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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Nicolás Espinosa, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Recently I ran into an old acquaintance I knew through writing many years ago. She told me that she’d submitted a few essays to a few places and when they got rejected she gave up. It’s such a familiar story. I probably hear a similar version of it from someone nearly every month or two. But while I can’t counteract the argument that submitting work is a drain on time that might be more enjoyably spent on other things, I urge folks to expand their view of what it means to be rejected.
This week, I got the following letter from ONLY POEMS, a magazine with a 1.61% acceptance rate.
Thank you so much for trusting us with your wonderful poem. Although we‘re passing on this submission, I wanted to let you know that we received almost 600 poems for the Poem of the Month and your poem was in my Top 30.
I know “Meditating in a Heat Wave” will find a wonderful home soon, and I welcome you to share it when it does. I’d love to see it published, and also consider sharing it on our socials.
I sincerely hope you’ll try us again for our next Poem of the Month call.We will open again with a new themed call feature soon. Keep an eye out for that!
I’d also like to invite you to submit for our Poet of the Week series. We’re also forever open for our new features: short poems, ekphrastic, and poets howl. Learn about them through our Submittable page/website/Substack.
Wow!
Out of 600 poems, mine was in the top 30! That’s pretty darn good. Problem is, for this particular call, they were going to only publish one poem. We need to stop thinking zero-sum game here, and get out of the “sports team metaphor” that if you don’t win the championship, you’ve failed. What’s even more important than my “ranking” is that my work touched these editors to the point of saying that if the poem eventually gets published in another journal, they would consider sharing it on their social media sites, extending legitimacy to my work through their good name, and enhancing its reach through their 37.8K followers on Instagram.
Of course, I’m now psyched to submit to ONLY POEMS again, but whether or not they ever publish my work, I’ll be forever grateful to their generosity in taking the time to write this letter, rebunking the insidious inner critic who lives in all of us and delights in promoting the falsehood that rejection means we are bad writers, bad people, worthless, useless, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So while the submission game may not be for everyone, I’m determined to keep playing it. The odds may be about the same, but it’s a lot cheaper than going to a casino, and the “prizes”–even when they’re rejection letters, are a lot longer lasting than whatever money might come tumbling out of a slot machine.
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Two steps forward, one step back. That’s what this grief journey feels like.
The path is still so foggy, it’s easy to take an unexpected turn and find myself confronting a new thicket of wet foliage: vines to climb over, felled trees. But for days at a time I feel like myself–going about my routines, enjoying the company of family and friends, even plunging into activism and edging my way back to writing, On these days, I’m barely able to access what it feels like to be sad and worried. And then suddenly, it all comes tumbling down again. Sometimes, this is in direct reaction to a news story; other times, even more than dealing with pangs of grief from personal loss, I find myself tuned in to the suffering of so many–both here in the U.S. and abroad in war zones and elsewhere, and feel frustration and despair at being too paralyzed to be able to do anything about it. Too paralyzed, in fact, to be able to do much of anything at all.
As “weapons” (i.e. news stories) keep dropping, I imagine I’m not the only one feeling stunned as I try to claw through the rubble of what’s left and assemble some kind of structure and foundation that will hold up in the ongoing storm–a mindset to hang onto that can keep me going. However, in the past few days, a couple of things stood out that felt like beacons guiding me to a more hopeful space.
We were in New York City and I was walking with my mother to the bank through the neighborhood I grew up in, which has always felt oppressive to me despite its vibrancy. The streets are filthy with litter. Unhoused people sleep by the subway stairs and people merely step over them or walk around them. The housing is blocked from the sidewalk with iron gates, and whatever flowers are blooming are encased in tiny concrete-bordered yards. Yet, my mom, who is 91, has found intimacy and support in the neighborhood’s underpinnings. She stops at the taxi stand on the corner to greet and introduce me to one of the drivers, who knows her by name. Then she greets the mail carrier, expressing delight that he’s recovered from his illness and is back on his regular route. And the bank teller warmly smiles at her in recognition when she enters, making me feel like I’m in a smaller close-knit neighborhood, rather than a large impersonal city.
It’s not clear whether everyone who lives here for a long time has a similar experience, or if these small connections are directly related to the way my mom takes on the world. She has said many times that one of the most important tips for a happy life and marriage is to always be kind. And I have witnessed the benefits of that kindness from the number of people ranging from contractors to close friends who’ve told me they love my mother and would do anything for her.
Truly, that’s a good tip–holding on to kindness and making it front and center as my mom continues to do, even as she struggles with her own grief at losing her life partner after 72 years, a grief that is even heavier and more profound than mine.
We also went to buy flowers for the yard–four generations of us: me, my mom, my daughter and son-in-law, and my 2-year-old grandchild. As we meandered through the aisles of colorful blooms, and then loaded them all into my daughter’s station wagon, I thought, this is what we need to do. Somehow, we need to keep things growing. Even if my mother’s yard is small and gated like all the other yards on the block, there’s hope in those flowers. And kindness in sharing their beauty with the people walking by, both those she knows and those she doesn’t.
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I generally reserve Wednesdays for blogging, because the end of the week is busier, but today, I find myself wondering what to write about.
It’s likely a spread of the “writer’s block” that has permeated most of the rest of my writing life. It’s more like a silty fog than a blockade on the road. I can still delve into old poems/stories and revise them; I just haven’t been able to generate anything new that feels worth keeping.
So instead of writing, I’ve been using the time to pour through my lists of submission opportunities, dragging out poems and stories, reading them through, working on a few and then putting things together in batches to send on Submittable. This is not terrible. I’m still spending time with my words; I’m just not birthing new ones. But I’m missing the thrill of the generative process, saying something that feels important and urgent in the moment–something that matters.
I’m pretty sure the reason I’m feeling blocked is that I just don’t want to access the deep feelings lurking below the surface–my anger, fear and despair at all that’s happening in the world, tinted with the residue of grief from my father’s recent death. It’s not even that I’m feeling a need to write directly about these things, but to write anything of substance still requires a journey outside the carefully constructed contours of my world that I’ve struggled to hold front and center–even as I feel gratitude for having the reassurance of that world: the smiling greenery, the flowering trees, my friends and family, financial and food security.
Today, in writing group, a quote from Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel James, a brilliant and poignant retelling of Huck Finn from the enslaved character Jim’s point of view:
I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.
And I realized that somehow I need to befriend my anger, my sadness, rather than keep it as a barely visible apparition on the other side of the fog. And then, simply brace myself, as the dam erupts, letting the rush of water and words spew forward.
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My two-and-a-half-year-old grandchild, Manu, loves to play songs on the piano, which he does by pressing down on random groups of notes in the song’s rhythm. Often he sings along, eradicating any question I might have about what song he’s playing, Sometimes I sing with him, but mostly, what he wants me to do is listen–and then burst into wild applause as soon as he plays the final note.
But a few weeks ago, suddenly that wasn’t enough. He turned to me and said, “You’re supposed to say, bravo!”
“Bravo!” I willingly added.
“No!” he said. “Bra…Vo” emphasizing each syllable with equal force and leaving a breath of air in between.
“Bra…Vo!”
“No, Braah…..Vo…oh..”
“Braah….Vo..oh.”
We went through this a few times. Apparently I couldn’t say bravo exactly the way his babysitter said it, but after a while he let it go and went on to something else. Thank goodness for two-year-old attention spans.
But I’ve been thinking about the message, regardless of whether I can pronounce the word bravo to Manu’s liking. We could all use more bravo in our lives.
As some readers of this blog know, four and a half years ago I started playing the piano again after pretty much abandoning it for most of my adulthood. This required way more than beefing up my music reading and finger dexterity. It involved delving into and confronting baggage that had plagued me my entire life–my debilitating perfectionism and the resulting shame at not being able to live up to the standards enshrined in our family legacy of professional musicians.
But I slogged through, one note, one phrase, one piece at a time until I eventually got the minimal piano chops I’d had up to snuff. I only played by myself in the living room. I didn’t want a teacher, or even anyone in my family to hear me play. Yet, in the back of my mind, I wondered, was I competent enough to join a chamber group? My kids had loved doing chamber music when they were teenagers and I’d been so envious. It looked like so much fun.
It took a year between the time I first started thinking about it before I called the local community music center and then another six months (until last February) to find a group. I’d like to say that being in this chamber music group was a sublime experience and a dream come true, but it wasn’t. On the other hand, it wasn’t awful, either. On a scale of sweet/sour, it skewed acidic, but the tangy taste was at least somewhat pleasurable. I felt gratified that I could play the music, and even if the coach seemed to give me more direction than she gave others, she always addressed me in a kind and respectful way. The other players all seemed friendly and no one stood out as being way above or below the level of the others–or unable to do what the piece demanded. But I didn’t get much of a sense of who they were as people, which I think lessened our ability to connect musically. And I didn’t particularly feel like we got into the nuances and phrasing of the piece, which made the experience rather boring (though in all fairness, maybe it was enough that we learned how to play together).
For all these reasons, and because I still am highly judgmental when it comes to music (despite how hard I try not to be), I really did not want to play at the end of semester recital. But the other musicians did, and I certainly wasn’t going to sabotage them–even though I told my partner and my daughter very definitively that no, I did NOT want them to come.
So, last Sunday I sucked it up and drove through the foggy, drizzly rain to the performance venue, arriving half an hour early so we could get in one last run through. I noticed that without depending on the coach to tell us what to do that we were able to stop ourselves to talk about problem spots and address them, and this made me feel more connected to the other musicians. And I was pleased that our actual performance of the piece, while not perfect or wonderful or exciting, was better than we usually played it, despite the nerves of having to play in front of an audience.
No one said, bravo, or (bra… vo…) but that’s okay. I can say bravo to myself for my bravery.
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My intent today was to write not about the fog of grief that’s encapsulated me in so many ways over the past two months, but about the process of clawing back my life. Yet, this morning in one of my favorite Zoom writing groups, I think it was one of those spiritually serendipitous accidents that Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, The Art of Losing, was offered as a lead-in to the writing prompt.
Lose something every day, Bishop writes, evoking objects as mundane as door keys and as complex as rivers.
And in her last verse:
We’re in that all-too-short week of spring where everything’s blooming, but nothing’s quite leafed out, and yesterday, on a walk at the Bachelor Brook conservation area, I was wowed by the beauty of the tableau–the young spring green buds draping over the marshy water, the array of skunk cabbage sprouting tall on either side of the boardwalk that seemed to be smiling at us, the way the sun shone on the young saplings, bringing out the silver hues, and overlooking it all, my friends, the beeches–those thick trunked, wise elders.
Photo by Shel Horowitz
Photo by Shel Horowitz
“I love this!” I said to Shel, my partner, grateful for a moment where I could find a sliver of genuine unadulterated happiness! “I love these trees!”
Photo by Shel Horowitz
And then, as if channeling my father’s voice, I added, “Except that one over there…”
It was just the kind of thing he would say. Like, “The food’s good, except for the taste.”
Yet, Bishop insists, in her closing line of every other verse of this villanelle (as required by the form) that the art of losing is not a disaster. Objects, places, people disappear from our lives, and somehow we go on. And while we might be able to replace the set of door keys, all we have left of the places and the people are the memories.
But this is where we can each turn to our own art to process the art of losing–expressing our feelings obliquely or directly through drawing, writing, music, dancing…
And in the process, claw back our lives.
Photo by Shel Horowitz
I say this having not written very much about my father or about anything in the past two months–other than these blog entries, because my schoolgirl self is committed to satisfying the Substack Bot that demands weekly posts. But I have been playing music with a different kind of intentionality, releasing what I can’t yet find words to express.
And I’ve gone back to more of my daily self-care routines of morning exercise and breathing practice, daily woods walking, and nightly music and meditation. It’s amazing how much these ground me and actually make me more productive and focused, despite how much time they take out of my day.
Most importantly, they make me feel normal. And even if in world events, where the second part of my grief lies festering, things are anything but normal right now, I cannot do my small but necessary part in addressing them unless I feel like my settled self.
I certainly haven’t mastered the art of losing, despite Bishop’s claim that it isn’t hard, but I’m slowly finding my way through the fog, with a lot more sun predicted in the upcoming forecast.
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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