When I was writing about the rebirth of the Oxford American a few weeks back, it occurred to me that I ought to save a few words of praise for another Southern magazine, and one a little closer to home: The Sun, a determined little monthly out of Chapel Hill.

I first heard of The Sun back in the mid-nineties, when I was writing bad fiction and trying to find someone dumb enough to publish it. The Sun didn’t bite, although as I recall, their rejection letters were personally signed by founder/editor Sy Safransky. I appreciated the gesture, but I never actually cracked a copy of The Sun until two months ago, when I stumbled across a pile of back issues in the bathroom of a friend. I spent longer in that bathroom than I intended, and by the time I had emerged from my crouch, The Sun had another fan. That’s a testimonial they won’t be putting on the Web site, but that’s the way it was.

The Sun is not for everyone, I suppose. It is not concerned with flashy graphics, name-dropping, or the tawdry exploits of the nightclub set, and I’ve yet to find a recipe involving cream cheese and chocolate pudding between its covers. Rather, The Sun goes about its business in a quieter, more concentrated, way, offering nothing more exciting than good writing, good photography, and good sense. Their fiction section is semi-legendary, but in the issues I lifted from my friend’s pissoir, I tended to skip the short stories, as I have skipped all short stories since about the time I stopped writing them. Rather, I dipped my toes in the Readers Write section, a series of confessionals in which readers write on a topic of Safransky’s choosing (recent topics include Fitting In, Coming Clean, and Hero Worship). Like all confessionals, they can swing towards self-pity on the one hand and self-service on the other, but by and large they are compelling, well-written snapshots of everyday life, offered from dozens of different perspectives. One gets the sense that Safransky cherishes that diversity of mood and opinion.

Another page of interest is called Sunbeams, and while the title sounds like it is straight from Hallmark, the content is far from conventional, offering thought-provoking quotations from writers both famous and obscure. Recent offerings range from Chekhov (“Alas, what is terrible is not the skeletons, but the fact that I am no longer terrified by them”) to Dr. Seuss (“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind”). Not a bad range.

Although it’s published in the South, The Sun is not a Southern magazine, in tone or content. Its interests are global, as is its reach, and the wagons never seem to circle. They just keep pushing ahead, trying to see what’s coming next.

(Jay Hardwig is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)