Monthly Archives: February 2024

Getting to Carnegie Hall

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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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Birthday Parties

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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.

 

 

The Danger of the Zero-Sum Game

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When I published my first book, Escaping Into the Night, with Simon & Schuster in 2006, I thought I had finally broken the publication barrier and was well on my way to achieving my goal of being a recognized author. Once that first book was published, the rest should be easy! And I had many ideas–and several manuscripts in various stages of completion in the drawer just waiting to be published.

But even though my contract required me to give Simon & Schuster an option on my next book before sending it anywhere else, they rejected my next manuscript. And the next. And the next. When I asked why, I was told that Escaping Into the Night didn’t do well enough–despite going into five additional printings and earning honorable mention designations from the American Library Association, Association of Jewish Libraries, and New York Public Library. When I reminded my editor of this, she said, “Well, you didn’t win a Newberry medal.”

O-kay… according to the Children’s Cooperative Book Center, approximately 5000 children’s books were published in 2006. Five of them won Newberry Honors. So, my book wasn’t in the top .001%. Gee! Sorry!

This is the thinking behind the predatory capitalist mentality and the “zero-sum game.” If you don’t win, you lose.

I’m thinking about this a lot this week while we’ve been in Florida managing yet another crisis with my father-in-law’s dementia. After being moved out of his home and into memory care a few weeks ago when his “sundowning” outbursts became too much for his home health aides to handle, he fell and broke his hip. In the last two weeks he has been in and out five different hospitals and rehab facilities. Each move has pressed further on his fragile ability to understand where he is and what is happening to him. At his worst, in another trip to the ER on Friday, he was shaking and crying and slapping at himself. I want to die! he screamed. You took it all away from me, and now I want to die. I’m already dead! I started dying when you took my apartment, my money, all my stuff!

As much as we patiently explained that his apartment was still there, and we could discuss whether he could go back to it after he was able to walk again (the apartment is inaccessible and he is completely bedridden at the moment), he could not be consoled. My father-in-law’s defining image of success–his only definition of success–revolved around independence: making his own decisions and doing things his own way. Once he lost that due to increasing dementia, in his mind, all was lost–a zero-sum game. He could not take a moment from his misery to appreciate even for one second some soothing music, a picture of his great-grandchild, the evocative shapes of the clouds on the skyline view out his hospital window, or us simply holding his hand and telling him that we loved him.

As I think about planning for my own aging, rather than focusing on the endless lists of financial minutiae that my father-in-law so meticulously put together and now lacks the cognitive ability to understand, I’m trying to instigate a practice now of cultivating gratitude for exactly the things I’ve been trying to point out to him that he does not see. This morning, in an attempt to “refill my empty tank” and fortify myself for another day fending off his anger on one end and negotiating intractable medical bureaucracy on the other, I spent a few minutes on the beach, mesmerized at the purple hues of the sky reflected in the ocean, the sound of the waves, the gulls strutting around in the sand.   Hopefully, if I’m ever plagued by dementia, I’ll be able to pull up that inner reservoir of abandoning the zero-sum game and simply enjoy whatever the moment has to offer me.

 

This is what I had to do as a writer 18 years ago: abandon the zero-sum game. And while it may not have been as difficult as that has been for my father-in-law (with admittedly less at stake, too) it still took a couple of years before I stopped thinking about being a writer as a win (big publisher)/lose (anything else) proposition and overcome the resulting depression that warped thinking caused.

But in the last several years, I HAVE reclaimed myself as a writer. And broadened the definition of a writer as anyone who uses their words to express a truth they’re compelled to tell (even when that truth is embedded in a fictional story). And while all truths may not touch all people, and some people will be more skilled than others in telling their truths, it’s the sharing of truth-telling that matters more than how much recognition or accolades I (or someone else) might get. And on days when I might doubt my own convictions, all I need to do is remember the outpouring of love and support at my launch reading for Immigrants last week, as well as all the comments I’ve received over the years from friends, colleagues and even strangers who have told me that my writing touched them.

And incidentally, the very small publisher who published Immigrants also requested an exclusive option on another work of fiction and subsequently rejected it–before Immigrants was even published. LOL it never ends!

How and Why

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Back in my business communication teaching days I often shared a tidbit with my classes that I picked up from the career center: To prepare for a job interview, make sure you can answer “how” and “why” to everything you wrote on your resume.

This seems like a good process for writers, too. We can ask ourselves questions like:

  • Why am I choosing to break this line in this spot?
  • Why would my character say–*that*? Or do *that*?
  • How can I convey my character’s emotions from describing the way she’s opening her backpack?
  • How can I integrate setting more effectively here to raise the emotional temperature of this conflict?
  • Why am I using a metaphor here instead of sticking to the actual image?

The questions can be endless. And while I almost never answer them with a logical and well-worded rationale, I do use them as a guiding light through my intuitive fogginess. In other words, the mere act of framing the question can help me figure out if the choices I’m making feel true and right, and also inspire me to try a few different approaches and compare the effects.

Lately, I’ve also been putting some of these questions in play in my piano practicing. How soft should I make this part?  How much rubato is too much? Articulating a rationale is even harder since both my intuition and field of knowledge are on much shakier ground. But framing the questions in order to consider different ways of playing gives me a sense of the options. And since I’m no longer trying to prove anything to anyone about my piano-playing, I end up just choosing what I like.

As I’ve had to sacrifice some of my writing and piano time to tackle book-marketing, I’ve come up against how/why questions that feel more annoying–perhaps because interviewers, bloggers, and podcasters need to have clear and well-worded responses, rather than the multi-directional swirls in my mucky brain.

Q. Why did you become a writer?
True answer: I don’t know. I’ve just always wanted to be one.
Cheeky answer (because true answer is way too bland): Because I knew I didn’t have the chops to make it as a Broadway or Carnegie Hall star. And with writing, you can have as many do-overs as you want before you put your work out in the world.

Q. How do you like to write? With a pen? On the computer? In the morning? Afternoon? Middle of the night?
True answer: Sometimes pen, sometimes screen. Morning is best, but I can force myself to write at any hour if I’m disciplined enough.|
Cheeky answer (because true answer is way too bland, and how I like to write has nothing to do with how someone else might like to write): Actually, I like to carve my thoughts in sand with a stick and then erase them like a Tibetan mandala. And, I guarantee, the muse doesn’t care what time it is and what color pen you’re writing with, even if you might care.

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

So what questions do I hope people will ask me at my book launch reading for IMMIGRANTS on Wednesday night. Here are a few I’d love to chew on:

  • What was the hardest story in the book to write and why?
  • Which of your characters did you fall in love with and why? Which characters were difficult to empathize with and how did you manage to overcome that challenge?
  • How will you deal with reactions to this book from people who aren’t sympathetic to immigrant issues?

True confession: At this moment, I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I promise to corral the various options and choose one well-worded answer–just as I would in a job interview!