SINGING TO FALLEN TREE

Posted on January 16, 2025 by dinafried

Last Friday, on the 3rd anniversary of my brother’s death, I found myself alone in the woods, singing to a fallen tree.

I hadn’t intended to do this, or anything else to mark the day, even though I was keenly aware of it. But in the middle of our daily woods walk, my partner, Shel, turned around to hurry back to a meeting, and I continued on… to the rarely traveled old growth pine forest below the more popular trail that leads to the top of Mt. Holyoke, where three years ago, I’d sat by a large fallen tree and spent a few moments contemplating my brother’s life and death.

My brother, Danny, and I did not have an easy relationship, and he did not have an easy life. At 15 he had a schizophrenic breakdown and never fully recovered. The early years of his illness were rife with outbursts of often violent psychotic episodes at home, punctuated by short stays at locked institutions where they zombified him with thorazine. Later, as treatment for psychosis evolved, he became more functional, but never mastered the stress of holding a job or living on his own, even though he didn’t need 24-hour supervision and could travel alone to visit family. But these drugs took a toll on his physical health and by the time he died (from an imploded port whose repair surgery was delayed due to the COVID crisis) he was struggling with severe kidney disease.

One of the things we shared–from the time we were teenagers–was a love of singing. Danny didn’t have a particularly pleasant voice, or a strong ability to hold pitch, but if he knew that, he never let it bother him. And through the years, when the grandchildren were asked to perform on their musical instruments at family gatherings, Danny always wanted to sing a song.

So in memory of Danny, I sang a song to the same tree where I sat three years ago–Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend. Danny always liked the James Taylor version, and it’s been one of the songs I’ve been working on in my voice lessons, where I’ve discovered that while my higher range voice is still pretty weak and wispy (though slowly improving) my lower range is strong and getting even stronger.

In the cold and quiet January woods, I belted it out, even though through most of my life, I wouldn’t have considered Danny my friend–just an (often secret) albatross I had to deal with.

I’m forever grateful that a few years before he died, I decided that I needed to go through the process of forgiving him for several abusive incidents that had made me cringe with disgust and an underlying edge of fear every time I was around him. This process was not easy or quick. It involved exposing, through writing and talking to people, many details I preferred not to think about. But, in the last few years of his life I was able to feel more caring and compassion when I saw him.

Here’s a short poem I wrote about the process:

ABLUTION
“To love is to chew; to forgive is to swallow”
—Mark Nepo

Two days before new year, and I have forgiven you,
let the thick glop between us dissolve
like a face in fade-to-black. To forgive
is not to swallow, but to spit, let the saliva glide
on the foam of a cool wave. Forgiveness is faith
in salt, in the movement of water against rocks
as they wear down to a black shine,
so slick you can slip right off—
turning your legs into mermaid tail,
your breathing lungs into gills. I have surrendered,
filled my bones with ocean. This forgiveness is cake.
It is love and I chew. It is cream with chocolate curls,
and it is green and clean, like a crisp, sharp leaf.
(Originally published in Dash, June 2021)

A few days ago, after my rendez-vous with the tree I came across this quote from Jacoby Ballard, from a series of journal prompts I’ve subscribed to from Kripalu Yoga Center on the theme of Choosing Love.

Feeling the emotions of grief, disappointment, betrayal, sadness, and anger are all prerequisites for forgiveness. If these emotions are not fully felt before one turns toward forgiveness, it can erode the process and compromise its authenticity.

How true. It took a LONG time to confront the sadness and denial and face the grief head-on. But I’m glad I got through this before it was too late, thoroughly enough that I could now sing my heart out to a fallen tree.

Then, as in Jewish tradition, I found a rock to place in the spot where the tree had been uprooted and headed home.

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Submission Milestones for 2024

Posted on January 9, 2025 by dinafried

Each year since I’ve started this blog, I’ve included an end-of-year submission stats post, just to shed some light on the nitty-gritty of this murky game. Here’s what happened for me in 2024.

POETRY:

20 Journals/Anthologies accepted 34 poems. I also got 91 poetry rejections.

Of the 34 poems accepted, 7 were taken on the very first go-round; 8 poems were previously rejected 1-3 times; 7 poems were rejected 4-7 times; 4 were rejected 9-12 times; 3 were rejected 15-20 times, and 1 had been previously rejected 31 times! (The other 4 poems were previously published, so I didn’t track that stat.) This surprised me, as usually my poems circulate more before someone picks them up. I’m wondering if I might be getting better at selecting poems I send out and matching them to journals.

Another thing of note is that of the 20 journals that accepted my work, 8 of them had previously published something of mine in the past, so I may have been more of a known quantity. But this is a great point for anyone playing the submission game. Establishing relationships with journals and editors who like your work can be extremely gratifying and also help soften the rejections from some of the more competitive journals on your reach list. And as long as the journals you’re published in put out a good quality product, who cares that they’re not the creme de la creme in the journal world. Your work is still getting read and appreciated!

FICTION AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION:

My fiction stats are a bit more depressing. I offered stories and essays to 23 journals, and only 1 got accepted: an op-ed in my local newspaper.

Some analysis on this:

–Stories and essays are often harder to publish because they take up more room in a publication. (5-10 pages vs. a 1-2 page poem).

–Most of my better stories were already published in my collection, IMMIGRANTS, so I’ve been only circulating a few newer ones. Before the book was published I did manage to publish around half of the stories it contained in various places, but it was slow going.

–I still tend to feel overall more confident in my fiction, and therefore I submitted to a greater number of “reach journals.”

AWARDS:

I’m personally very mixed on the “awards/contest” game for books because it seems like mostly a way of collecting a lot of exorbitant entry fees just to say your book won an award, but my publisher and I did submit to a couple of the more known ones. I was pleased to get a finalist designation (first runner up short-story and all category short-list) for the Eric Hoffer Awards, and a finalist designation in the short story category for the Independent Authors Network.

I also received two Pushcart Prize and two Best-of-the-Net nominations from various journal editors.

And I did not win a few other notable things, like an IPPY Award.

LARGER PROJECTS:

It was a thrill to have my poetry book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, which drew heavily on my witnessing trips to the border and the children’s detention center in Homestead, FL, come out in early 2024. With the upcoming administration’s about to take over and put their extreme deportation plans in gear, this book feels even more relevant right now, and I’m continuing to look for ways to publicize it.

I did not spend a lot of time circulating my music memoir or any of my novels. But I did receive three rejections (aka non-responses) from agents, and one non-response from a small press where I sent one of my older kid-lit novels.) So this might be an area ripe for New Year’s resolutions in 2025.

Nevertheless, I easily crossed the 100-rejection threshold (91 poetry rejections, 22 fiction/CNF rejections, and 4 agent/small press rejections) for a grand total of 117!

Onward to 2025!

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A Chanukah Tribute to My Dog, Lefty

Posted on January 1, 2025 by dinafried

As we lit the Chanukah menorah on the first winter at our new house twenty-six years ago, my ten-year-old wanted to know if people could see the lights from the road. I think she was sensitive to ours being the only house in the neighborhood that wasn’t strung with Christmas lights and blinking Santas.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s go see.”

We removed the curtain, placed the menorah in the front window, then bundled up and went outside. In the New England snow, our house, on top of a small hill next door to a farm with a Star of Bethlehem on the silo, looked gorgeous with the small menorah light twinkling at the window. I just wanted to stay out there forever under the amazing mass of stars.

We got in the car and drove down the hill, then turned so we could pass the house from below. “There it is!” I pointed. But to see our little menorah would clearly involve knowing that it was there, and a questionably dangerous maneuver of looking up at the house when you should be looking at the twisty road.

My children were not persuaded. “I want it to be like the star on the silo,” my six-year-old insisted as we pulled back into the driveway. “I want to see the menorah from far away.”

“It doesn’t matter. We can see it,” I tried to convince them. And then I had an idea. “Hey, let’s put menorahs on all sides of the house, and then we can walk around and see them, and the neighbors can see them, too!”

We lit three more menorahs, bundled back into our coats and boots, and crunched all the way around our snowy yard. One of the kids started to sing, and we all joined in: “Chanukah, oh Chanukah, come light the menorah/Let’s have a party, we’ll all dance the hora/every day for eight days, dreidels to spin/crispy little latkes, tasty and thin… When we got to the slope at the back of the house, the children stopped singing and flopped down dramatically, rolling all the way to the bottom of the hill. I felt my heart catch, but only until I heard them laughing.

This was so much fun that we did it again on the second night of Chanukah, and the third, and the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th. Each time we got to the back of the house, the kids would engage in a dramatic fall and roll down the hill. Some nights were bitter cold with wind-chills below zero. Others were slick with ice. It didn’t matter. Going out to see the Chanukah lights became a test of our resolve and our fortitude. A tradition was born.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

The next year, we celebrated Chanukah with a new arrival, our rambunctious husky-shepherd Lefty. My partner, Shel, had surprised us by suddenly agreeing to let Lefty to join our family after insisting for years that a “dog should be accompanied by a farm.” I interpreted this as meaning he would never live with a dog, not that he would suddenly agree to one, now that we had a farm next door. Lefty loved nothing more than going out for an extra romp on the farm on Chanukah nights. He caught onto the tradition quickly and started panting the minute he saw candles, barking excitedly through the lighting and the blessings, the careful placement of lit menorahs at the windows, and the long process of bundling up. The ground conditions were too unstable to try to control him on leash so we let him run. He’d stay with us sometimes as we circled the house, but more often than not, he’d take off across the farm fields tracking the scent of something. As huskies believe their territory is the size of Alaska, we faced the real possibility every time that he might not come back, as he often didn’t on longer walks, but each night as we were completing our circle, singing, Nightly so brightly/the candles of Chanukah glow/Shining with glory, retelling the story/the wonders of days long ago… we’d add one more word to the song—Lef–ty!

There’d be quiet as we waited. Sometimes we’d have to call a second time, or a third, but then we’d hear a rumble in the distance, as out of the dark he’d come bounding back, jumping on all of us over and over again as if giving an exuberant thank you for his special Chanukah present.

Lefty died in 2011, the same year my youngest left for college. My older child had already graduated and was living in New York City, so on the first night of Chanukah that year, the nest was truly empty. After Shel and I lit the Chanukah candles, I insisted on going out despite the fact that it was four degrees and the grounds were covered with a solid glaze of ice. We took ski poles and crept carefully down the ice-coated steps. At the front window, the small light of the menorah exuded warmth, the blanket of stars above us, magnificence, but I felt sad. I missed the kids, even though they were coming in a couple of days to celebrate Chanukah over the weekend. I missed the dog even more.

“We can walk the other way around the house,” Shel said. “It’s less steep.”

I knew the kids would have rebelled at any break in tradition, but I humored him and our old bones. We sang the song. At the end of the last line, I added “Lef–ty!” Like, “Play ball,” at the end of the Star Spangled Banner, the words just belonged there. I even looked across the field, half expecting to see him running toward us, but no Chanukah miracle.

When the kids came that weekend, they insisted on walking in the direction they’d always walked, and stopped, as usual, at the back of the house to dramatically roll down the hill. We sang the song, and of course, they too added, “Lef–ty!” to the last line—as we’ve done every year since then. At least one night every year, we still celebrate Chanukah with the children, their long-term partners, and now, a grandchild. But I still find myself looking across the field, waiting for that moment of rumbling and the speck of distant movement to get larger and clearer, our joyful dog coming back to us.

Originally published in Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Wonders of Christmas, 2018.

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