Monthly Archives: January 2026

Washing Away the Numbness

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Like most writers, I’m constantly trying to strike the perfect balance between time for my writing and time for the rest of my life. And, like many activists, I struggle to balance responding to the demands of a situation, while setting boundaries so I can stay focused and not burn out too quickly. This past week has certainly been a test in maintaining all these balances. Nearly every day I’ve had 2 or 3 long meetings, some of them highly frustrating in the amount of disappointing new information revealed, or in their lack of productive outcomes.

This doesn’t even include time dealing with the text threads and email chains to plan and debrief these meetings, and sorting through the hundreds of issue-related texts and emails that have come into my inbox–many of which need to be responded to or forwarded to the right people.

Nor does it include the demonstration a few of us planned last Saturday as part of a regional day of action to boycott Citizens Bank, one of the few banks that still provides loans to CoreCivic and GeoGroup, two major players that run most of the ICE detention centers. And it doesn’t include the insomniac hours I spent worrying about the zero-degree wind chill forecast for that day and pondering whether or not we should postpone. (We decided to go for it, but set a shorter time frame. Happy that we got a good turnout and the sun kept the cold tolerable.)

It also doesn’t include dealing with the numbing grief as one shocking news story after another unfolds in Minneapolis and elsewhere. A second murder of a protester, the abduction of a preschooler used as bait to detain his parents (my grandson has the same bunny hat), a gunpoint wrongful arrest of a US citizen who was taken in his underwear in the frigid cold, and 5-year old twins being denied release after 8 months in detention in Texas because the judge said they have no access to collateral.

These are just a few of the horrific stories that can easily send me reeling into a state of numbness.

While people now seem to be galvanized by DHS’s murders of Tim Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, it’s important to know that they are only 2 of the 8 people who died in dealings with ICE just in the past month. Perhaps it’s easier to see ourselves in Pretti and Good, since they were protesters, but let’s not forget the other six people who died in ICE detention centers this January, often under questionable circumstances: Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez. Campos’s case is particularly disturbing, as ICE claimed he committed suicide, but the medical examiner determined that his death was clearly a homicide.

So, yes, friends, it has been hard to find balance. And hard to find the psychic space to write, though in some ways being inundated with all these meetings and emails and events and projects does make me feel like I’m doing something to fight the tsunami, even if at times, I worry that I’m just wading right into it with my surfboard. Still, the cold water pouring over me does help wash away the numbness. And somehow, I’m still managing to stay afloat. And if you’re moved to take a small but important action right now, you can ask your Senator to vote against continued funding for ICE, using this call script from Indivisible.

Image by Elias from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/wave-ocean-sea-storm-tsunami-1913559/

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The Power of Not Giving Up

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Yesterday, I spent a grueling day flying from my home in New England to DC and back for the funeral of my aunt, Amy Loeserman.

I wasn’t close to my aunt. In fact, most of my strongest memories of her were mixed, at best. The one that stands out was when I was around nine. She was bragging that she was the best Monopoly player ever. So, more out of curiosity than bravado–because even then I rarely cared about winning or losing board games–I challenged her. The image of all my mortgaged properties spread out on my grandma’s gray rug as I tearfully handed over my last pink $5 bill is burned in my memory. I hadn’t merely lost. I had been humiliated. And she was gleeful about it.

For years after that, I was convinced she didn’t like me. Maybe that was true. She wasn’t what you would call, “a kid person” and her relationship with my mother, her only sibling, had–until their old age–always been bumpy. Despite being a kid, I could feel the reverberations.

In retrospect, I think this was one of those harmful assumptions we tend to make about unpleasant life events in order to put them in a palatable context. And that assumption, backed by a number of less-than-perfect interactions over the years that followed, prevented us from having more of a relationship.

But relationship or not, my relationships with my cousins (her children) are important to me, so I wanted to show up. And despite the grueling day, which started at 6am and ended at midnight, I’m glad I did. For one thing, I learned in my cousin’s eulogy that Amy’s ruthlessness at board games was not a personal vendetta against me. She was known for not letting her children or her grandchildren win, no matter how young they were. When I told the Monopoly story to my cousins and their children, they laughed out loud. “Classic!” they agreed.

I also learned things about Amy I never knew. She was one of only four women in her U. of Chicago law school class in 1959. Her original intent was to use law for social justice, but no social justice oriented law firms would hire women in those days. The only firm that was willing to hire her was involved with shipping law, so that became her field, and she even got to argue a case before the Supreme Court. She also volunteered for the ACLU and handled pro bono cases on racial and gender discrimination.

I’m sorry I didn’t know how much of an interest in social justice we had in common. But I’m thankful for the small ways we did bond around music. I appreciated her frank honesty in talking about her own musical journey and how it fit into our family dynamics when I interviewed her for my piano memoir–one of the best conversations I ever had with her. She talked about how hard she worked, since she didn’t believe she had much musical talent, and how her father (my grandfather), the family music god whom we all venerated but could never live up to, would be shouting out from the back of the house… higher… lower… when she couldn’t get exactly the right pitch on the violin. It got to the point where she couldn’t stand it any more and decided to play flute instead, as well as piano.

When I saw her for the last time, last month at a family Bat Mitzvah, I was glad to have a the common topic of piano to talk about. She had recently moved to assisted living where she had the opportunity to take piano lessons again. We asked each other about which pieces we were learning. Even at 89, she was still working hard, not giving up. In fact, Amy’s life was about not giving up. From dealing with gender discrimination in the legal field, to feeding her musical passion despite not thinking she was “talented,” to going to graduate school at age 54 and getting a Ph.D. in French literature 14 years later simply because she loved French, Amy was someone whose perseverance we could all learn from, even if at times this same trait manifested in useless arguments about honoring an expired coupon (another story told at the funeral).

In these tough and scary times in our world, I’m hoping I can carry some of Amy’s perseverance with me and be as willing as she was to work hard–even when it’s not easy. And to be as stubborn as she was about not giving up.

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Submissions Game Stats for 2025

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Still reeling from the news cycle, but the advice I took away from my trusty meditation app today was to soften into acceptance/resistance, rather than tensing up and making myself crazy, or giving up and crumbling away into some useless ball of powdery nothing.

So, returning to “my little life” with hopes that some of this will inspire others who are also playing (or thinking about playing) “The Submissions Game”–and it really does help to think of it as a game unless you are someone who can’t stand losing, here are my stats for 2025.

In poetry, my biggest focus, 17 journals accepted 28 poems. Of these, 13 of the journals were new to me, and 4 I’d been published in before. Of the poems, 4 were accepted on the first try, 8 had been rejected less than 5 times, 7 less than 10 times, 7 others had been rejected less than 15 times, and 2 were rejected less than 20 times (I generally stop submitting a poem when it hits 20 rejections.)

As for poetry rejections, the grand number was 83, with 25 submissions from 2025 still outstanding.

Short stories and essays, as usual, were less successful, with one acceptance (of a story that had previously been rejected 12 times.) I could also count two of the poems accepted as “flash fiction,” as they were prose poems that bordered on both genres.

Two other stories were rejected 14 times combined, and the essays I submitted were rejected 9 times.

I did get 2 “send more” or “made final round” notes with my fiction/essay submissions. Three essay/fiction submissions from 2025 are still outstanding.

Bigger projects also made little headway. A chapbook I’ve been circulating got 7 rejections. (And 3 more in the first week of 2026). One submission from 2025 is still outstanding.

I didn’t spend too much energy submitting my piano memoir this year, as most of the time I fretted over conflicting advice on how to revamp it into more of a self-help book. Two revisions later, at the end of December, it became clear to me that the new format wasn’t working so I went back to the original version and sent that to seven small press just before New Year’s Day. So far I’ve only heard back from one: a rejection.

I also haven’t done too much with the eleven novels in the drawer, but I did send one of them to three agents. One ghosted me, one answered with a scam offer, and one was nice enough to write an actual letter of rejection. It’s still out at one small press.

So, my grand total of overall rejections for 2025 was 134–well surpassing my goal of 100!

And I’m hitting the ground at a good rate for 2026, with 6 rejections in the first two weeks–that’s like a rejection almost every other day! But two nice things, as well: an acceptance of a poem from a new journal, and notification from a journal that I was accepted in last year that my poem had won one of their prizes, which comes with a cash award and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

 

https://pngimg.com/image/54797

As I’ve said before, while I’m compelled to keep getting my work out there–mostly so more people will read it than for any uncontrollable need for outside validation–I find I can soften into thinking of this as nothing more than a game I play with myself. So, if you’re interested in offering your work (and totally fine, if you’re not) I encourage you not to take the process too seriously, and certainly not as a judgment on the quality of your writing.

Now onto doing my part to change the world. If only I could approach that with the same softness and ease! Of course, the stakes are much higher!

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Grandma, Dance!

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Once again, I was in the middle of preparing a blog post on my submissions stats from 2025. And once again, life happened. Or, should I say, death happened.

Renee Nicole Good. 37 years old. A poet, and the mother of three young children.  Sitting in her car as a legal observer during an ICE raid in Minneapolis. Shot four times in the face after being harassed by ICE agents as she attempted to drive away.

The feds are spinning this story by painting her as a domestic terrorist who was trying to run over ICE agents with her vehicle. An outright lie, but what else would you expect from an administration who had the audacity to rewrite the events of January 6? The videos made by numerous bystanders show otherwise. No ICE agents were in the vehicle’s path as she attempted to escape. The person who shot her–four times in the face–was standing by the side of the car, not in its path. And besides, as my partner pointed out so matter-of-factly, if you want to stop a car, you don’t need to shoot the occupant. You can shoot the tires.

And after she had collapsed and crashed into a utility pole, ICE refused to allow a physician in the crowd to provide medical treatment, claiming they had their own medics, who, at the moment, were nowhere to be found.

I first read accounts of this story yesterday, sitting in the dark in my grandson’s room while he napped. And two things came to mind. First was a blurry melange from Schindler’s List and other Holocaust movies where Nazi guards randomly and blithely shot any Jew who wasn’t immediately conforming to whatever order was given.

The second was an event that happened to me when I was about Renee’s age. I was backing out of a parking space with my one-year-old in the car, when all of a sudden I heard this man knocking on my trunk. You hit me! he shouted. He told me he had fallen from the impact and re-injured his knee. Mortified, I dropped off the baby to my partner at home, a few blocks away, then drove the man to the ER. When he said he didn’t need me to come and wait with him, I drove to the police station to report the accident. When I gave the name of the victim, the policeman rolled his eyes. That guy’s a known scammer. I’d be very careful, he said. He probably didn’t even go into the ER. You probably didn’t even hit him.

And I had stupidly just shown him exactly where I lived!

The next day he called me and asked for money for medical expenses. I took the easy way out. I met him in town with cash.

I was lucky. I never heard from the man again. I have my life. I watched my children grow up, as Renee never will. The feds’ story circulating about Renee, embellished and exaggerated by Kristi Noem and Donald Trump, is another scam. A scam of out-of-control proportions, which if people start believing it, will give ICE the authority to keep randomly shooting anyone they deem “non-compliant”–to be no different than the Nazi guards were, needing no justification to shoot anyone they pleased.

So today, I’m wearing dark colors, feeling a different kind of grief, a stunned sadness punctured with fear for my country. Renee’s death is not the only senseless death of a protesting activist. I think of Rachel Corrie in Gaza, Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. And I think of the hundreds of African-Americans murdered by authoritarian police for no cause: George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Daunte Wright, Breonna Taylor, Stephon Clark–just to name a few. More profiles and stories are here.

I hope all the readers of this blog–those of you who are inclined toward political action and those of you who aren’t–will think of one thing you can do in response to Renee’s death and this unraveling trajectory towards authoritarianism. Call your Congresspeople. (Jessica Craven has a script here), attend a vigil, write a poem, as Cyn Grace Sylvie did in yesterday’s poetic resistance blog, Second Coming, or make a piece of art. Post your responseon social media/and or share it with friends. Share this blog. Or share something else that might speak to you more deeply.

After I first read the news story about Renee yesterday, I only had a few minutes to absorb the severity of it all before my grandson woke up and wanted listen to clips of his favorite band, The Tokyo Paradise Ska Orchestra (an odd choice for a 3-year-old, but that’s where he’s at). He has about 50 cuts on the playlist his parents made for him, and was happy to put them on shuffle and see what came next.

Grandma, dance! He kept shouting as he bounced up and down to the beat,  a different stuffed animal in his arms for each song.

I didn’t feel like dancing. But this is life.

And as I bobbed around, I realized one more time, that this is why we must keep fighting. So we can dance.

Carolmooredc, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

If I can’t dance, then I don’t want to be part of your revolution.–Emma Goldman

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Reflections on a Year of Loss

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Happy New Year! I was intending to write my annual post of my submissions stats for the year (which I will do in the near future) but a prompt suggested by poet Meg Hartmann, who offers a self-led write-a-poem-every-day course and other goodies for writers on her website Ah The Sea, led me in a completely different direction. The prompt, by sheer coincidence, turned out to be a line from my first writing teacher and long-time mentor, Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists.

What could be more generous than a window? 

I have a gorgeous set of floor-length sliding windows in my dining room, where I often work in the winter in order to take in the maximum amount of sun. Looking out that window, I ended up meandering down a wider path and considering all of 2025–the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For me personally, the salient event of 2025 was my father’s death on March 1. Despite my gratitude for his long life (he was 93) and relatively short illness before his passing; and despite our not being exceptionally close even though our overall family bonds were strong, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a foundation of my world had come undone. My father’s illness and death, as well as its aftermath, have forged me into an entirely new relationship with my mother. Before 2025, I’d speak to both my parents on the phone every week or two, casually recounting the newsy highlights of my life while they shared theirs. This past year, I spoke to my mother no less than every other day: at first providing emotional and logistical support in navigating my father’s care, and then, after his death, occasionally helping her problem-solve life’s relentless administrative demands but mostly providing someone to talk to in the unbearable dark loneliness of isolation.

This has made me so grateful for my partner, Shel, and our 46-year relationship. I have major hermitic tendencies (and I’m grateful that he’s learned to dance around them) but ultimately, I will always choose connection over isolation.

I’m also grateful that my mother, at age 91, is cognitively sharp and physically able to care for herself. As with my father, my mother and I are not exceptionally close, though we share the same family-bonded loyalty. And we probably have less in common than my father and I did in terms of personality, outlook and values. But I’m determined to be the best daughter I can be and provide whatever support I can in this inconceivable transition. (My parents were married for 72 years.)

As I look out the window and watch 2025 recede into the distance, I can’t close out this reflection without considering how many people in our country have suffered losses, even if, due to luck and privilege, I haven’t been as deeply affected: loss of safety due to hate crimes and ICE overreach, loss of economic security, loss of access to health care, loss of access to food, loss of due process. I continue to be distraught as news story after news story reinforces the conjecture that cruelty is not only a result of the administration’s policies–it is the point. Yet, I’m hoping that some of the pundits are correct in predicting that the swelling tide of resistance will continue to rise in 2026.

Happy New Year! May it be joyful, peaceful, and cruelty-free! And may all your windows be generous!

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