Tag: creative nonfiction

Sundress Reads: Review of
The Watch: Time to Witness the Beauty of It All

Sundress Reads logo, which shows a sheep reading, with glasses on and a book. Logo is black and white.
Cover of the book The Watch, showing a clock in clouds

An introspective memoir about loss and life, The Watch: Time to Witness the Beauty of It All (Wildhouse Publications, 2025) by Paula Sager is a healing walk through the process of being present while a loved one passes away. The Watch is part diary and part philosophy, the author using her strong mind-body connection as a teacher of the Alexander Technique to feel her way through what her soul is undergoing. Collecting many quotes from various authors, philosophers, and family members, Paula Sager offers that our emotions can be processed through the Discipline of Authentic Movement, and that it’s possible to stay mentally present even in the most difficult of times. Trigger warning: If you’ve had a loved one pass away or expect someone to pass soon, this can be a healing, but also at times difficult read. Please give yourself time and private space to process thoughts and emotions while paddling through this book.

While reading The Watch, I felt like I traveled back in time to when my grandparents were completing their life cycles, only this time, I felt more present in my memories. If you’ve had a loved one die slowly of cancer or other medical issues, this book will deeply resonate with you. Sager’s writing captures daily life, the little and big tasks that continue to need doing, while also showing how she stays present and tries to enjoy every moment she can before there are no more moments. One quote from Sager’s father, Bob, continues to float in my mind:

  “These are the waves of yesterday’s wind.” (Sager 53)

This small sentence encapsulates what it feels like after realizing that someone you’re close to has little time left. You’re propelled forward by the waves from yesterday’s wind that blew your life onto a new path that will soon depart from the path of your loved one. Dwelling on the circle of life and her family members that are still in the beginning or middle of the life cycle helps Sager through the process. She writes of her brothers and her children, as well as how their pasts and futures seem to mirror not only her own, but her passing father’s. The watch, which began mysteriously falling apart after Sager’s father died, appears recurrently as a reminder of time, both precious and fleeting. When Sager trades watches with her father, it’s as if she’s giving him the best gift she can: more time with her and love.

Despite life’s limitations, a sense of calmness and acceptance imbues the book. The way Sager bares her raw emotions for the reader and conveys a calmness is rather wonderous. Some of her conversations with her father are true gems. For example, Sager’s father Bob says at one point, still a bit hazy from anesthesia:

  “I want to tell you about something I dreamed … First there was the dream of death
   … And it was fine! … And then there was the dream of birth—and it was spectacular!
   … They really have it figured out. It all makes sense, and there is nothing to worry
   about.” (Sager 65)

It’s hard to accept death, even though we know it’s coming. The most amazing takeaway for me personally from The Watch is a new sense that I might finally be able to let go of fear of the unknown. Somehow, through reading about Sager’s life, her peaceful moments, her father’s insights, she has talked me free of fear of the unknown. One of her and her family’s extraordinary abilities seems to be to take life in stride. Although there are certainly tough time periods, overall, Sager enjoys the last moments with her father and calmly accepts her experiences, letting fear depart as well.

Kayaking Watercolor by Everly Arts, showing a kayaker paddling on the water towards a sunset between two mountains
Kayaking Watercolor by Everly Arts

Sager’s father loved to kayak, and the family ultimately return him to the water he loved in a unique kayak flotilla funeral. This poem Sager quotes is quite fitting:

“Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.”
(Sager 51, quoting “Island” by Langston Hughes)

Sager takes readers there, showing us the beauty of our lives that remain after loss and the love of memories we will have forever. She also touches on some intriguing supernatural experiences she has had surrounding her father and his passing period, such as feeling pain at the same time as him, a swan flying up to the family that seems to embody some presence of her father’s, the watch falling apart after he died, and unusual mind-body connections she experiences through Janet Adler’s Discipline of Authentic Movement.

I recommend this book for readers that are of the “middle generation,” that have both children as well as parents in their lives. I would also like to recommend the following tea pairing with this book: Tulsi & Ginger Tea from Traditional Medicinals. This tea provides calming stress relief and warming ginger to heal your body and soul.

The Watch: Time to Witness the Beauty of It All is available from Wildhouse Publications

Ana Mourant sitting on grass reading a book. She has light skin and blonde hair, has a sunflower in her hair, and is wearing a green sundress.

Ana Mourant (she/her) is an editorial intern for Sundress Publications and a recent graduate of the University of Washington’s editing program. She holds a Certificate in Editing as well as a Certificate in Storytelling and Content Strategy, and a BA in English Language and Literature, with a minor in Professional Writing. Ana conducts manuscript evaluations, edits, and proofreads, as well as provides authenticity and sensitivity readings for Indigenous Peoples content. Ana loves nature writing and Indigenous cultures, and, when she’s not working, is often out in the wilderness tracking animals, Nordic skiing, or just enjoying nature.

Meet Our New Intern: Finnegan Angelos

A young white mustached-man looks into the sun with yellow eyeshadow and a white, red, and blue striped T-shirt. He stands in front of green forestry.

I’m trying to stop hating winter, honest. Though it’s one of those ebb and flow type things, three steps forward two steps back. I’ve hated winter all my life, mostly due to loving summer so much, where I’ve quite happily read and swam and even cultivated something somewhere close to inner peace, never fully there but close enough. I’m an accidental binary-enthusiast, polarized in loving things, a Gemini, all in or all out. But to my credit, there is nothing I love more than being surprised, ever-willing to be proven wrong.

I grew up memorizing poetry, a habit that grew out of a desire to please my father. He was a rigid and technical man, with a soft spot for William Blake. See? Surprise! To this day “The Tyger,” “Oh Captain! My Captain!,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” repeat around my head, line by line, during any number of monotonous and thoughtless tasks. I’ve been trying this past year to encourage stillness inside of myself, but I can’t yet argue the worth of an eloquent sentence in its wake. 

The poets my father read were always fixated around nature. I couldn’t discern if that was due to his love of it or my own, but found it ever intriguing that they somehow appealed to us both. We seemed to love nature so differently—I seemed to love it so much more. Perhaps at ten years old, love is just immovably, incomparably in plain sight. Looking back, I wish he had read me more female poets—any queer poets—but a part of me was glad to find both on my own. Poetry was a seed planted in me by my father, but I tilled the land till it grew. Due to our combined efforts, everything flourished. At thirteen, I was already engulfed by philosophy—transcendentalism became religion and art in one broad sweep. My first copy of Leaves of Grass is illegible, its margins a battlefield of graphite and ink.

I think Mary Oliver puts it best (as always) when she writes, “Pay Attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” That’s my motto, as well as everything else she has ever penned. (I even have her quote, “walk slowly, bow often” tattooed on my chest). With all of this culture of praise, of silent and precious and unfaltering awe—I still haven’t been able to bring myself to love winter, the very chill of it feeling like a natural antonym of said qualities. But in the good, true, fair practice of Mary and Walt, I’ve been trying to wrestle my way into compassion. 

Today, I picked up my dearest friend from his home, holding nothing but a great wooden toboggan, the kind I haven’t seen outside of Charlie Brown cartoons. We, well past childhood and even teenagehood somehow, spent close to three hours running up and sledding down a very steep hill. I can pinpoint the moment, right after we pushed the comical thing in the general direction of down, that I felt so in tune with everything, so divinely connected with the ground, my companion, and yes, even the toboggan, that at once loving something as fleetingly beautiful as winter didn’t seem a hard task at all. 

Reading work from Sundress Publications has always left me in a similar position. Feeling connection, newness, awe all over. It’s this, and so much else, that leaves me in almost-wordless gratitude that I am able to contribute to a space that continually pushes for creative and accessible writing. And it is in the spirit of my great transcendentalist lineage that I offer to it nothing but open-mindedness, open-heartedness, and sacred appreciation. 

Finnegan Angelos is a self-proclaimed east-coast-love-struck-queer-awakening poet and essayist originally from northern Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has been published in the Beyond Queer Words Anthology, Thistle Magazine, and FRANCES, and has work forthcoming in EPOCH. He loves his dog, hibiscus tea, and the banjo.