by Ed Hamer Naming the Shadows by Sharon Berg The Porcupine’s Quill (2019) ISBN 9780889848665 The Stories Themselves: Sharon Berg has written a collection of short stories, really a powerful gallery of highly visual tales that evoke our desire to look into them intensely and to see deeply. Inside the tableaux, she plants the ephemera of psychic shadows and these are certainly enough to launch strong flights of our imagination.  So we are reading and interpreting at two quite different levels.  And she holds true to her initial quotation from Jung: one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious These stories are laden with darkness and it transforms the reading of the apparent into a reading of the obscure and difficult. Like visual art at its best Berg avoids prettiness and too easy legibility. Again, as with difficult visual art, Berg works to make the ritual of reading transformative — calling on us to develop solutionary insights into very difficult situations and very difficult people. Some of the Stories… …