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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I’ve noticed over the years that I get far more likes on social media for my personal posts than my political posts. Especially if the personal post is a happy one. It makes sense. On the whole, people would rather read something uplifting, poignant, or inspirational than the gloom and doom embedded in political messages, even when they convey what I think is important information or ask people to engage in a quick, painless action.
Because of this observation, I’ve generally been judicious about posting political content, even in these trying times. But lately I haven’t been able to help myself when nearly every day I come across another story of someone being wrongfully taken by ICE and sent to prison: sometimes here in the U.S. (although often thousands of miles away from their families), and sometimes to El Salvador, where the U.S. no longer has jurisdiction over their cases and torture and abuse are even more rampant.
In many of these cases, the people taken have no criminal record. In fact, they often have legal status: a green card, a visa, an asylum case pending. In nearly all of the El Salvador deportations, the people detained have been denied the opportunity to speak to an attorney or argue the charges against them in court. Instead they are quickly loaded, shackled onto a plane simply because someone has accused them (often based on a tattoo or hearsay evidence) of being a member of a gang.
In many cases, when ICE cannot find the person they are looking for, they make collateral arrests of whoever happens to be nearby. Sometimes these people are U.S. citizens, who are eventually released, but not until they’ve dealt with the trauma of spending several nights in jail. And those who aren’t citizens–hard-working people with no criminal record–enter the detention/deportation system, even if they have parole or asylum claims pending.
Even tourists have been arrested, strip-searched and sent to jail for visa mix-ups or under suspicion of plans to work illegally.
During this administration’s first term, when I wrote the stories in my collection Immigrants, I tried to envision the impact of DT’s policies on real people. While there were love stories that ended with deportation, a woman facing a dilemma of whether or not to bail out her housekeeper’s brother, and a mother in a squalid border encampment who sent her daughter over the bridge to the U.S. alone, there was a still a softness to the stories. I did not talk about the torture and abuse inherent in detention facilities. I balanced these stories with others where immigrants played a positive and vital role in people’s everyday lives. And I took the stance that these people were victims in a system that had gone out of control due to misguided information and decision-making.
But in current times, these people are no longer victims; they’re prey. Deliberately hunted. Shredded. Devoured. And they don’t just include people who entered the U.S. without documentation. They’re people with legal status who are being imprisoned for writing op-eds or social media posts against the government’s point of view, or for organizing peaceful protests. Or they’re people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don’t feel like I can write any stories about immigrants any more because the true stories are too hard to read. And to write anything that waters down the truth is mitigating the effects of what is happening.
Yet, I know that as a writer, I have a responsibility to speak out.
So, on my Facebook feed, I’m posting these stories as I come across them. Most are from Witness at the Border, a group I worked with when I went to the children’s detention center in Homestead Florida in 2019 and the Brownsville/Matamoros border in 2020. You can read quick summaries of some of these cases in this Axios article, but it’s the power of detail in the actual stories that really strikes a chord. In my fiction collection, one of my goals was to change people’s hearts and minds by inviting them to really know the characters I wrote about. The stories profiled by Witness at the Border do just that. I’m hoping we can get past the sadness and disempowerment and channel the power of these stories as inspiration to take whatever actions we can to make this stop.
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One of the parts of the Passover seder I resonate with most is the story of Nachsun. Nachsun was at the head of 600,000 Israelites running away from Pharaoh’s army when he came to the frothy waters of the Red Sea–the end of the road marked by angry waves and deep water stretching all the way out to the horizon.
But, rather than succumb and turn back to the horrors of slavery, Nachsun plunged into the water. And it was only after this courageous act that God told Moses to lift his staff and part the waters, enabling the rest of the Israelites to cross over on the dry path.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/st-stev/2432121049
According to some Biblical scholars, “Nachsun’s name has become synonymous with courage and the will to do the right thing,” even when it’s f*ing scary.
So, I’ve been thinking about Nachsun as I read as much as my stomach and soul will let me: ICE smashing car windows to make arrests, taking random people who have legal status when they can’t find the ones they were looking for, arresting a man at his citizenship appointment, and grabbing an international student off the streets for having views that differ with the government, and defying Supreme Court orders and refusing to return a man who was sent to a prison in El Salvador by error. In fact, there has been no due process for anyone sent to prison in El Salvador, and now the government is threatening to send U.S. citizens there, as well.
These are only a few of the incidents. There are more people effected, and more stories. What I learned from visiting the border in 2020 is that everyone had a personal story that made me cry and tug at my hair and fall into an awe-struck paralysis where there just were no words to fathom the cruelty of human beings.
But the people I met in 2020 were fleeing cruelty in their countries of origin. Here in 2025, they–and we–are facing an equal if not greater cruelty from our country, our fellow Americans, people that we (collectively) elected, whose lawlessness we continue to enable each day with our fear and our silence, whether or not we voted for them.
So, I’m pondering… how can we… how can I… be like Nachsun and jump into the water. Even if it’s cold and rough. Even if my swimming ability is shaky.
How can I keep my head above the rough waters and shout, NOT IN MY NAME!
Not in my name as an American, and not in my name as a Jew who rejects the contorted use of antisemitism as an excuse for this barbaric behavior and understands that the definition of a concentration camp, “a guarded compound for the mass detention without hearings or the imprisonment without trial of civilians, refugees, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc.” fits this situation far too well.
In the Passover liturgy, the word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, refers to “The Narrow Place,” and some of the observance consists of reflecting on how each of us as individuals can get past the obstacles that constrict us and emerge into a wider and more abundant state of being.
I’m thinking we need to do this as a country, maybe even as a species.
How can we stop being cruel? How can we jump into the water and believe that some hidden internal goodness–divinely inspired or otherwise–will save us?
On the pre-visit questionnaire for a recent medical appointment, I once again came face-to-face with the familiar anxiety screening questions:
–Are you feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge?
–Are you worrying too much about different things?
–Are you feeling like you can’t stop or control your worrying?
–Are you feeling afraid, as if something awful might happen?
Though I dutifully clicked the “no” box for each of these questions, I wanted to add in a “but” and a nervous giggle. I knew I didn’t have what they were looking for in terms of clinical anxiety, but how could I not feel anxious, depressed and on edge every time I scroll social media, hear a blip on NPR, or open my email?
Vincent Le Moign, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
How could I not be worried?
And what weighs on me more: how do I balance my mental health by controlling worry, with the stories of people being literally kidnapped and sent to CECOT, a torturous prison in El Salvador. (Despite the media hype and MAGA speech about gang affiliations, 75% of the people in CECOT have no criminal history!)
How can I not worry when students are arrested, detained, and threatened with deportation for peaceful protesting, when visas of international students are revoked for no apparent cause, when long-time foreign residents are suddenly kicked out of the country?
How can I not worry when due process has been suspended and court orders are being ignored? And when collateral arrests in ICE raids include U.S. citizens with no rectification or apology?
How can I just let these stories slide off me like a momentary annoying wave that rolls out to sea as I continue with my life? And what’s happening to immigrants is only one of many disturbing developments since the new administration took office. How can I not worry about the BIPOC and LGBTQ communities? About women? About children in poverty?
Like many American Jews who came of age in the 60s and 70s, I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Even though my family wasn’t directly impacted, the stories were told: The Germans watched as the Jews were rounded up… marched off…
Of course there were many good people in Nazi Germany who risked their lives trying to help those who were targeted. And I don’t believe the rest were all bad people. I’m sure there were some who naively believed the lies being told. And there were probably others who were told not to worry. Take care of yourself. As we’re being told every day. Even by our colleagues in the activist world.
I know I do need to take care of myself–and that spending more time worrying is not going to help. But the same perfectionist tendency that tries to rule my artistic life has been clawing at my activist self. If I’m not doing everything I could possibly do at this moment as perfectly as possible, than I’m likely not doing enough, it tells me. So the conundrum is figuring out ways to do even more than I’m doing and to be as effective as possible, without succumbing to the paralyzing guilt of perfectionist demands that minimizes the impact of my actions and just leads to more worrying.
As much as I like this video, the Bobby McFerrin song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” doesn’t seem to apply right now. I need to worry AND I need be happy, but not so worried or so happy that I don’t take every opportunity I can to act.
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Despite coming down with COVID a few days afterwards, my time at AWP, the big writing conference put on every year by Associated Writing Programs, greatly surpassed my expectations. This was huge, because my introvert interior had been raising a fair amount of ruckus trying to convince me not to go.
How did I get beyond my general dislike of intensive networking and chatting up strangers and vague acquaintances? I think Julie Andrews said it best–Confidence. (My 2 &1/2-year-old grandchild is obsessed with Do-Re-Mi, so I’ve been watching a lot of Julie Andrews, lately.)
I only went to AWP once before, ten years ago, when I was a student in an MFA program and at a low point in my writing life. As an older student who wasn’t into going out drinking every night after residency activities, I didn’t establish the strong connections that many of my classmates had. And I’d already achieved the goal held by so many–of publishing a novel (two, actually) with major publishers. The problem was I couldn’t seem to publish anything else because my books hadn’t met company sales expectations, even though both won awards and one went into six printings.
So I’d been floundering for a few years before I decided to take the plunge into an MFA program. Even then, the decision spurred more from the love of learning than with strong expectations of getting my writing life back on track. I certainly learned a bunch, but while the approach to learning writing through close analytical study and imitation of “successful” writers helped me polish many elements of craft, I felt like I was losing the connection to my own voice that I’d honed over the years with a more generative and positively focused approach.
And as my voice floundered and rejections continued to pour in, I lost my confidence.
What I remember about being at that AWP ten years ago was feeling that I didn’t belong. The journals and presses there were part of the MFA world, a world in which I didn’t feel included. So I didn’t talk to many of the people behind the tables. I walked the floor silently, feeling maybe a bit too sorry for myself. But when someone’s in the thick of writer depression, it’s hard to claw your way out.
So, what changed?
(1) Community: While I didn’t find a strong community in the MFA program, I did realize how important community was. It again took some arm-wrestling with the introvert, but shortly after I graduated, I started expanding my writing community. Forcing myself to go to a monthly reading put on by a local writers association led to an invitation to join a poetry critique group, which brought me a whole new circle of dear and trusted friends. And when the pandemic hit, joining on-line generative writing communities anchored near and far helped address the profound isolation of that time, even if it seemed strange to feel so connected to people I’d only seen in a box on my computer screen.
And one thrill from this past AWP was to meet two of these people for the first time: Sage and Carla in real life.
(2) Persistence: Somehow I got back in the submission saddle. Big time. With a goal of getting 100 rejections every year. And with these rejections came acceptances. And many of the journals who accepted my work were at this year’s AWP. So I could go up to them and say, “Hi, you published a poem of mine in your journal. Thank you!” Hint: if you do this, it helps to have the name of the poem and the year it was published. And then, take a picture, as I did with Brian, who published my poem Horses in the Gully in his first edition of Tofu Ink, and bought my poetry book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling.
In fact, it was my poetry book’s publisher Querencia’s participation at AWP that provided the final reason to draw me there, and I loved being part of an offsite reading they organized with Alternative Milk, fifth wheel press and many worl(d)s.place. But having community and a publishing track record kept my sulky introvert at bay as I walked the tables of the trade show floor. This time, I browsed journals and small press titles, asking editors what kinds of work they were looking for. My conversations affirmed that these editors were real people, with their own tastes, judgments, prejudices that were no more or less valid than mine. And while I didn’t do a Julie Andrews hop-skip or wave a guitar around, I felt confidence–not that I would necessarily be published by these journals, but that my work was valid and belonged in their reading queue. And more importantly, that I belonged.
Greetings from La-La Land! While the journey is just beginning, I figure I’ll be too busy to blog once the AWP conference gets in full swing tomorrow and I’m running around, oscillating between trying to learn some stuff, hear some inspiring writing, and chatting up the multitudes in a vague pretense of being an extrovert. The jury’s out on how long it will take before I pack up and head for some peace and quiet in the Emily Dickinson Room. Even today, I’ve got a meeting with my fiction editor coming up soon and an off-site reading I’m participating tonight co-organized by the editor of my poetry press, whom I’m also looking forward to meeting (7 pm at the Lilly Rose in case anyone’s in town). But in the meantime I’m enjoying some down time at the LA Central Library–a good tip on where to go from my cousin Steve, whom I just met for the first time this morning.
Cousin Steve
Steve is from the side of my family I barely knew, but heavily mythologized: the seven siblings of my grandmother’s generation (also known as the Glicksteins) who hosted musical concerts every Sunday in their small Newark apartment in the early 20th century: Dave on trumpet and Max on violin joined their father Abe in klezmer trios, which they also offered throughout the area for weddings and bar mitzvahs. Jeanne and Leona played the piano, Myra sang, and the two little ones, Sylvia and Harvey, banged their cymbals together when their father gave the count.
Dave Glickstein
Steve is the grandson of Dave, who played both trumpet and piano. At 12, Dave developed a performance shtick of playing both instruments at the same time. In his 80s, beset by deep dementia, he wasn’t sure who anyone was, but he could still sit down and play the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto flawlessly and beautifully from memory. My grandmother, Jeanne, played and taught piano and recorder, and ran music camps for children and adults. She never achieved the accolades of her brothers Dave and Max, who both played for professional orchestras, but like them, she was determined to bring the joy of music to those who sought it.
Two pianists: Grandma Jeanne with my daughter Alana when she was baby.
Not surprisingly, Steve is also a musician, despite many of this older generation’s warning to those that followed to give up on music and choose a career that was more dependable. And whether or not we’ve followed the advice in choosing our livelihoods, it’s rare to find a Glickstein cousin who doesn’t play something, even if only for the joy of it.
So, I’m thinking about this today while in LA, a place that so many people go to in pursuit of a dream. I’m way too realistic to think a chance meeting at the AWP will spark any of my unfulfilled dreams, no matter how far I can turn the extrovert faucet. But it’s still important to pursue what you love, to realize your art matters, that the process of making it makes you a better person, and hopefully touches at least some of those who are exposed to it.
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Yesterday, for the first time since my father died, I dived back into my writing.
Actually, it was my poetry critique group on Monday that started the waters churning. I had to come up with a poem, so I started looking through some old ones, and found one that reflected the grief I was feeling, even though I’d written the poem several months ago–after the election, but way before my father took a turn for the worse. Yet, the grief in the poem was so raw, my poetry group was surprised that it wasn’t a new poem. I guess grief has been in the air for a while, as the foundations of the country continue to rumble.
To tell the truth, I’d forgotten I’d even written this poem. I was simply pawing through my files of dribs and drabs, musings and snippets, trying to come up with something that felt like it had potential and held my interest enough to talk about. I got some good feedback–enough to bring the poem up a level or two. But more importantly, I got tacit permission to spend yesterday meandering through my piles of words, reordering, adding on, sloughing off, sewing together a few more poems for the “Send Out” file, piling up others to kiss goodbye before relegating them to the file marked “Inactive.” and leaving the vast majority in the file marked, “Poems to Work On,” but with the magical expectation that at least some of the changes I made might nudge them closer to send-out status soon.
Poet Molly Peacock, in a biography of Mary Delany, who invented the art of mixed-media collage in the 1700s, wrote, “Having a collection, taking it out, looking at it, reordering it, and putting it away is creative in itself. It doesn’t yield a product, like the results of an art, but stops time, as making art does.”
My style of writing poetry is somewhat like collage. I often seek to combine disparate images and make them add up to a whole. But more importantly, yesterday morning, for a few hours I stopped time as I took a few small steps away from my personal grief and the grief I’m feeling for our nation. Did I create art? That remains to be seen. Was the grief still there when I stepped back in? Absolutely, but I’m beginning to clear away the fallen branches and tangled vines and find a small path forward.
After my little writing vacation, I turned to some activism tasks I also hadn’t been able to do in the past few weeks: drafted a letter to the editor from our immigration justice group and wrote two call-to-action entries for Rogan’s List. It’s still hard not to get paralyzed by the enormity of it all, but taking time to put words together in a hopefully coherent manner made me feel empowered, rather than disheartened.
This morning, I’ve taken another step in returning to normalcy, writing with some of my favorite pals in the Forbes Library Zoom Group, where my friend and colleague, Tzivia Gover, with whom I’ve co-blogged a few times, introduced the quote above. Tzivia sent me this beautiful sympathy card featuring one of Mrs. Delany’s collages. I’m looking forward to reading The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72.
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My father lived by his routines. Breakfast was a daily ritual of muesli, blueberries, dates, and apples–eaten dry, since he didn’t like milk or yogurt, accompanied by glass of orange juice, and followed by a cup of green tea with several slices of lemon, steeped for exactly two minutes. The day would unfold with the New York Times, which he read in his chair, often nodding off between stories, and later–as his illness worsened–between sentences. Later: lunch (a can of soup), a Ken-Ken puzzle, a walk, snack-time (two cookies and an orange), and dinner. In the evenings he’d look up what had happened on that calendar day in various other years from the short daily summaries he’d been keeping for decades and read the highlights to my mother, until Alexa reminded him at exactly 10:30 pm that it was time to empty the dishwasher–a task that was followed by the 11 o’clock news and some novel reading before winding down into bed.
Even in his healthier years, routines kept him going. After retirement, he’d go for a mile-and-a-half walk around the neighborhood every day, a distance that decreased as he grew older, but still kept him healthy and vibrant. And before he developed “trigger finger,” he also made sure to practice violin each afternoon, not because he had any expectation of getting good at it–simply because he enjoyed the process.
During these early days of mourning him, I’ve been thinking about the role of routines in my life–both in keeping me going through these sad, hard times, and also how they’ve served me in my creative life. When I’ve given readings or book talks people often ask me what my writing routines are like, as if I’m aware of some kind of magic formula that can propel them into the world of words. Sorry, folks! If I had one, I’d be happy to share it. I will say that sometimes my attempts at routine trick me into sitting down at my computer at the prescribed time. For me, that’s generally after a short breath-work practice, a cardio or yoga video, and breakfast. (Like my dad I’m a cereal and fruit person, but my go-to is my homemade granola with yogurt and frozen or fresh berries from our yard, depending on the season.) However, getting the words to come out when I’m sitting at the computer seems to be a totally different process. Sometimes words flow easily and I’m in the groove. Often, I’m stuck. And when I’m stuck for too many days in a row, the routine starts to feel stale and boring.
What then? Sometimes it helps me to deliberately not follow the routine for a day or two. Instead of getting to my writing after breakfast, I’ll tackle an administrative task that I’d usually save for later in the day, or make a date with a friend, or go for walk–another routine I usually save for the afternoon. In the summer, I go to the garden, where my best ideas come from weeding.
Sometimes, this process of switching up a routine, which ultimately involves letting go of expectation that I’m going to “produce” anything, can be intensely freeing. But other times, like the present, where I’m still floundering in a foggy and disoriented state of grief and sadness, just makes me feel more adrift. So this is why I’m clinging to routines, sitting down at my computer on Wednesday morning, because Wednesday morning is usually my blogging day, and I’m too much of a school girl to want to break my Substack streak of blogging 49 weeks in a row. And knowing that breath-work and exercise are the first things I’m going to do gives me a reason to get up in the morning. And even as I’ve given myself far more permission to do nothing than I usually would, I’m grateful for my evening routines of Duolingo (another streak I don’t want to break), and voice and piano practice, which, when I abandon judgment, makes me feel transported into a place where I can feel my emotions without having to find words for them.
So, I’m grateful for routines, but also glad, that unlike my father, I’m more comfortable flitting in and out of them as needed. And once my latest batch of homemade granola is depleted, I’ll enjoy switching my breakfast routine to the several boxes of unopened muesli I brought home from New York, so I can keep remembering my father, whether or not I make it to the computer right afterwards.
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My father died a week ago, in the early hours of Saturday morning March 1, 2025–in his sleep, in his own bed, at the age of 93 with his wife of 72 years sleeping by his side. While he’d been failing in recent weeks and on hospice, the quickness still came as a surprise, but I’m enormously grateful his death was peaceful and pain-free.
Last week, I wrote about being in a still space, unable to grasp the words that captured the profound sadness I was feeling about my father’s imminent death. While I remain in that foggy place, punctuated by a few rushes of angry winds and smatterings of quiet rainy weeping, I’ve managed to unearth a few more words about my father and his impact on my life.
As a child, my father played stickball on the streets of the Bronx. He was “the extra man,” which meant that when the other players were chosen, the team captains would once-twice-three shoot for the extra man. And then, whoever won would say to the captain, That’s okay. You can have him. Then they’d send him off to right field, which he had to share with Harry Jupiter. My brothers were lucky to inherit my mother’s athletic ability, but I spent my childhood being picked last on every time in school and day camp, and when I stood at the volleyball net, the team captain made sure to tell me not to even try to hit the ball if it came toward me. Someone else would cover. When I complained to my parents about this shame and humiliation, my father would once again tell me, what I came to think of as the “Harry Jupiter story.” (Underlying message: it’s your genetic fate; there’s nothing you can do about it).
But while I’ve often lamented inheriting my father’s unathletic genes, since his death, I began to wonder if being out there in right field, where there wasn’t too much going on, or being on the bench while Harry Jupiter took his turn, enhanced one of my favorite qualities about my father–a way of stepping outside the face value of the moment and taking a sidelong, irreverent view of the world, which seemed to be the genesis of the ironic and witty one-liners he was known for. I’ve never been a one-line comic, but like my father, I’ve always been a daydreamer. By example, he taught me that it was perfectly okay to take respite in the fog of my own mind and develop my own ways of expressing whatever I perceived.
My father also modeled another way in to the realm of the imagination, which was through playfulness. When I was a kid, all the inanimate objects in the house had their own personalities. Every day at breakfast, my father would flap the tea kettle’s steamy spigot open and shut, and let it utter its croaky greeting, daily kvetch, or philosophical witticism. And bath time was an adventure with Sammy the Soap and Tommy the Towel, characters that my children and nephews grew to love, and which I’ve tried to resurrect with my grandchild. By example, my father taught me that when playing with characters we could be as ridiculous and uncensored as we wanted to be. And this may have been why it felt so easy and normal to have imaginary friends as a kid, when I didn’t have too many real ones. All this childhood practice also made it easier when I started writing fiction. I could just close my eyes, dive in, and imagine my characters’ voices.
I believe this trait of embracing the unbridled mind, whether through play or daydreams, with a no-holds barred first-draft permission to probe the world of the subconscious without editing or self-censorship, is an absolute necessity to becoming a writer, and far more important than any genetic predisposition or so-called talent. But since I came from a family that emphasized the limitations of my genetic inheritance early on, I’m glad that writing was in our family’s genes. I fell asleep every night to the sound of my father’s manual typewriter clacking away at scripts for the documentaries he wrote and produced for WWOR TV.
In sharing stories with my family this past week, one of the key things that stood out was my father’s humility. My nephew, for example, who knew his grandfather only in his retirement years, was unaware until quite recently that my father had received several Emmy nominations and two awards for his documentary work. My father just wasn’t the type to mention it. Somehow this makes me feel validated for choices I’ve made to focus on my writing, rather than hyping my work, my brand, all that sh*t. Even in blogging, which is about the one marketing-related thing I regularly do, I’ve made the choice to keep it personal and hopefully focused on insights that can help others, as my father did. The people I spoke to this week who worked with him told me he always encouraged their ideas and inspired them to take leadership.
Dad and me at my wedding (Mom in background) October 1983. Photo by Brian Goldman.
So whether it’s genetic or not, thanks, Dad, for showing me the path forward to writing, playing, and dreaming.
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