ABSTRACT
Stories carry both memory and longing and offer moments so vivid that both writer and reader become immersed in their sensual vitality. In memory, no one is ever absent; rather, persons psychoanalysts have lost continue to inhabit an emotional inner landscape, infused with the treasure of what they mean to them. In writing about his psychiatrist father, Mark Singer, also a psychiatrist, draws an inner portrait of a man who strongly influenced him. Rachael Matthews is a poet from England who grew up in a small seaside town where her ancestors were circus performers. She paints portraits with words, as she writes about relationship, risk, the body, entrances and exits: the stuff of every real performance in the "sawdust circle". Presence is a quality of being. Yet, absence and presence will always remain in dialectical tension because they each contain the essence of the other.
