ, Lonnie, and Letting Go, reveal how compassion can affect choices.
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 Early in the Dreamtime there lived a young woman who decided to leave her village because the elders would not allow her to marry the man of her choice. When no one was looking, she ran away and hid in a place of rocks where there was little food and water. She barely slept and was hungry and thirsty, but she was not willing to return to her people and a marriage she did not want. When she saw the men coming to take her back by force, she ran even further into the barren land.
 After my father sold his drugstore in Queens, he began to work for a pharmacist who owned a store in a poor area in Brooklyn. His shift was from 4-10pm. One day a Black kid came in to buy something and my father noticed his pimply face. He told him that eating wheatgerm might help. The kid, about 16, didn’t know what wheatgerm was so my father offered to bring him some. The kid ate the wheat germ and his face began to clear up. After that, friends of his came into the store to ask my father’s advice, not only about their skin. He would listen, and if he could, suggest a remedy.
 He was among the last to arrive for the audition of Power Play. A heavyset male of medium height dressed in a shirt that came down to his knees, pants that practically began at his knees, a smirk on his face. When I looked at him, as if reading my mind, he assured me he was an enrolled student and asked if I was the director. I nodded. He told me the play’s title intrigued him and reminded me the audition was open to all students, not just drama majors, which was true. He made a point of telling me how happy he was to see there were other Black students trying out.
 All the people in the REI trip to Alaska were partnered—friends or spouses. One woman and I were the only singles and had to share a room. From the beginning, she treated me with disdain, sometimes talking about me to others as if I weren’t in the group. I didn’t know what set her off—we hadn’t argued or had a disagreement about any issue. It was so uncomfortable I asked if it were possible to have a roommate change. It wasn’t.
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June 2025
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Nancy King is a widely published author and a professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she has taught theater, drama, playwriting, creative writing, and multidisciplinary studies with an emphasis on world literature. She has published seven previous works of nonfiction and five novels. Her new memoir, Breaking the Silence, explores the power of stories in healing from trauma and abuse. Her career has emphasized the use of her own experience in being silenced to encourage students to find their voices and to express their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with authenticity, as a way to add meaning to their lives.
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