At 5:45 a.m. we started getting ready for the big day. We awoke Kendra and Maliyah, wanting to hold them for the last time as conjoined twins. "Is it Cut-Apart Day?" Kendra asked almost immediately. "Today is the day,: I said, hoping she wasn't worried, like I was.

I'm not sure worried is a strong enough word to describe how I felt. Terrified might be better. My nerves were raw, my emotions ready to erupt every second. I tried to stay positive so the girls wouldn't see how upset I was and become frightened themselves. If anything went wrong today - if I lost one or both of my precious daughters, I'd never be able to live with myself."

When Hearts Conjoin is the true story of the Salt Lake City family whose conjoined twins held viewers mesmerized, joined in prayer and hope for the survival of their daughters in a time when Americans needed something to hope for after the devastation of 9/11.

This sampler includes multiple chapters from the book, as well as two ancillary articles about the family, and a special offer.

Author Lu Ann Brobst Staheli is a two-time Utah Best of State Literary Arts medalist for Non-Fiction.

At 5:45 a.m. we started getting ready for the big day. We awoke Kendra and Maliyah, wanting to hold them for the last time as conjoined twins. "Is it Cut-Apart Day?" Kendra asked almost immediately. "Today is the day,: I said, hoping she wasn't worried, like I was.

I'm not sure worried is a strong enough word to describe how I felt. Terrified might be better. My nerves were raw, my emotions ready to erupt every second. I tried to stay positive so the girls wouldn't see how upset I was and become frightened themselves. If anything went wrong today - if I lost one or both of my precious daughters, I'd never be able to live with myself."

When Hearts Conjoin is the true story of the Salt Lake City family whose conjoined twins held viewers mesmerized, joined in prayer and hope for the survival of their daughters in a time when Americans needed something to hope for after the devastation of 9/11.

This sampler includes multiple chapters from the book, as well as two ancillary articles about the family, and a special offer.

Author Lu Ann Brobst Staheli is a two-time Utah Best of State Literary Arts medalist for Non-Fiction.

Sowbel's exploratory hypothesis is that empathy, which is fundamental to relatedness and key to the development of ethical understanding and ethical action, has vital roots in visual activity. Through a heuristic, discursive, arts-informed inquiry, the question: "Is there a link between visual activity (defined as the ongoing making of internal and external conceptualizations) and ethical conduct?" is examined for significance in today's climate of reduced support for the arts. Socio-political events show that empathy across difference is critical to negotiations at the local, national and international level. This interdisciplinary study looks at links among the eye, empathy and ethics through several bodies of creative work and literature on neurons, kin recognition, pattern identification, attachment theory, empathy, perspective-taking, prosocial behavior, metaphor, the history of portraiture and the cultural stories about eyes. Creative work, included in the document, locates visual activity across theory and practice. A personal reflexive voice brings the difference in disciplinary dialects into relation across methodologies. The 40+ monoprints, 50-page manuscript of poetry: Mixing Liberties, five large scale portraits, and documentation of the work of five fictive artists displayed as an installation are used as both method and data to ground conclusions regarding the ubiquity of visual activity and its link to human processes related to prosocial behavior. This study has implications for the research, policies and practices of developmental and social psychologists, expressive arts therapists, arts-based researchers, educators and legislators.

At 5:45 a.m. we started getting ready for the big day. We awoke Kendra and Maliyah, wanting to hold them for the last time as conjoined twins. "Is it Cut-Apart Day?" Kendra asked almost immediately. "Today is the day,: I said, hoping she wasn't worried, like I was.

I'm not sure worried is a strong enough word to describe how I felt. Terrified might be better. My nerves were raw, my emotions ready to erupt every second. I tried to stay positive so the girls wouldn't see how upset I was and become frightened themselves. If anything went wrong today - if I lost one or both of my precious daughters, I'd never be able to live with myself.