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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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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Lately, I haven’t felt like talking very much.
And not talking has translated into not writing. Because writing is like talking–to some specified or unspecified audience out there, or simply to myself.
You can call it writer’s block or mild depression, both of which may be true, but I think it’s different. I feel suspended in “a still space,” a quiet kind of sadness like a sepia filter over a bright picture, muting the light into something eerie and unreachable.
Why am I sad? Why am I stymied? I’m about to lose a parent. And my country is transforming into a place where cruelty and greed are heightened, and glorified violence against those with less privilege due to race, gender, gender identity, economic status, citizenship status, etc. has risen to levels I wouldn’t have thought believable.
But it’s always been this way. I can hear the pundits, the activists, the social media bullhorns saying. The seeds have been sown years ago. Look at our history: enslavement, internment camps, lynchings, family separations, forced relocation of Native Americans, hate crimes against LGBTQ people… just a few of many examples.
Yet, there always seemed another way the lever could tilt–an opposing force that could right the wrongs.
Right now, correcting the angle of the lever seems to be a pretty heavy lift, despite the pundits, the activists, the social media cheerleaders telling us to suck it up and do it anyway.
Which I will. Because it matters. And because even in this still space, my schoolgirl self would never think of not doing her homework. So I’m going through the motions, slowly ticking off the activist tasks on my large to-do list. I can’t allow myself the privilege of wallowing when the lives of so many people who are much more vulnerable than I am are at stake.
And for my own personal sadness, I remind myself that my father is 93. He has been happy and healthy for nearly all of his long and well-lived life. The experience of losing a parent is excruciatingly hard, but it’s something most of us go through at some point. I’m lucky I’ve had 67 years before I’ve had to face it.
The last time I visited my father, about a month ago, he was in the hospital with the New York Times spread across his lap. He was still reading it back then, though in small snatches between nodding off. I’m scared of what’s going to happen after the inauguration, he said.
Now, he makes no pretense of reading the Times or watching the TV news. Now his life has been compressed to a few waking moments between a lot of nodding off, and his conversation has dwindled to silence. Perhaps, he, too, is entering a still space. I hope it’s still enough that he isn’t experiencing the fear many of the rest of us are feeling.
Surprisingly, the one creative thing I’ve been able to, and have been drawn to do, is play the piano. I’ve been focusing on the Bach fantasias (not the fugues that follow) in a minor and c minor–at a slightly slower and more soulful tempo than the way it’s played on the videos. Bach is my father’s favorite composer, so it feels like a way of honoring him. And it feels like a creative space I can be in–perhaps because it’s a space without words.
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Soon after the presidential election in 2016, I told myself complacency was no longer an option. This “mantra” became my modus operandi as I struggled to figure out what I could do to stop the nightmare. I had taken a break from political activism in the proceeding years, prioritizing writing in the small spaces I had left after my demanding day job. But all of a sudden I was thrown into reading all the political pundits I could get my hands on, searching for some tidbit of info that would tell me what we needed to do to stop the MAGA agenda. There had to be some magic formula–and those folks who were smarter and more in the thick of things had to know what to do.
But, alas, no easy recipes. Everyone–activists, super-activists, previously dormant activists, and non-activists–much as we railed about the state of affairs, seemed clueless about how to put a stop to it.
Since complacency wasn’t an option, I tried to do what I could. I went to dozens of political meetings and started, with the help of my daughter and son-in-law, a weekly call-to-action blog called “3 NoTrump,” which highlighted three simple civic actions people could take in response to unfolding events. I called my MoCs almost daily; I went to countless demonstrations. And while I appreciated myself for not being complacent, none of it seemed very useful.
A year or two later, things fell more into place with my personal activism. While our 3NoTrump blog folded after we never got much traction and no longer had the energy to keep it going, I joined a larger team that wrote for Rogan’s List, another call-to-action site that has recently reached its 50,000th subscriber. And I was able to join with an affinity group of like-minded people who were devoted to immigration justice. Together we went to a children’s detention center in Homestead, Florida, and to the Brownsville/ Matamoros border, each time sharing stories about what we had witnessed in community presentations and written media. These two focuses became the foundation of my current activism. And while we still didn’t stop everything, I’d like to think we made at least a small difference in raising awareness and inspiring people to action.
Refugee Camp: Matamoros, 2019. Photo by D. Dina Friedman
By the time of the 2024 election, I was still active in both these efforts, so I didn’t have to worry about complacency. But I had a new enemy: hopelessness.
In addition to many good reasons to feel hopeless (which I don’t have to depress people by outlining) I’ve figured out that my personal hopelessness is exacerbated by my general lack of patience. Heck, I get impatient if there’s someone ahead of me in line or if the computer takes more than five seconds to reload. My partner Shel always says he retains his optimism by seeing how much progress has been made over the years, despite backlash and pushback–MLK’s long arc bending toward justice. But patience is a mixed bag and it’s also good not to be too patient, IMHO. While many campaigns for progress (abolition and civil rights, for example) were eventually successful, they were also excruciatingly long and many people were hurt or killed before change happened.
I think that’s why it’s hard to conjure up patience. The stakes are too high, and, just like in 2016, what I really want is to find someone who can “fix it.”
But ultimately the only one who can “fix it” is me. You. All of us.
Deportation Plane, Brownsville, TX, 2019. Photo by D. Dina Friedman
And we can’t fix anything by being hopeless.
Thinking about hopelessness also brings me back to our trip to the border in 2019–how the people we talked with, thousands of them waiting months for an appointment at a tent court where only 1% would be granted asylum, didn’t lose hope. They stayed in the squalid and dangerous tent camp waiting and hoping, because to return, for many, would mean death–for themselves and their families.
Hopelessness wasn’t an option for them. It can’t be an option for me.
Refugee Camp, Matamoros, 2019. Photo by D. Dina Friedman
Today is my favorite Jewish holiday, Tu B’shevat, The New Year of the Trees.
Why do I like this holiday so much? It doesn’t have a back story about war and destruction or about celebrating a so-called “victory” after taking sides. It’s simply about celebrating trees. And I have a thing for trees.
Nine years ago on Tu B’shevat, my friends and I gathered to have a 100th birthday party for the tree in my front yard, which we know was planted in 1916 when our house was moved several hundred feet by horse and winch from where it previously stood. It’s definitely an elder now and we watch it every year with loving care. We’re glad it’s still standing.
And five years ago, on Tu B’shevat, I was at the Brownsville/Matamoros border, leading writing workshops for women and teenagers who were stuck waiting in Mexico for a months or years to be called for a tiny number of daily asylum appointments. As a prompt for the workshop, we read a book called Somos Como las Nubes, (We Are Like the Clouds), a collection poems by young people about their journey north and their hopes and dreams of a better life.
These children (and the adults that accompanied them) may have thought they were like the clouds. But they were also like trees. Rooted in an unshakable hope. Then and now, I am amazed at their steadfastness and resilience, especially as I think back on the stories they told me of the violence they faced. I continue to be haunted by the pictures on their phones they showed me of loved ones covered in blood.
Friends, these are the stories of many of the people who are being rooted out, separated from their families, shackled and put on planes, or sent to places like Guantanamo Bay.
It breaks my heart. And while it doesn’t minimize the impact of the wrongs being done, I take small solace that trees are still standing.
In fact, when I start feeling anxious and fearful about the end of democracy, I think of the trees all over the world who have lived through wars, genocide, dictatorships…
How do they do it, and what lessons can I learn from them?
It’s only been in the past few years that I read that trees communicate with each other through a complex underground network of fungi to warn each other against insect attacks and other dangers. Somehow, I don’t think they discriminate about which trees to warn and which not to warn, which to welcome, and which to keep out.
Trees, like humans, need community. And tonight, I will celebrate Tu B’shevat tonight in community, where we’ll eat different kinds of tree products (fruit and nuts) and talk about the cycles of life and the seasons. But mostly what I’ll celebrate is that trees are still here–and we’re still here, which I’ve learned has become a theme song on many people’s “getting through dark times” playlists. As a total luddite when it comes to pop culture, I’m not even sure which I’m Still Here song is getting all the play. But here’s a rap I found that I like by Lathan Warlick; and here’s a Holly Near favorite with the slightly altered title of We’re Still Here.
Let’s keep on being here–warning each other against danger, and taking care of each other.
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