Did you ever say, "Please just listen to me"? Many people carry that plea deep inside if not spoken aloud. You already have the equipment to meet this need, and here is your training. You can help heal the worst long-haul disease left by the pandemic--feelings of isolation and fear at previously unmatched intensities. This is your handbook for what to say and what not to say, organized so you can find quickly what you want. There are nine ideas to keep from getting bored while listening, four safety issues in gift listening, four ways language impacts listening, six different kinds of difficult listening situations, and seven tools for disabling systemic pervasive anxiety. Forty-five chapters like the titles already listed populate Book I, a complete training course for use in any setting. In Book II, the stories of Jesus's seven metaphors, seven signs, and more on listening from the Gospel of John illustrate the topics of Book I. Here is divine inspiration and enablement to spread the healing gift of listening.

'Illuminate' demonstrates how, though the power of persuasive communication, one can turn an idea into a movement, as compared with the likes of Steve Jobs, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Starbucks, IBM, and more.

Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond is an interdisciplinary collection that gathers the work of scholars and performance practitioners who together explore questions about the oral, written, and visual. The book includes the voices of oral performance practitioners, while the scholarship of many of the academic contributors is informed by their participation in oral storytelling, whether as poets, singers, or visual artists. Its contributions address the politics and ethics of the utterance and text: textualizing orature and orality, simulations of the oral, the poetics of performance, and reconstructions of the oral.