The Elephant

The Perspective Project has evolved! We are, as always, devoted to stories, essays, and art exploring perspectives, identity, and why we are the way we are, but we are now a PUBLICATION! Visit us at The Elephant (theelephant.press)

Seeing White

By Sarah J Hart I moved back to this small town in the Adirondack Park five years ago. In that time I found work I loved, met the man I will marry, and had a beautiful baby girl. My life is full of very Adirondack-y activities: I hike mountains with my dogs, stack wood for...

The River

By Sarah J Hart We lived on a bluff overlooking the Epulu River. From the back side of the compound one could see the expanse of it – wide and silvery, cut with brown. As it flowed west, water and sky drew together, like two fingers of the same hand, pressing between them the thick...

On Moving to the North Country: What’s Revealed in a View

By Sarah J Hart My last two years in Brooklyn I felt fortunate to have the view I did. My windows faced east, and, although the blank wall of another building loomed large directly in front, to the right grew a luscious tree and above was an unobstructed view of sky. I often woke at...

Doing Justice

By Sarah J Hart It’s a bright winter morning, sunlight pouring in from the east, and I am in a van on my way to jail. We’ve just crossed from Manhattan into the Bronx and are heading north on a wide boulevard. We pass a long line of elegant limestone row houses getting a face-full...

Indelibly Writ Into the Air and Into the Sand

I had occasion one time to watch an earnest young man try to design a school that would promote and celebrate traditional dance in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The value of such a school would be to preserve culture and to allow a peaceful structure for the expression of ethnic identity. It was a...

Detroit Re-New

If you are not familiar with Detroit, and you drive around on a little tour, this is what might, initially, impress you: The beautiful brick homes – gorgeous homes! Expansive, distinguished, embellished with elaborate woodwork and fanciful touches of stained glass and shingling – now abandoned. They are encroached upon by vines, missing bricks, and...

Nostalgia Study Musing 4: Passage

Passing Strange, a Broadway theater production also immortalized in film by Spike Lee, tells the story of a young African American man, a single son of a single mother, from an affluent Black community in the suburbs of L.A. The play opens when Main Character is in his teens and suffering severe disgust with just...

Peddling a Bird’s Eye View

  Biking has changed my perspective on New York City. It has become simultaneously bigger and more complex, and smaller and easier. I travel into parts of the map previously unimaginable and marvel at how it just goes on and on, one neighborhood-village unfolding into the next, little universes fully equipped, as disconnected from one...