What does it mean to be a creative soul in a challenging and often uncreative universe?
How can we tackle those challenges to embrace our inner creativity in whatever form it takes?
To inspire you on your journey, here are some hopefully helpful snippets and contemplations from my life as a writer, activist, and wannabee musician–the good, the bad, and the ugly, but mostly stuff I’m grateful for!
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Last weekend I had the privilege of reading at the Northampton Center for the Arts with two awesome poets, Lindsay Rockwell and Mary Warren Foulk, as part of the Northampton Literary Walk. We were the intro act to a film by Chris Gentes entitled What is Poetry, where four other accomplished local poets–all worth checking out (Michael Favala Goldman, Howie Faerstein, Tommy Twilite, and L.D. Greene) discussed their work and their process.
Later, on a text thread, one poet remarked, I often feel so raw and exposed after a reading. Maybe that’s the nature of the beast.
Yes, vulnerability is the nature of the beast. Reading your work out loud is kind of like undressing, putting one’s heart and words on the dissection line, showing all the flaws in your imperfect body.
Because we go through life with a certain amout of polish–a veneer we lather on as we learn to relate to each other, as impermeable as a long fuzzy sweater and a pair of jeans, we take care in how much we reveal to others. Even in our closer circles of friends and family, I, at least, take great pains to project an aura of strength and competence.
But when we share our work with others, especially in a public reading setting, where even the most compassionate audience cannot divorce themselves from their own need to discern what they’re hearing into what’s pleasing to them and what isn’t, it’s hard not to feel judged.
For me, this judgment has two components:
Is my writing good? Am I a real writer or an impostor? I especially worry about this with more academically oriented audiences whose banter about other writers often edges over into a line of snobbery. I also feel like an impostor when I’m among people who’ve had significantly more success than I have, often due to a far greater level of skill that I can only admire and covet.
The second question goes even deeper into the heart of vulnerability. In fact, it feels like one of those chasm-like questions whose words only graze the edges.
Do you feel me?
We write, even when it’s flawed, from our deepest selves, that raw place inside that’s aching to be heard, validated, and understood. Metaphorically undressing and exposing that spot, we often hide as we parade our polished selves through our daily lives, can be terrifying. Especially in a capitalistic society that values writing more as a commodity than an art–but that’s a topic for another post.
One of the most significant things I’ve done in the past few years is to share more of my writing with my parents who’ve always loved me, but really only know the polished self I choose to show them. Do they feel me? Not always, though I’ve appreciated that they’ve taken the time to try. When she read my short story collection Immigrants, my mother was pretty up front about saying she liked some stories better than others. But she took the time to read the book again, and said, I saw how well you put it together. And when she read my not-yet-published memoir, Imperfect Pitch, which was much harder for me to share because it was about our family and not always nice, she said, I think this book would be important for people in our family to read. It gave me more understanding.
These comments made all the vulnerability risk worth it. And while I’ll still parade my polished competent self in family and other settings, being felt and acknowledged, even when not as fully as I might like, has made me a little braver about reading, and more amenable to finding moments to let the rawness shine through.
Because I’ve been traveling so much and fighting off a benign but annoyingly persistent respiratory illness, I’ve been late to the table writing about the eclipse.
But I was one of many folks who drove several hours to the totality zone for a few minutes of day-time darkness and a gaze at the celestial wonder of the corona, which we shared with strangers in a community park in a small town in northern Vermont. 
Things seemed pleasantly normal in the hour before the big event. People donned eclipse glasses to sneak views of the disappearing sun, children ran through the grass playing, and adults waited in lines for free pizza cooked in the community stone oven or to silk-screen a t-shirt as an Eclipse Day souvenir. 
But when totality hit, something shifted in the energy. There was a hush among the crowd, a kind of collective “wow.” My eclipse glasses now dark, I was nervous about viewing the corona with unprotected eyes, but there it was, eerie and other-worldly, the tiny ring of light flaring in asymmetrical bursts before settling to a steady glow like a small spark of hope.
Jongsun Lee, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Then the moon moved away and a crescent of sun reappeared. And again, I could feel the crowd’s energy shifting, a waft of ebullience, giddiness from having lived through a bewildering darkness and come out the other side.
What struck me then was not the moon, but the connectedness I felt to all these strangers. There are so many metaphors I could make out of this, it’s hard to know where to begin. But in these times of constant fractiousness, there was a poignancy in that moment that felt important, a sense of all of us humans as anthropological creatures who, deep in our DNA, know how to co-exist, especially under the awe of something so much greater than ourselves. And maybe I’ve been “moonstruck,” but I can’t stop hoping that there might be away out of a darkness that makes “othering” human beings and then harming those “others” acceptable.
So I’m offering this poem from Here in Sanctuary–Whirling as a starting point for contemplation. And I also invite all of us to take some time to close our eyes and envision the metaphor of the sun reappearing after totality. What can each of us do to bring back the ebullience and giddiness that comes with connection?
I DO NOT KNOW
–D. Dina Friedman
Why the wind is so fierce today. Why some people die
and others recover. Does a tornado choose its targets?
Is there a blueprint somewhere with the secret path
of my life mapped out? Will this trail I’m on
connect with the ridgeline, or will it keep crossing
the same stream? How do I get to the bunker,
and what’s hidden there now that the army no longer has it?
I do not know how dirt feels to a carrot root, or to my brother
six feet under. Is he able to read the prayer books
placed on his coffin through some double miracle
of semi-resurrection and dyslexia cured? What does it feel like
to a dyslexic when letters leave their prescribed places?
Why do bodies compartmentalize into people who love each other
hating the people across the river, who love each other
and hate the people across the river? Why do we have to teach toddlers
to share sand-buckets? Why don’t they do it naturally?
Why don’t we do it naturally?
Why don’t we do it?
In Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, Querencia Press, 2024.
Orginally published in Silkworm 15.
In November 2016, waking up to the dystopian reality of Trump being elected, I told myself: complacency is no longer an option. I’ve been an activist all my life, though in the years leading up to 2016, I hadn’t done that much. But all of a sudden, everything took on a new frantic urgency.
Of all the horrible things Trump was doing, the issue that spoke to me most was immigration. While the babies in cages broke my heart, what scared me even more was the way Trump continues to talk about immigrants—as “invaders poisoning the blood of America,” language which edges far too close to my Jewish roots and the collective generational trauma we carry from the Holocaust.
So, when volunteers were needed to spend time at a local church that was harboring a man in sanctuary, I signed up. And this was where I saw the note seeking people interested in traveling to Florida to witness at the children’s detention center in Homestead, a horrid converted air force base, whose fenced boundaries were now lined with black paper to keep on-lookers from seeing what lay within.
For three days in June 2019, the eight of us who made the trip stood on ladders in the heat so we could look over the barrier at the children. 
We held up paper hearts and waved at them when they came out in their bright orange hats for 15-minute stints of exercise. Te amo (I love you) we shouted. Occasionally the children would take off their hats and wave them at us, though they were always reprimanded by the guards when they did.
When we came home, we spread the word about what we’d seen in speaking events with a variety of community groups. We also organized our own educational events and demonstrations, and started planning a trip to the border. This involved working in conjunction with a number of immigration support groups based in that region, including Witness at the Border, Team Brownsville, and the Resource Center of Matamoros. We prepared and served meals, observed the infamous tent courts, stood at the bridge with signs, and spoke to many of the people who were stuck in Mexico as they waited for their turn to apply for asylum, which they had an extremely low chance of getting. We also led a writing/drawing workshop for children to express their feelings about leaving home and a similar workshop for the women in the camp in a room filled with tears as each woman shared stories of loved ones killed by gangs or children left behind. 
On the morning of Valentine’s Day, we woke before dawn to stand at the fence and stare at the wing of the deportation plane, (the only part not purposely blocked by a truck). Then we linked arms and headed for the parking lot, trying for a few moments to block the bus of deportees from arriving until we were warned by the cops to disperse or get arrested. 
Unfortunately, we were not in a position to engage in civil disobedience, so we had to settle for supporting the people on the bus with hearts and words of encouragement as they walked shackled into the plane’s belly and departed under the cover of the night.
The cover Here in Sanctuary—Whirling is from a photo taken at the refugee camp, where children followed us through the maze of crowded tents, as eager as their grown-up counterparts to talk to us.The poems in the book were born directly from our experiences. While I’ve written the occasional political poem over the years, this type of writing was a departure for me.
For most of my life, my writing and my activism were separate. But my writing has always come from my heart, and my heart is now intrinsically linked with these people who are far braver than I am. While I recognize that their stories ultimately belong to them and not to me, I’m glad they gave me permission to share these hard truths about their lives, which counter the rhetoric of even the supposedly liberal people in our government, because these stories need to be heard, loudly, by as many people as possible.
(Originally posted on my publisher Querencia Press’s Blog: in response to why I wrote this book. )
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When I was recently on vacation in China, all my regular Internet sites were blocked! I thought I could get around this by purchasing a VPN, but alas, I couldn’t even access the support page to troubleshoot the problems, nor could I contact my phone provider for more international data, which I didn’t think I would need until I discovered that my translation app wouldn’t work on the data speed I had.
So here we were, trying to talk to people when we didn’t understand a word of each other’s language, and trying to navigate without Google maps. It definitely helped to keep a sense of humor about all the getting lost and the miscommunication. One night, we were trying to explain (without the translator app–or a note in Chinese that we later got) to various restaurant people that we were vegetarian, only to get a lot of shaking heads and blank looks. Finally, we saw a place with an array of fresh vegetables displayed in a cooler behind the counter and thought we could explain ourselves with sign language. The server, who miraculously had her own translator app, told us to point to the vegetables we wanted and she would make them. We pointed to a lot of vegetables, because we thought she was going to throw them all in a stir fry, but we ended up with separate dishes for each veggie, plus scallion broth, rice and tea. The delicious food just kept on coming! 
Being blocked from the Internet also made me hyper aware of how much time I spend (waste) on Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. It felt both odd and welcoming to be forced to go to my writing files whenever I felt the urge to use my laptop. Over the course of the trip, I spent several hours working on a spring clean-up I try to do at least every other year, where I go through all the unpublished poems in my “Active” folder and figure out which ones I want to keep sending out for another year, and which ones no longer hold interest and need to be moved to “Inactive” or “Meh.” This always leads to tons of revision as I look at old work with a fresh eye.
Though being forced to write was a good thing, I have to admit I regretted not getting the immediate gratification of people’s reactions to the cherry blossoms in Kunming, or my musings on Substack, which made me wonder–what is it about we humans in the social media age that makes us feel that everything we do needs to be immediately validated? True confessions, I am one of those people who obsessively looks for likes and feedback for anything I post on the big cyber cloud. Sometimes I worry that this has a negative impact on my writing–whether in sharing groups, I’m too quick to read something half-finished, simply for the joy of hearing people’s reactions to it. But I do like to think that reading things out loud, even early drafts, sharpens my own ear for what’s working or not working in a piece. In fact, one of my favorite revision techniques is to read a piece out loud even if I’m the only person listening.
I didn’t write a lot in China; I rarely do on vacation. I mostly enjoyed the distraction of sightseeing, the feeling that I was amassing thoughts and experiences I could synthesize later. But when I did sit down with my writing–just me and the page, and the Great Firewall surrounding us, it felt like a lovely ink-brush wash of inner peace because I couldn’t quick-click to headlines blaring at me from news or email or social media sites. What a wonderful feeling of insouciance to have no idea what was going on in the news! T–mp could die, I remarked to my partner and I wouldn’t even know.
Now that I’ve been back home for a week, I hate to admit how enticing the old habits have become. I’m letting my distraction demons take hold more often than not, as if making up for lost time, partly because I worried that all the work I’d done to publicize my books by building up my writer presence on social media had dissipated with my two weeks of complete silence. But really, what people seem to want to see from me are not more book or writing-related posts; they want to see my pictures of China, which I’m putting out day by day on my Facebook page. I guess many of us respond to the urge to experience travel vicariously when we can’t do it directly. And perhaps, through looking at some of the astounding images, we can find our way behind the Great Firewall of China, capturing both some of the magic, as well as the shift to a more peaceful perspective that can come from letting the anxiety-producing headlines fade to a gentle blur.
When a friend of mine asked me what I was looking forward to about my upcoming China trip, I found it hard to come up with an answer. While I had done a lot of research in choosing the string of destinations in this part of China less traveled by westerners, there was nothing in particular that I needed to see. I was simply attracted to the region because it was the home of many of China’s ethnic minorities, and the gorgeous pictures of places like Black Dragon Pool, Jade Snow Mountain, and Leaping Tiger Gorge were too enticing to pass up.
Now that I’m here, I’m not disappointed. Eye candy is abundant everywhere. Despite the general hassles of travel and the rather exhausting pace of very full days, I feel nurtured by the serenity as I slowly circumambulate the reflecting pool by the three pagodas temple, where the cherry blossoms–an added bonus–shine pink, in both the water and sky! I’m awed by the white-capped spiky peaks of Jade Snow Mountain looming in and out of the fog, reminding me of an ink brush painting. I’m buoyed by seeing people dancing in the streets in the ancient cities of Dali and Lijiang, some in their colorful traditional dress, and some in jeans and sweaters, and how so many people in the crowd from parents with toddlers to gray-haired elders, join in the flow. And these old towns are a tasting paradise. In any 2-3 block radius you can sample homegrown tea, coffee, fruit juices, fruit tea, homemade plum wine, milk powder candy, sesame candy, hot pepper relishes, dried fruits of all persuasions including persimmon, mango, hawthorne bark, and–if you want it–yak jerky.
But was my desire to travel here based on a need to see any of this? I could have stayed home and walked in my own comforting woods. Or traveled only as far as New York to see spontaneous exuberant dancing among strangers in public places. Or been content with past trips to Mount Ranier or the Alps if my penchant was to see snow-covered mountains. And I could likely find many of the street treats at one of my local Asian stores.
What would be missing, however, is the serendipity.
It has been consistently the unplanned, unanticipated moments that have engorged my inner travel bug. There’s an exhilarating feeling (at least, for me) that comes with being in a new place, an invigorating sense of wonder in rounding the next corner, whether the discovery will be an exquisitely ornate pagoda roof, a man carving marble, or a store selling tacky toys and souvenirs that still look totally different from American tacky toys and souvenirs.
Keying into serendipity keeps my writing brain fresh. It reminds me when I’m frowning at the blank page or the blank screen, to lean into that wonder of discovery. The experiences I’ve had here are now part of my brain’s bank of images and memories, ready to be resurrected at just the right moment as fodder for an poetic image, a metaphor, or scene in some future work of fiction or non-fiction.
This doesn’t mean that I’m taking home an assignment to write a poem or story about China. In fact, these blog posts–along with occasional emails and texts to family and friends–will likely be the only types of “straight writing about China” I’ll do. In my own writing process nothing is more of a creativity killer than to intentionally sit down with the purpose of writing about something I’ve recently done. Instead, I’ll try to integrate these experiences into other issues that suddenly call to me, as I did in Ganesh Ascends to Heaven–a story in Immigrants about someone trying to put their life back together by traveling to India after unintentionally killing someone.
And even if I don’t remember everything I’ve seen and done, because I haven’t bothered to take a lot of notes or write much down, I’ll have to trust that when I need it, the muse (like the Black Dragon god of the Naxi people, who lives under the water here and wakes up in spring to give the people luck and prosperity) will dive down into the muck of all my travel images and resurrect just the right one.
I got my first Amazon review of my new poetry book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, a few days ago. It was a 5-star rating, filled with wonderful phrases like “lyrical and evocative,” “alive and immersive,” “a sensory experience that is both enchanting and exhilarating.”
Only one problem: the reviewer depicted the book as “a mesmerizing fantasy novel …set against the backdrop of the mystical land of Sanctuary… At the heart of the novel is Whirling, a young girl with a deep connection to the elemental forces of wind and air.”
Ahem! This is a book of poems centered on my work in immigration justice and my witnessing trip to the border.
LOL!
Apparently, fake reviews–usually written by AI-bots–are a thing. Despite the many times I’ve had to go through hoops to post an Amazon review (I’m often told I hadn’t bought enough on Amazon recently to attain the privilege of posting on their site, or told to wait a few days while they verify my identity and authenticity) several writers in my network recounted similar experiences. “My poetry collection was called More Money Than God,” said Rich Michelson. “And one person gave me a one-star review, claiming I didn’t write enough about hedge funds.”
Still, I can’t help wondering–why are people doing this? Is this the new middle-school equivalent of making prank phone calls? At least then you had the pleasure of listening to someone’s reaction when you asked if their refrigerator was running and told them to catch it. I doubt whoever put up this review is hanging out in Cyberspace waiting for my reaction. (And there’s nowhere to put reactions or comments in Amazon reviews, anyway.)
And, if you’re going to write a fake review, why give a Bot the job? It’s much more fun to write these yourself. My family has spent many laugh-filled hours playing a game called Balderdash where you make up definitions to unusual words, write biographies for people you’ve never heard of, explain what various acronyms stand for, and write brief plot summaries for titles of obscure movies.
So, whoever you are, dear reviewer who goes by the name of Piper N., I dare you: next time, get together with a group of friends and write your own Balderdash. It’ll be a lot more fun–and even if you don’t sound as smooth as the AI-bot, you’ll get to stretch your creative muscles. But thanks for the five stars. And if I ever attempt a fantasy novel, I hope my main character, like “Whirling” will emerge “as a fierce and courageous protagonist who defies expectations and challenges the status quo.”–I’m all for that.
And perhaps, reviewers to come might call my poetry book, just as you called “Whirling’s” journey, “a testament to the power of resilience and determination in the face of adversity.” That would certainly make me feel like the poems in the book had been truly heard.
Any artists out there—I’d love to see what “Whirling” looks like.
Today my mother turns 90!
While I have many reasons to be grateful in my life, one of my biggest sources of gratitude is having healthy parents who are still enjoying and making the most of their later years. My mom–and my dad, who is 92–are cultural aficionados. They love going to Carnegie Hall and Broadway. In fact, often when I announce my plans to come into New York, they search for tickets to something they think I would enjoy. In their eyes, tickets are one of the best forms of showing love.
The COVID years were hard for them. “It’s like jail!” my father would grumble. But as vaccinations have become abundant and restrictions have relaxed, they’re out in the world again.
© Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar
How do they get to Carnegie Hall? I know you’re thinking–practice! But they’ve paid their family musical dues and don’t need to practice any more. They take the subway–about a 30-minute ride. That they’re still able to do this is a wonderful privilege for people in their 90s, but when I mention it my mother looks confused. How else would we get there? she asks.
When I wrote my memoir, Imperfect Pitch, about the generational baggage of coming from a family of musicians and my struggle to meet what I perceived as a family expectation to be the next in a line of musical “prodigies,” I was pretty nervous about sharing the book with my parents. Not everything in the book I wrote about them was complimentary (LOL). But I realized, as I delved into the material, that they were just as much victims of the generational expectations as perpetrators. Like me, my parents both played music through high school, but didn’t have the ability–or (unlike me) the desire–to play professionally. And also unlike me, both of them accepted their limitations and went on with their lives, getting their “musical fixes” at Carnegie Hall, rather than from their own playing.
While I had a much harder time letting myself off the hook for not being able to play better than I could, I also moved on to my own life, spilling my creative passions into writing. But in 2020, my way of dealing with “COVID jail” was to return to the piano bench–tentatively at first, with a lot of finger stumbles and tears–and now, with a fluidity that pleases me. Even if I’m never going to win accolades for performing music, I’m happy to spend around 30 minutes every evening (the same amount of time it takes my parents to get to Carnegie Hall) to play for an audience of one–me! This is another thing that I’m profoundly grateful for.
And a final note of gratitude: when my parents did read my book, my mother said, I think this book will be very helpful to people in our family. We’ve gone through many birthdays together, and seen many shows at Carnegie Hall, but of all the gifts I’ve received, this affirmation is the one I cherish the most.
Happy birthday, Mom!
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This Friday, February 23rd, is the official birthday of my new book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, a collection of poetry inspired by my work in the immigration justice movement.
So this week, I’m feeling myself floundering as I try to get all the pieces in place for a perfect birthday party.
When my children were little, birthday parties were a huge stress. My older child, especially, wanted everything exactly how she wanted it… the color of the plates, the order of activities, the guest list/seating arrangements, and where she would stand to hand out the paper for an art activity featuring red and blue food coloring. My younger child was a little more chill, but I do remember making several calls before I found a baker who would be willing to do a birthday cake with a salamander on it (a picture, thank goodness–not a real salamander, though I’m sure a live one would have been preferred!)
Keeping a bunch of pre-schoolers entertained for two hours, containing their sugar-induced energy, and making small talk with parents I didn’t know while wondering how much they were judging me for the cleanliness of my house, my parenting style, my children’s uncensored responses to gifts they didn’t like all heightened the anxiety. I loved hanging out with my children, but I dreaded birthday party season!
Luckily, a book can’t tell you want it wants the way a child can. But this also means all the pressure is on me. As I sift through a nauseating number of articles and listserv comments on book marketing, I’m recognizing some important things about myself. I did succumb, as suggested, to posting myself on video on Instagram opening up my box of books, even though I thought it was silly. But ultimately I still believe parties should be low-budget affairs. I’m not interested in the $100/day plan, or anything that requires huge monetary investments, even when I’m promised that investing a daily $100 will net a daily $150. I got into this to be a writer, not a business person and I refuse to think of my work as a commodity that I have to manipulate an audience into buying. As it is, I’m already spending too much time in my analytical marketing brain rather than my dreamy and comfortable writing brain.
But the goody-goody schoolgirl who also lives inside me reminds me that I can’t simply do nothing. My book will be so disappointed if I don’t give it a birthday party! Yet, I’m going to delay the big launch until May, where it can be in conjunction with a photography exhibit on detention that my immigration justice group is putting on at the Anchor House of Artists. I’m still coming off my last book (Immigrants‘) birthday party (also delayed) which I’m glad to finally be on the other side of, even though I was wowed by the love and support of nearly 50 guests who showed up. I hope they liked the color of the plates (brown, compostable) and the gluten-free brownies.
In the meantime, I’ll invite people to wish Here in Sanctuary–Whirling a happy birthday on social media. And the gift this book would love more than anything else, for anyone who feels so inclined, is a review on Amazon or Goodreads. I guarantee, unlike my kids, the book will not talk back, no matter what you say. Or if you’re not someone who ever reads poetry, you can say happy birthday by adding the book to your Goodreads “want to read” shelf.
One birthday party I am co-planning and looking forward to is my mother’s. She’s turning 90 just a few days after my book is officially born. I’m thankful she’s never cared about the color of the plates. I got to order the cake. It will not have a salamander.