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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The night after the election, instead of doing my regular piano practicing, I sat down with Rise Up Singing and played John Lennon’s Imagine. It’s become my anthem. Then I went through the entire book, and played a whole bunch of songs that give voice to hope–even if hope is so wispy right now, it’s hard to find enough to lift myself out of bed every morning.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
I played Let it Be, Love Call Me Home, The Rose, If We Only Had Love, and How Can I Keep from Singing.
And I sang along.
I’ve been struggling with vocal issues during the past couple of years, which has made singing difficult. But I’m now taking voice lessons and it has been thrilling to start recovering my singing voice. When I can sing without losing my breath or croaking into raspy-ness, I feel giddy with power.
And these things feel like what I need right now–giddiness, and, at least, a flicker of power.
In the writing world we talk a lot about finding or accessing one’s own writing voice. It can often take months or years before we find our “groove,” a way of expression that feels uniquely our own.
And in writing, our voice can change over the years as we experiment with new and different approaches. As in singing, we might at times lose our voice (writers’ block) for a while before we find it again.
Let’s trust that even in this very difficult and scary time we will find our voices and use them to speak our truths.
And let’s keep holding onto the vision of Imagine.
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Today (Election Day) is going to be a hard day for many of us. And it’s likely we won’t know the outcome tonight–or what the aftermath will bring if the election is contested and violence erupts. It’s pretty f-ing scary.
Some people say they’re feeling optimistically nauseous. Others just report feeling nauseous. And again–likely thanks to climate change–it’s going to be unseasonably warm in New England. One of the three maple trees that shares my property is still quite glorious.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
I will lean into the beauty of that tree as a way of reaching toward hope.
According to Rabbi Shai Held from the Hadar Institute, Hope is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism belies the gravity of the moment by painting it over with rosy-ness. Hope, according to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is “a passion for the possible.” Philosopher Terry Eagleton in his book, Hope Without Optimism defines hope as, “a movement toward the good, not simply a craving for it.”
In other words, Rabbi Held argues, “hope involves commitment.”
I’ve already voted, so today I will continue to research phone numbers for voters in Pennsylvania who need to cure faulty ballots. And I’ll also write my daily poem for 30 Poems in November, because art matters. Here is the poem I wrote for 30 Poems in November on Election Day 2020. I think it’s still relevant. Hopefully it will be reassuring. Or inspirational.
ELECTION DAY 2020
D. Dina Friedman
Remember, a strong rain is what we need.
Plant the tulips, the daffodils,
before the ground hardens, and remember
the miracle of mud on your baby fingers,
your great-grandmother, who crossed chopping seas
to avoid the mobs with the knives. Remember,
as you stand outside today holding your sign,
or entering to make your mark in the oval,
you are one of a chain of humans
whose most grievous sin was trying
to make the world better. Remember
the small creatures taking refuge
under the lawn, and the children ripped
from their parents’ arms at the border.
Reach for them. Remember waves
are part of the ocean and you are water.
Swim. Let it hold you from the outside and in.
Drink a river of water today. Hold the flow
in your trembling belly and remember the moon
and your magic. How you were born
to hold the world like a large water-filled bowl.
Ask a loved one to touch your cheek
just above where the mask ends, and tell you
the morning sun will rise out of the desert,
the wind will blow away the dust.
And here’s another poem that burrowed deep into my heart: Accepting Heaven at Great Basin by Nathalie Handel. I’ve found it so helpful in getting through the past few days. Hopefully you will, too.
I may also go to the garden center and buy some bulbs to plant. And knowing that my candidate smiles more than the other one, I’m wearing this shirt today for luck. And trying, myself, to keep smiling.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
In 2014, I visited the Galilee, and stayed with one of three Jewish families in the Druze village of Peki’in. They were an older couple, Holocaust survivors from the Netherlands, and they lived right next door to the carob tree that Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, author of the Jewish mystical book, the Kabbalah, supposedly subsisted on for 13 years when he fled the Romans and had to hide out in a cave.
In addition to visiting the tree, we visited a “national park” nearby, which was mostly filled with scrubby desert flora. But in the middle of the area sat an old stone church, and in front of the church sat an old man wearing a keffiyeh. Our host asked the man why he was there and the man told us his story. He had been 11 years old in 1948 when the Israeli soldiers came into his village. They told his mother she had to leave–for just a couple of weeks, they said. They needed to do some work and then it would be fine to return. They could leave most of their things–no need to take the donkey.
When they returned, the entire village had been razed. Only the church was left standing. Later the government turned the area into a national park, ironically charging admission for this man to enter his own village, where he sat day after day on a one-person vigil to commemorate what had happened to his home.
Later that night, our host told his story. He’d been a “hidden child,” sheltered by a Christian family during the war. But the trauma of being left by his parents (who ended up killed in the death camps) had never fully subsided.
Last night I went to hear a reading and talk from the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who, in response to a question about the value of writing poems at times of such death and devastation, said that as poets we need to hang on to the stories–and we have a responsibility to tell them.
Mosab Abu Toha’s work does just that. He portrays Gaza through the lens of the people that live there. I think this is one of the reasons that poet Audre Lorde said, Poetry is not a luxury; it’s a necessity, the quote that begins Abu Toha’s new book, Forest of Noise.
When I went to the border in early 2020, I heard many stories from people that kept me awake at night, and kept me crying for days and weeks after I returned. I wrote poems about some of these stories; and I also wrote poems about the man in front of the Church in the Galilee and our Holocaust survivor host in Peki’in. But I continue to worry that capturing these stories in poems is not enough. For weeks, months, and even now, all of us on the border trip have continued to feel the weight of these stories. How can we keep ourselves healthy and lean into joy without discounting or ignoring the moral imperative for action that these stories should lead us to?
And how do we untangle the knots when stories contradict each other? How can we move into a space that rejects the idea of right and wrong, a space that has no sides?
My friend and compañera on the border trip carried this sign everywhere she went.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
May it be so. B’aruch Ha’Shem. Inshallah.
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Once again, I’ve signed up to write 30 Poems in November to benefit the Center for New Americans, which provides English classes and many other types of advocacy for immigrants here in western Mass. And once again, as October draws to a close, I’m feeling that trepidation of adding one more item to my to-do list, wondering how I’m ever going to churn out 30 poems in a month–even poems that are unfinished and far less than stellar.
It hasn’t helped that my writing life has slowed to a crawl. Paperwork related to my father-in-law’s death, last minute election volunteering, putting the garden to bed, health issues with relatives, the Jewish holidays, my grandchild’s birthday, editing deadlines, and a flurry of visits with friends and family have made it hard to get to my desk as often and regularly as I’d like. Even this blog post–which I usually aim for mid-week–is late. (I just got a warning post from SubStack, letting me know that I had only two more days to fulfill my pledge of blogging weekly, LOL!)
But one of the things I love about writing 30 Poems in November is that permission to slow down. To make writing practice front and center again.
I find I’m most successful at birthing poems when I can be out of my to-do list and into what I think of as the fuzzier part of my brain. Then, I just let the pen flow and the words come–sometimes easily, and sometimes with a bit of effort, but the trick, for me, is not to try too hard to construct *a poem* as much as let myself sense what I’m sensing and free associate from there. And from that pile of words, I can often sift through and find the gems, threading my path forward.
The hardest part is to let the chaff fall away–the distractions, the judgment– and let myself fall into the “wow” of whatever is underneath all that detritus.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
And lately, when I need lessons in falling into the sensual wonder of discovery, I get them from my two-year-old grandchild Manu. Recently, he’s been entranced with the abundant display of Halloween decorations in his neighborhood: the furry spiders perched on the hedges, the life-sized dragon with the blinking red eyes, the pumpkin faces, the creepy hands sticking out of the ground, the lanterns hanging from the trees.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
Every day, he asks to see the dragon and the spiders. He takes his time, exclaiming, Oh, there’s another spider! before rushing over to investigate and dig his little hands into the fur.
After the “spider house,” we go next door to the Japanese rock garden, where he watches the brightly colored fish, and rains handfuls of small, cool rocks, listening to the pleasing sound they make when they hit the ground.
Poems are everywhere. Hopefully, some will come to me this November.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
And yes, please consider contributing to my fundraising page for this worthy cause. No donation is too small! Many thanks. Happy Halloween and Happy November!
Despite the occasional seduction of signs advertising $5 palm readings, I’ve always been afraid of fortune tellers.
Gunnshots (Don), CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
If there’s going to be bad news, I don’t want to hear it. Just as I don’t want to read disturbing news stories with clickbait headlines. Heck, I don’t even want to watch my teams lose at sporting events. Last week, I walked away from the Mets/Phillies game when the Phillies threatened the Mets’ slim lead in the 9th inning. If it was going to be bad, I didn’t want to watch.
So, I totally understand my father when he says he doesn’t want more medical testing to explore what might be causing his occasional bouts of delirium and physical instability.
Because he’d rather spend what remains of his life in ignorant bliss. He’s 93. He’s had a good life. He doesn’t want his remaining time to be consumed with thinking there may be something wrong with him.
And for the moment, the delirium has subsided. He’s feeling ok, happy to do his puzzles and watch the Mets and Yankees in the playoffs.
As I’ve continued my fledgling practice of mindfulness meditation, I’ve seen a lot of my stress ebb away as long as I can eschew the nagging of my to-do list and keep myself in the present moment. There are some definite perks in stepping off the worry treadmill and refraining from obsessing over the great unknown. Even if there’s an aspect of “flying by the seat of my pants,” when situations encroach that demand my attention, I’m convinced I make my best decisions in the reality of the present rather than to adapt to a foggy future.
And–at least for me–I feel the same way about trying to plot the trajectory of a novel (or even a short-story). I could probably save myself a lot of time if I had a better idea of where I was going when I sit down in front of the blank page or the blank screen, but the reality is I have no idea what my characters are going to do until they’re faced with the situation. Sometimes they make the “wrong” decisions and the story goes nowhere. And–unlike most of life–I get to backtrack and revise. But if I try to gauge the ending of a story before paying close and careful attention to the beginning and the middle, I end up with flat and predictable characters and outcomes, instead of carefully nuanced and surprising twists.
This is not to diss outlines for those people who find them useful. But I would caution people not to be too attached to their initial ideas. Give your characters free agency and they will surprise you. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.” Tomorrow never knows.
Tony Barnard, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
So, I’ll keep trying to cherish the present–and savor the discrete precious moments of the last few days in New York watching baseball games with my parents, even as they might nod off into dreamland, and even if–unlike me–they’re resilient enough to watch when their teams are losing.
For the past five years, I’ve done a self-reflective practice during the month of Elul, the 29 days preceding the Jewish New Year (which we celebrated on October 2-4 this year) where I focus intensely on my aspirations for the coming year, as well as my current short-comings, places where I’ve “missed the mark” in who I want to be as a person. During that month, I try to journal more than I usually do, often in response to inspirational readings and self-reflective questions I find on on-line, or books written by spiritual leaders in various traditions.
Cathryn Lavery cathrynlavery, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
What comes through loud and clear, no matter how much (or how little) I journal, or what I choose to read, is that forgiveness—especially self-forgiveness–lies at the heart of personal growth. Even when I may be regretting something I’ve done that may have hurt someone else, and feel compelled to ask their forgiveness, I find that I can’t let the incident go until I’ve forgiven myself.
Forgiveness is a hallmark of many faith traditions, but even those of us who don’t follow a strict religious path (and I include myself in that category as a mostly secular Jew), can incorporate it into our personal growth plan. In fact, forgiveness can be kryptonite to the nudgy inner judge. What would our lives be like if every time that nasty voice reared its ugly head with some critical, self-deprecating comment, you simply answered by smiling and saying, yes, but I’ve forgiven myself for this.
The flip side of forgiveness is aspirations. When I went through old papers a few weeks ago, in attempt to create a more sacred space (while practicing forgiving myself for my messiness!) I was touched to find a journal entry from the past secular New Year in January. I wrote:
I was (am) a writer who is setting even deeper roots in a community of writers. The past year brought out that it is ok to be successful. That I have a voice that matters. That others have a voice that matters. That it’s important to me to nurture other people’s voices as well as my own. I value community. I stand for expression and an artistic standard that I would like to encourage others to reach for, and what I would like to keep improving in myself. I want to communicate what deeply matters—to humans, and to the world. My writing is now central to my life. It is what I am.
I followed this with a list of wishes. Some were pie-in-the-sky, like getting a story from Immigrants optioned into a movie. Others were possible, but not likely to happen, such as getting an agent who believed in me and my work and saw it as more than a commodity. But what stood out was this:
My biggest hope was to be taken seriously by everyone as a real writer whose craft is at standard and whose art and messages matter. I would like to be seen by others as a person of integrity and depth whose words and perspectives matter.
This is my New Year’s wish for all of you–in whatever you do. May your words, images, music, movement, actions, thoughts and perspectives matter.
Shanah Tovah!
Williamsburg Postcard Company, New York, 1920
A few weeks ago, after the presidential debate, I was inspired to write about the topic of lying. And last night, I couldn’t help but thinking about the slickness with which Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance shamelessly delivered lie after lie after lie, complaining when corrected by moderators, that “they weren’t supposed to fact-check.”
And if you didn’t have the facts, it would be totally easy to be lured into Vance’s narrative, due to his polished, smooth delivery. He delivered his untruths so confidently, it left me wondering whether Vance believed his own narrative.
And this, I think, is a good lesson for fiction writers–even if the “lies” (which I’d prefer to call “stories” in this context are not intended to do harm or be taken as factual. Writer John Gardener in The Art of Fiction writes about the importance of creating “a continuous unbroken dream” where the reader is totally ensconced in whatever reality the writer has created–kind of like a virtual reality experience that’s dependent on words, rather than 3-D classes.
And to do that, you as a writer need–to some extent–to believe in your own narrative, to present it with complete and unshakable confidence.
How do we do that? Here are a couple of things to think about.
DETAILS: In an episode of Young Sheldon, Georgie tells his out-of-sync genius younger brother that lying well involves details. You’ve got to add enough heft to make the story stand on its own. Take a random subject-verb-object sentence (i.e. The spider crawled on the corn) and let us see, hear, taste, touch and smell the action as you relay it. Note: This involves more than adding adjectives, too many of which can easily weigh a sentence down. It can often involve just adding a couple of well-chosen words, or adding another sentence or two before or after to increase the stakes and add more context.
APPEAL TO EMOTION: Many of Vance’s falsehoods last night were clearly designed to arouse anger. And while in this context, this was a manipulative attempt to sway people’s votes, for our fiction to be successful, we often need people to engage emotionally by empathizing with our characters and the situations they are facing. This means we need to work hard to create believable and fully developed characters who are sympathetic and realistic, despite whatever flaws they might have.
KNOW WHERE YOUR PLOT IS GOING: I laughed as I typed these words because I’m often not sure where my plot is going until my second or third draft. But once I do know, I cut out the tangents that weigh my stories down. Last night I was both amazed and horrified about how Vance made Kamala Harris, or immigrants, or both, the villains in nearly every lie he told–a move that was clearly plotted in advance.
When I’m in my writing groove, I believe in my own narratives, even as I know they have no factual foundation, and even as, like many politicians, I might flip-flop on the details of their creation. But whatever changes my characters go through can be attributed to my getting to know them better, or their choosing to reveal more of themselves to me. Ultimately, the details, the characters, the plot are all there as props for me to reveal my truth–or my lie, if I choose. But in this context, I always choose my truth.
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When I was a child in New York City, I was one of the few kids who wasn’t an immigrant or a child of immigrants. I remember being awed when I’d visit my friends in their homes and listen to them speaking animatedly in another language–Spanish, or Chinese, or Greek–before switching back to me and talking in just as fluent English. I felt envious and ripped off that my family couldn’t speak any other languages.
In elementary school, nearly every year our teacher would give us a homework assignment to describe the country we, or our parents, or grandparents had come from, and then present that to the class so everyone could learn about it. “You come from many different countries,” my parents would tell me, as they ticked off the different areas on the map that my great grandparents (and sometimes great-great grandparents) had lived before sailing to Ellis Island: Lithuania, Germany, Holland, Russia, the Ukraine, Poland…
This was an odd assignment for me because I felt no connection to any of these places. We had no legacy of language. My parents didn’t know Yiddish. Even my grandparents–all of whom were born here–knew very little. I felt so American, so boring, and sad that I had absolutely nothing for “Show and Tell”
But the point isn’t to complain about my experience as much to reflect back on an instance when being an immigrant was celebrated. And I did not go to a “lefty commie school.” This was a regular public school in New York City where we pledged allegiance to the flag every morning, and learned about how “great” America was. And part of what made it “great,” we learned, was immigrants. New York was a “melting pot.”
I currently prefer the term salad bowl, a metaphor that allows us to acknowledge everyone’s individual culture rather than envisioning us all melting into some unidentifiable assimilated conglomeration. However, neither image does the kind of harm as the recent outrageous lies about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the overall vilification of immigrants put out by MAGA Republicans–who are calling for a large-scale deportation of not only undocumented residents, but also those who have obtained a legal path to be in this country.
Had this been carried out when I was a kid, it would have included nearly everyone in my class.
When I wrote my collection of short stories, I wanted to emphasize how immigrants are everywhere, just as they were everywhere in my childhood. Some of my stories are overtly political, drawing on my experiences as an activist, but most of them aren’t. They’re simply tapestries woven with real people–some of whom simply weren’t born in the U.S. I write about humans in situations with issues. That’s what’s always grabbed me in fiction–the ways we struggle to love the world, each other, and ourselves.
So I guess that’s my “show-and-tell”–only 50 years late. Hoping we can get a little of that immigrant love back. All of us belong in the salad.