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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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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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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