Riada talks about "This Brilliant Darkness" with Jeff Sharlet, award-winning literary journalist and bestselling author

Dignified Resilience with Riada Akyol

This certainly was one of those great conversations that I wish did not have to end! It was so great to talk to Jeff Sharlet, an award-winning literary journalist, the nationally bestselling author of The Family, Sweet Heaven When I Die, and Director of Creative writing at Darthmouth. His work has earned numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award and the Outspoken Award. In this episode of the podcast, we discuss Jeff’s new book, "This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers.” Jeff started the work on it when his father had a heart attack. Two years later, Jeff, at age 44, had a heart attack of his own. This book of photo-journalistic essays is about those two years in between, much of which he spent on the road meeting strangers on different continents. “This is a book of other people’s lives,” he writes, “lives that became for a moment — the duration of a snapshot — my life, too.” We talked about the importance of human connections, how they take work and why it is worth it. We also focused on the darkness and why Jeff says there is also luminescence to it. Hear what he means when he writes "this brilliant darkness with which I am coming to terms," and how we discuss it both in terms of his book and the current global pandemic. Throughout this beautiful conversation, we touched upon the relativity of time, the looming mental illness crisis, the current uncertainty but also the certainty of mortality and how to find solidarity in darkness. Hope you enjoy as much as I did, and make sure to check out his new book!