James Shaheen

2 months ago | tricycle.org | Vajra Chandrasekera |James Shaheen

Sri Lankan novelist Vajra Chandrasekera grew up reading the stories of Western literature as if they were science fiction. Now, as a writer, Chandrasekera views speculative fiction as an opportunity to depict different types of worlds than we typically inhabit—as well as different kinds of personhood.

2 months ago | tricycle.org | James Shaheen

In January, as wildfires consumed large swaths of Los Angeles, I found myself doing my best to offer solace to friends and family members who’d lost their homes. Those who had so far been spared anxiously tracked weather reports, their well-being a simple matter of the wind’s caprice. With bags packed and nerves shot, they waited for an order to evacuate. From New York, I watched as areas so familiar from my youth vanished, burnt beyond recognition.

2 months ago | tricycle.org | James Shaheen |Roger Jackson

Once, when the great 11th-century translator Marpa was being detained by tax collectors in Nepal, he was visited by an unlikely guest: the 10th-century poet-yogin Saraha. In a dream, after being carried on a palanquin to a fig tree grove in south India, the sleeping translator encountered Saraha seated on a corpse and requested his blessing.

2 months ago | tricycle.org | Pico Iyer |James Shaheen

After his family home burned down in a California wildfire in 1990, essayist Pico Iyer found refuge in an unlikely location: a small Benedictine hermitage along the Big Sur coastline. Though Iyer initially arrived looking for a bed to sleep in, he soon found the silence of monastic life transformative, and over the course of the past thirty-three years, he has returned to the hermitage more than one hundred times.

Nov 8, 2024 | tricycle.org | James Shaheen

Born in Central Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War, Sister Dang Nghiem grew up singing made-up songs to comfort herself. After moving to the United States, she began writing poetry at the encouragement of an English teacher, and eventually ordained as a nun in the Plum Village tradition following the sudden death of her partner.