Aurora Levins Morales was born in rural Puerto Rico in 1954, of Puerto Rican and Ashkenazi Jewish parents. A lifelong feminist and radical, artist and activist, storyteller and historian, her writing bridges the gap between the intimately personal and the global, between sensual experience and theory. In Kindling she explores the meanings of sickness and healing, suffering and pleasure, through the story of her own body, of all our bodies, of the body of the planet. Kindling is a collage of prose poetry, poems, essays, performance pieces and memoir, exploring the rich complexity od living in a physical and social body. From 19th century bomba dancers to the environmental causes of epilepsy from eugenics to the Cuban health care system, from the sexuality of the chronically sick and tired, to a broader interpretation of taking back the night, Levins Morales writes with passion and insight, self-revelation and global, historical perspective

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Kindling, featuring valuable summaries of the participants’ current cutting-edge research on the kindling of seizures and related phenomena in epilepsy.

A new magazine for people with children, from the team behind Kinfolk. Kindling is a place to explore the new ideas and fresh perspectives that come with being a parent. It’s non-judgmental, unfussy and made to be enjoyed by anyone currently raising a child under the age of ten. We’re interested in exploring the big ideas around parenthood, not what your child should be having for dinner or wearing at the weekend. Compact and colorful, the magazine is designed to be kept and treasured—whether on a coffee table or a child’s bookshelf. Inside The Emotions Issue, you’ll find an interview with the professor of psychology who advised on Pixar’s Inside Out, a workbook geared towards helping your child talk about their feelings, and a photo essay in which fruits and vegetables bring common idioms to life. Just ask yourself: What would it really look like to be “cool as a cucumber”? Kindling is also packed with features and columns that answer questions including: What’s it like to spend four years traveling with your parents? What can the Gruffalo teach us about fatherhood? And how should you answer a child if they blindside you with a tough question like “Why do people die?”? Designed to be read by adults but shared with children, Kindling is brought to life through the playful drawings of Norwegian illustrator Espen Friberg, and contains an activity section packed with suggestions for fun, free and (occasionally) educational games that parents and children can enjoy together.

The last Kindling Conference was organized by Dr. Juhn Wada and held at the Univer sity of British Columbia, Vancouver, B. C. , in 1989. In the intervening years, research on kin dling has proceeded at an explosive pace and significant advances have been made in our understanding of the molecular biological, anatomical, and physiological substrates of kin dling, as well as in our appreciation of the age-dependent effects and complex behavioral consequences of kindling, its sensitivity to drugs, and its relevance to the clinical epilepsies. In order to review these developments and to provide researchers with an opportunity to in teract face to face and discuss the issues that preoccupy us all, we organized the Fifth Interna tional Conference on Kindling, in Victoria, B. C. , in the summer of 1996. Most of the stalwarts in kindling research were invited, as were a number of investigators whose research on kindling has become prominent in the past few years. We continue to miss the late Graham Goddard, the discoverer of kindling, and were saddened by the recent death of Eric Lothman, a prolific researcher and clinician who would have been a prominent participant. We were deeply disturbed to learn of the death of Frank Morrell, one of the earliest kindlers and an eminent neurologist, who died several months after our conference.

This is the proceedings of the fourth in a series of inter national gatherings on kindling held on the University of British Columbia campus, June 15-17, 1989. Since the last gath ering in 1985, kindling continues to attract an ever-increasing number of investigators as reflected by the phenomenal increase in the number of kindling-related research reports. No other acute or chronic model has been exploited so extensively using electrophysiological, pharmacological, biochemical and behav ioural approaches involving a variety of brain sites and ani mal species. The continuing search, during the past few years, for the mechanism underlying the enduring change induced by kindling is beginning to shed some light on aspects of its molecular basis and to suggest the future direction of research. The late Graham Goddard, the original kindler, would have been delighted with this development. We were all shocked and saddened by his tragic death, but his spirit is very much alive among all of us who gathered together to share new information and collectively reassess the present state of knowledge at this symposium. I must say that we miss him very, very much. We know he is happy in his heaven knowing that he accomplished more in a short lifetime than most and that his love for mankind, and life's challenges, remain as a legacy, and goal, for us all.