Monthly Archives: October 2023

Pressure and Practice

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From the Center for New Americans: www.cnam.org

Once again, I’m taking on the challenge of writing 30 Poems in November as a fundraiser to benefit the Center for New Americans, a wonderful organization in our community that provides English classes and other assistance for immigrants. And once again, as the calendar reels toward November 1, I’m feeling the pressure and panic. How will I ever write 30 poems in a month? How will I even write one poem? Will I ever write a poem again? Adding to the pressure, I’ve promised to share the poems with those who’ve contributed to my fundraiser (if they want them) and I feel like I need to reach some minimal standard in order to avoid total embarrassment.

So, in the last few days of October, even though I’ve had more free time than I’ll likely have in November, where I have (on top of my regular commitments) two sets of guests, a week away for a family event, and a book coming out at the end of the month, I’ve been refraining from writing poems–hoping that whatever might be simmering will build up to a boiling overflow of precious words the minute the calendar page turns. If only I weren’t such a “good girl,” I could write today, or cheat and count some of the poems I wrote earlier in October in the mix, but the beauty of this challenge for me is in the practice of sitting down every single day in November and attempting to write something I can wrestle into a “poem” that counts in the total.

Emphasized word here is not “poem” but practice.

Some of us might practice yoga, or meditation, or a musical instrument, or our dance moves. But it’s hard to think of practicing writing. Too many of us (myself included) expect that everything we write needs to have some productive purpose. And while those of us in the wonderfully supportive writing community that’s sprung up around this annual November fundraiser often remind each other that it’s “okay if the poems are bad,” this still implies a judgment of our work, which doesn’t need to be there.

We’re simply practicing.

If this year is similar to past years, it’s likely I’ll write a few poems I’m very happy with, several others that have potential, which I’ll noodle with until I either abandon them or send them out, and others that I’ll immediately file away as inactive. It doesn’t matter, I’ll be writing. And when I send November’s poetry harvest to those donors who’ve requested it, I’ll add the reminder that these are “poems-in-progress,” not finished masterpieces. A rehearsal, not a performance.

And like in music, or dance, or yoga, practicing does pay off. I’ve done this practice for seven years, which means I’ve drafted 210 poems. 47 of them, more than 20 percent, have been published, often years after I wrote them and in versions that were quite different from my initial November drafts.

If you’d like to contribute to my fundraiser, you can do so here. Or, you can sign up and do your own 30 poems this November. It’s not too late! As bonus, you get a prompt by email every day from the marvelous 30 Poems Coordinator, Sarah Sullivan–and as I stated in an earlier post, prompts can be your golden ticket to creativity. I’ve found that doing this practice in November is a great way to keep my spirits up in the encroaching late-afternoon darkness. And I promise you, your poems don’t have to be good–or bad–or anything that carries a label of judgment. They just have to be.

The Power of Witness

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Earlier this week I published an op-ed in our local newspaper the Daily Hampshire Gazette, that had left me feeling pretty raw when I wrote it. So I found myself waiting hungrily for reactions–emails from people who might have seen it, or likes and comments when I shared it on Facebook. At the same time, I was disparaging myself from being too caught up in my ego, as I kept drifting away from what I was doing to check my email and for Facebook reactions. I’m not one of those people who needs constant ego stroking, I reminded myself. I write things, I put them out, and then, there they are. It’s not about me, it’s about the work. 

Yet, even though I never stopped owning that last statement as the truth, I kept on checking–until the likes and comments started whooshing in. At that point, I could finally let it go. Not because my ego had been mollified, but because I’d been heard. In fact, one of the most valuable comments I received that day was one word–heard. No judgment given on whether the reader liked the piece, whether she agreed, whether she thought I was “good” or “talented” (whatever those two words mean). Just that she’d heard what I needed to say.

This is the power of witness, of reading one’s words out loud to an audience, or publishing them somewhere so others can read them. I believe that those of us who are driven to write do so because there are some things that are really important to us that we need to say. And when we share our words with others, we’re often asking them not to critique our structure or language choices, or comment on our writing worthiness. We simply want them to listen.

Of course, I’m touched when people tell me they like my writing. And I’m not immune to negative judgment–especially from the gatekeepers of the writing world: teachers, editors of literary journals, writers with higher celebrity status than I have.  Nor am I immune to to glowing when I receive praise–especially from writers I respect who know how hard all of this is, or from those same literary gatekeepers.

But ultimately what I want to know when I share a piece is that you feel me!

This doesn’t mean it’s okay to sacrifice artfulness or craft just to let go of a cathartic mess. Although there are times when that’s what we need to do to make peace with some aspect of our own life, if we choose to take the next step and make our writing public, we owe our witnesses a writer’s ear for precise and evocative language and an editor’s careful eye for clarity. Though this issue is up for debate in the literary world, I believe that writing can be “sentimental,” but, as this article in Ploughshares explains, it needs to earn the emotions it evokes. But by being brutally honest with yourself, a goal I’ve set that I’m continuing to get closer toward, you can get to the emotional heart of something more easily than you think.

And if you can use your art to touch the emotion in yourself, then it’s likely, your readers will also feel those emotions resonating within themselves.

And hopefully, they’ll take the time to tell you, I feel you. You’ve been heard.

 

 

 

 

I was trying to hold pain–my own, which was fairly inconsequential when compared with the larger pain of people in Israel and Gaza, whose lives have been upended by the recent violence. I framed the op-ed around my day-to-day life, much of which involves caring for a one-year-old

Confessions of a Prompt Queen

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I’m writing this post today in celebration of being featured today in Rattle Magazine’s tribute to prompt poems.

And while I’m not a fan of bragging, I can’t help being delighted to be published in such a reputable magazine that I like so much–makes it worth all the hours of submission/rejection drudgery.

One of my writing groups calls me The Submission Queen because I spend so much time trying to get my work out there and encouraging others to submit, as well. But I’d prefer to think of myself as The Prompt Queen. Truly, I don’t know where I would be in my writing life without prompts.

I’d written all through high school and in college (as an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing) and slogged my way through a couple of drafts of a novel, but I didn’t feel like I’d even begun to find my voice until my late 20s, when I took my first workshop with the late but immortal Pat Schneider of Amherst Writers & Artists. Choose an object, Pat would say as she’d lay out a bouquet of ordinary things on the coffee table: an egg beater, a hand-crocheted doily, a jar of French’s mustard, a hammer with nicks on the handle. And if you don’t know why you’re choosing it, that’s a good thing. Then write whatever this object inspires you to write. 

There was something about the freedom granted, the atmosphere in the room to say anything (or nothing–no one ever had to share their writing) that unlocked a gate in me, and in nearly everyone that took part in this process, whether we wrote about childhood memories this object evoked or sauntered off on some surrealistic language adventure where the object had, at most, a cameo role.

Pat would usually follow up her object exercise with pictures, or lines from poems, or a collection of things to smell or touch, or a meditation to bring back a memory or dream scene. It didn’t really matter what she offered. Following the prompt bypassed my inner critic’s need to write something “good.” I could simply pick up my pen and play, and with that playfulness came surprising turns of language and metaphors and scenes from my subconscious I would have never conjured up with my mind on more active patrol. So, I’ve continued to seek prompts wherever I can find them: in writing groups, in online subscriptions, or in my own collections of poems and pictures.

This doesn’t mean that all prompts work for me or that whatever I write comes out perfect and polished. I still file away a lot of this writing in the dead zone in my computer marked “Inactive.” But often I’m able to take what I wrote in a prompt and wrestle it into a poem, or flash fiction piece, or develop it further into an essay or short-story. Occasionally I’ve used prompts to enhance scenes in my novels or longer creative non-fiction projects.

And whether what I write turns into something finished or not, I have fun! And I often get to vicariously release whatever useless stressful thoughts are gnawing at me in a creative and playful way. In these dark times, there’s a lot to be said for the value of playing.

Revital Salomon, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

So, if you choose to read it, I hope you enjoy my Rattle poem (while I enjoy my 15 minutes of fame). And here’s a link to the poem (prompt) that inspired it.  And a picture of the moon, because that also could have been a prompt that inspired this poem.

And to jumpstart your own prompt process, I highly recommend Pat Schneider’s book, Writing Alone and With Others.

The Wrong Bus

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By Bashar Nayfeh – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73232226

In 1986, during the first of the two trips we took to Israel/Palestine together, my husband Shel and I waited for the bus from Bethlehem back to Jerusalem. We had a choice of two buses: the Jewish bus and the Arab bus. We stood between the clumps of Jews and Arabs, each of whom were waiting for their bus, and I remembered feeling as if I wasn’t in Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, but in Alabama before de-segregation. We were Jews, but we were also New Yorkers, so we were going to take whichever bus came first.

When the Arab bus arrived, all the Jews stood back. Only men and women in flowing robes and headgear got on. We followed behind like stowaways. The bus was crowded, but an old man offered Shel (who was in his 20s at the time) his seat–insisted on it. Someone asked where we were from. Obviously somewhere else, or we would have known we’d taken the wrong bus, even though it was going where we wanted to go. “America,” we said. “Massachusetts.”

“Boston?” Someone had relatives in Boston. “No, a small town.” we said as the bus belched its way back to Jerusalem, getting louder and more crowded, as people shouted in Arabic over our heads. Years later, I tried to learn Arabic from a big orange book and a professor who emphasized the ways words might end differently depending on the situation, not admitting for weeks that this was the classical version of the language and all these endings were dropped in common speech. I had wanted to learn common speech. For years I used to dream of going to villages, trying to make peace in two languages I didn’t speak, so I dropped the course.

I remember wondering why more Jews didn’t take the Arab buses, simply because they might be safer. After all, weren’t the frequent suicide bombers of the 1980s on the Jewish buses? And if some of the Jews had taken the Arab buses, would anyone have offered them a seat? Or did we have special status? Was the label “American tourist,” branded on us by our clothing, or simply because we didn’t know any better and had taken the wrong bus–which in my mind, turned out to be the right bus.

On that trip, we sought out peace activists, including people from Oz v’Shalom, an Orthodox Jewish peace movement, and Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, a mixed community of Israelis and Palestinians who ran educational dialogue programs for children and teens. We stayed with a Palestinian family and made labne, a soft yogurt-like cheese, under the stars. And we stayed for Shabbat with Shel’s religious relatives in a West Bank settlement. Everyone we met, regardless of our differences, treated us with warmth and kindness, piling on food, smiles, hugs.

I’m thinking about this today as I try to make sense of the latest wave of violence in Israel/Palestine, risking the discomfort of potential hate mail as I wade from the comfortable topics of writing, or music, or my sheltered life, into a landmine of emotions and suffering. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law and three of my nieces and their families–people I love–have chosen to make their home in Israel and I fear for their safety and well-being. I’m also grieving for every parent, Palestinian or Israeli, whose children were killed, kidnapped, or are now facing death due to air strikes or lack of food or essential medicines.

The situation is complicated, but war is ugly. It’s the wrong bus. And it’s full of people who, unlike me, didn’t choose to be on it.

 

 

 

 

Accepting the Hard Stuff

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I’ve been in Florida for the past few days visiting my 92-year-old father-in-law, who was been plagued by dementia. Despite the warm, sunny weather and proximity to the beach, this is never a trip I look forward to–even as I’m touched by N.’s stretches of cogent lucidity between the storms of anger and confusion, where he talks poignantly about how sad he is that his life has changed so much. As someone who valued his independence above all else, as he continues to point out when asked to look back on some of the happier times in his life, having to succumb to 24-hour care and supervision often makes him feel that his life isn’t worth living any more.

But I know I need to accept things, he says to me over dinner. And enjoy what I can, like this food. And be happy that I can stay in my apartment, and that I have a wonderful family. I know I need to be grateful for all of that.

It’s an easy adage to repeat. But much harder for anyone–those with dementia and those without–to implement. How do we truly reach a place of gratitude and acceptance of whatever happens to befall us? Especially, when we can’t change the situation, but even when we think we can?

I recognize the extreme privilege I’ve had in my life up until now of not having dementia or some other life-changing debilitating disease. And yet, as both a continually aspiring and a recovering perfectionist, I find myself constantly navigating the question of when I should push myself to do something better than I’m currently able, and when I should accept the status quo. Especially in my creative pursuits. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about learning Kol Nidre on the piano, and trying to accept that I would likely never play it at the level I wanted to. And in writing, as well, while I’m generally pleased with many of the things I’ve written, it’s hard to stop berating myself for not writing as well as ____________ (hundreds of names could fill in that blank) or not having accomplished as much in my writing career as more recognized writers.

As I sit on the beach, I try to practice some of the meditation techniques I’ve learned from the app I’ve been using this past year. Label the breaths: in/out, try to match them up with the waves. I get distracted easily. There’s a radio playing. A helicopter overhead. And I’m still on edge from just having to tell N. at least five times–or seven–or ten–what the plan is for the next day. He’ll have lunch with his aide at the senior center, as usual. We’ll come over after he gets back–in the afternoon, and take him back to our place and make him dinner.

He frowns. I need to go to the senior center.

I tell him one more time that we’ll see him after the senior center.

The lady (his aide) will be lonely if I leave, he protests.

I’m sure she understands that it’s important for you to spend time with your family. 

I keep trying to understand things, he tells me. And when I ask someone to explain it to me, I can tell that they think I’m a pain in the ass, but I’m just trying to understand. 

You’ve always been very persistent, I tell him, remembering the hours and hours he put in every day, writing down steps, studying videos, when learning to ballroom dance. It’s both a strength you have, but now it’s also a curse, because there are some things your brain can’t process. Please trust us and don’t worry so much about tomorrow. The day will work out. 

But he doesn’t let go of the worry. And why should he, just because I tell him to? Cultivating  faith that things will work out is a hard habit for those of us who’ve spent our lives priding ourselves on our own agency in making things happen.

I get up from the beach. No way I’m going to get anywhere near a state of inner peace tonight. Yet, I make sure to express gratitude for the sloshy sound of the waves and their dependable rhythms as the world just keeps doing its thing–with us, or without us.

 

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