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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Juliet might have said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but in the writing world titles matter.
Yet, up to now, I’ve been pretty blasé with my titles. Sometimes I can come up with a good title that adds some extra layers or a bit of wit, but when I can’t do that easily I often resort to something that’s succinct and just descriptive enough without giving away the store. And even then, I haven’t spent as much time as I might on a line of prose or poetry to make sure I’ve gotten exactly the words I want.
Maybe this is because I’m not that much of a title-reader. I often jump right to the first line to see if that draws me in.
But I’ve recently learned that if you send a poetry or short-story manuscript, editors will make snap judgments on the titles in your Table of Contents before they read a word of your prose. It’s a marketing world out there, and much as I might hate that, titles can be another form of clickbait. So, as I’m slogging through revisions for 30 Poems in November, I’m giving a bit more attention to titles and changing more of them than I usually do.
Poem #1: Becoming is now Evolution. Poem #5: The Answer is now Chasing Asclepias. Poem #13: Characteristics of Life is now Impossible Hope. Poem #27: In This Letter… is now In This Bottled Letter Bobbing in the Sea… And Poem #17: Family History is now Stick Figures on the Fascist Horizon.
I did have a few poems whose initial titles I liked as is: Van Gogh and Power Outages; Seeking the Moon; Fathers, Plants, Birds; I Am More than Seeds; and What Keeps Me Sane During Insane Times. As well as one I can’t take credit for because it was given in the prompt: Poem Set in the Present Moment Featuring My Mother’s Voice.
Most of the rest of my 30 Poems in November titles are okay, but definitely on the mediocre side of okay. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with a few more improvements–and I’ll make that a point for any I’m serious about and might want to put in a manuscript.
As for the rest, I hope there are other people like me out there who ignore the titles and jump right into the words.
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Yesterday, at around 8:30 am, my partner, Shel, and I left Las Vegas, Nevada en route to Death Valley, a 2.5 hour drive. We arrived 8 hours later.
No, we did not have traffic or car trouble. And, in all fairness, we did have a couple of stops planned that we guessed would add two more hours to the trip. But the other four hours? Chalk it up to seizing the opportunities that the moments presented.
The first interruption came when we still in Vegas, on our way to load up on groceries at Trader Joe’s. This was one of our two planned stops–since we were told that Death Valley was a food desert as well as a physical one. Shel suddenly told me that instead of eating some of the food we’d brought from home (or that we were about to buy from Trader Joe’s) he’d really love to have breakfast in a down-home Mexican restaurant that catered to the local community. So when we passed this diner, we had to stop!
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
One large dish of guacamole, accompanied by one burrito, five plantains, and countless chips later (approximately an hour after schedule) we climbed back in our car and pushed on.
We were reasonably quick at Trader Joe’s, stocking up on our general staples (cereal, yogurt, hummus, bread, peanut butter, cheese)–and dithering only a bit in figuring out which produce would keep best and locating the hard-to-find chocolate almond biscotti, and may have made up some of the time we spent on breakfast. I was feeling pretty hopeful when we got in the car and saw it was only 90 minutes to Shoshone, CA, our next planned stop. If all went well, we’d arrive sometime between noon and 12:30, perfect for lunch at the Crow Bar Saloon, which had been recommended by a friend as the only good food in the area. We also hoped to take a quick dip in one of the local hot-springs before driving the last hour into the park, arriving well before darkness made it hard to see where we were going.
We had driven about two miles and were finally out of Vegas and on the open road when Shel saw the sign for Red Rock Canyon National Park. “Let’s stop,” he said.
I reminded him that we’d been there on our last trip 11 years ago when we’d driven from Las Vegas to the National Parks in Utah and hadn’t found it that impressive.
“But it’s gorgeous right now!” he insisted.
I couldn’t argue. The scenery was absolutely stunning. We agreed on a short stop. Thirty minutes just to walk around and soak it in.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
An hour and a half later we were on the road, though not at all disappointed that we’d tarried as long as we had, for the privilege of getting up close and personal with the rocks. Now we were scheduled to arrive at Shoshone at 2, which reset to 2:15 after a gas and bathroom stop. We took a brief sweep of the eclectic one-room local museum, and ate a hearty late lunch at the Crow Bar, but alas, there would be no time for hot springs. It was 3:30, the sun was already sinking pretty low in the sky, and we had an hour more to go.
The light was quickly fading by the time we arrived at our lodgings in Death Valley. As we got out of the car, we snapped pictures of the last smidgeons of sunset.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
And by the time we were done checking in, we had to find our parking area, our building, and unload all the suitcases in the dark. But, whatever! We had no problem with the driving and we had an amazing day!
As I thought about this story–a very typical one for us, as our children will be first to grumpily attest–I recognized how important leaning into the unexpected has also been for me in my writing process. In first draft free-writing, my mind often makes sharp U-turns or veers off the road entirely. And while I may not even understand why I’m making the association, it’s often those odd connections that lead me into the juicier more important places. And even in revision, I’ve sometimes found that breaking open a piece that isn’t working and going off in an entirely different direction can help me ultimately find my way back home.
I do feel a bit sad that we didn’t go to the hot springs. But we’ll go on our way back to Las Vegas. Or we won’t–but at least, that’s the plan!
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After writing 30 poems during the past six Novembers, my December project is always to clean them up before sending them all–the good, the unfinished, and the hopeless–to the people who have so generously donated to this fundraiser to support the Center for New Americans.
Center for New Americans: cnam.org
I wrote about this process last year in a post called Poem Wrestling, but each year, I come to the table with a bit more learning, and also more compassion for myself as I work on shedding the egotistic aura of perfectionism and the numerous ways it sabotages my life. So what, if someone reads a not well rendered poem of mine and thinks badly of me or my writing abilities. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.
If I’m taking the time to revise these poems, it shouldn’t be out of preserving some image of myself whose truth is already questionable. Instead, revising should involve getting down dirty with each poem and asking myself, as Northampton Poet Laureate Franny Choi said so succinctly and enigmatically in a recent workshop I attended, what does the poem want?
And there is little that gives me more joy than when a poem bursts open into exciting new directions I had never anticipated, or when I can see in a pile of mud, a glint of a hidden sparkling stone that needs to be excavated and polished.
But enabling poems to find those pathways to self-realization can be difficult, especially when there are 30 of them that were quickly drafted.
Here’s what has helped me:
First, I read through all 30 and sort them into three categories which I label: Close (has integrity but could use tweaking), Medium (there’s something here, but still needs substantial work) and Mess (which means either huh? or yuck! depending on how self-deprecating I’m feeling that day).
Then, for each work-shift, I try to work on one poem from each category, reading through a few until I find one that appeals at the moment. For those in the Close pile, I read the poem out loud and listen for jarring word rhythms to eliminate and sounds that resonate. Then I pick through, taking out words that feel prosaic and flat, or images that feel worn and tired. I especially look at where I can replace a common verb with a stronger more evocative one, and if there are places I can substitute a word with a different number of syllables or slightly different sound to keep the internal “music” more consistent.
For a poem in the Medium category, I will eventually do all of the above, but first I’ll ask myself which parts are the sparkling rocks and which parts are mud trying to disguise itself as a sparkling rock. I’ll often chop off sections, and then add to the sections remaining to see if that brings me closer to what the poem wants.
The poems in the Mess category are the hardest to work with. These are the ones I’d likely toss if I hadn’t made the pledge to send all 30 poems to my funders. And often, I will file them in my Inactive archive after the whole process is complete. But sometimes a poem in this category just needs to emerge. For these poems, I first try to ask myself what the poem is really about, or remember what I was trying to say when I wrote it. Then, I look at what’s on the page and see which parts help reflect that message. I cut out all the parts that don’t seem relevant, (perhaps saving some of the images I might like for future poems) and start with what’s left. More times than I’d expect, I manage to rescue these poems once I’ve cut out the prose-laden, irrelevant and didactic places, and then continued revising according to the steps above.
Of course, my piles are fluid and sometimes a poem I first peg as Close gets demoted to Medium or even Mess. But this is counterbalanced by the Mess poems that eventually end up in the Close poems.
Does anything ever get finished? I’ll probably keep revising stuff until I die, but eventually poems fall into an additional category of Good Enough, and I offer them for publication.
And regardless, at the end of December, I send all 30 poems to my audience of funders, shoving aside any residual embarrassment. My revision process is effective enough that most of the poems by then are in the Close or Good Enough categories, with a few stragglers still in Medium and Mess. Most people don’t read all the poems, anyway, and I’m totally fine with that, giving them blanket permission to peruse or ignore. Life is short. We all have a lot to do.
And out of the 150 poems I started during these 30-poem Novembers between 2019 and 2023, 32 have been published. So, I guess someone somewhere also thought they were Good Enough.
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As a child on Thanksgiving, one of the things I most looked forward to–after the turkey, the stuffing, and the apple pie–was “The Argument.”
It was kind of like a sport. On one side would be my grandfather and Aunt Rita. On the other side would be just about everyone else: my parents, our close family friends: Bill & Jo, and–to the extent we could participate–my brothers and me.
Though the details of the news cycle changed over the late 60s and early 70s, the overlying arguments were always the same. Should we be in Vietnam? And did nuclear proliferation make any sense at all?
If I already have enough bombs to destroy the world a million times, I remember my mother arguing. There’s no reason I need enough bombs to destroy the world two million times–no matter what Russia does.
At this point my grandpa or Aunt Rita would launch in about the evils of Communism: Russia, Red China, world take-overs.
No one was ever declared the winner or loser in these yearly arguments. It was just something we did before getting out the poker chips–where there would be winners and losers, but only for chips so it didn’t matter. And I don’t remember any real antipathy expressed against those who held a different opinion. No cutting remarks about “owning the liberals,” or accusations of racism, ignorance, or “wokeness.”
My grandfather was one of the kindest, most generous people I knew. So was Aunt Rita, a devout Catholic and an active member of the Republican Party for decades. She sent us all so many cards with checks in them, my father joked that she was running a foundation. And on a Thanksgiving Day several years later when my brother ratted me out for sleeping with my college boyfriend after I confronted him about stealing the cash in my jewelry box and everyone else reacted with stony shocked silence, it was Aunt Rita who took me aside, pressed a twenty-dollar bill in my hand, and told me that whatever people did in loving relationships was just fine.
So, of course, I’m thinking about all of this as we head into this year’s Thanksgiving. I’ve already had moments of drama and trauma with some extended family that have left me feeling far less generous and forgiving than Aunt Rita–or any of us–were during those long-ago arguments. And I’m personally not in a place to take the Pollyanna route and conclude with some cliché about how we need to love everyone, regardless of their ideology. No matter how well-meaning and caring some people might be in their personal lives, I can’t get past their enabling a leader who has built his whole campaign on hatred of others.
Yet, this doesn’t excuse those of us on “the blue team” from dismissing their concerns, or deriding them as human beings, no matter how “wrong” we might think they are. So this gets at the conundrum: how do we keep ourselves, those we love, and those groups of people whom we may not know but still care about, safe from the augmented rhetoric that has been fomented to target them.
I don’t know the answer, but I do know that as a fiction writer I’ve had to infiltrate the minds of some characters who are about as different from me as possible. And I’ve had to make them fully developed, with fears, aspirations, prejudices, dreams, secret fantasies. A standard concept in character development is that the reader only sees the part of the iceberg above the water, but in order to make the character and their motivations authentic, the writer has to know and fully understand everything underneath.
So, maybe part of the problem, regardless of which “side” one might be on, is that people aren’t seeing anything more than the tip of the iceberg.
What would it be like to treat the uncle who drives you crazy as an exercise in character development. There are many great lists of questions you can ask yourself about your character in order to understand him better, and hopefully gain some compassion so that if you were to write him in a scene, whether people liked him or not, there’d be something about him that would make your readers care.
And a braver step, if you happen to be sharing a Thanksgiving table, what would it be like to ask your uncle to do the same exercise for someone from a targeted group–a trans teenager, or a woman from Central America whose husband has just been killed by gangs and is now fleeing for her life.
As Arlo says, if just 50 people a day….maybe it’s a movement…
Happy Thanksgiving!
A Thanksgiving staple–my cranberry upside down cake. Photo by Shel Horowitz
It’s Friday evening and I haven’t written a blog post all week. I can give a typical round of “a very busy ‘to-do’ list,” or “dog-ate-my-homework” excuses, but the real reason is that I haven’t been motivated. Usually, once an idea starts tickling me, it’s no problem to sit down and write, but that didn’t happen this week.
And despite my lack of creative zing, I had to write a poem every day, or, at least, a few lines dressed up as a poem for 30 Poems in November. That was about all I could corral my writer mind into doing.
In fact, earlier today when I suddenly made a rare decision that it was time to tackle the mound of homeless papers that hadn’t found their way to my file cabinet–a task that would involve emptying the file cabinet of papers that no longer needed to be there–I completely forgot that I was about to blow my streak of blogging 34 weeks in a row.
So now I’m writing against a deadline, plodding along even though my heart isn’t in it. Sometimes, when The Muse is AWOL, plodding is where it’s at. Every novel or long CNF work I’ve written would have never been completed if I hadn’t sucked in my breath and resolved to plod my way through, even on days I had no motivation.
I know my lack of motivation right now comes from being shell-shocked by the election results and the shock-and-awe tactics of bad and worse news coming down the pipeline quicker than I can respond to it. Likely I’m not the only one who’s overwhelmed by the onslaught of news stories, emails, and newsletter posts urging me to take some sort of action: calls to listen to, more articles to read, phone calls to make–all of which feel crucial and important.
But there are far more actions than I could possibly do.
So I plod along, careful to prioritize the things I’ve already committed to, like working with my immigration justice group to help build a wider coalition in our community, and writing calls-to-action for Rogan’s List, a very useful way of keeping on top of the news and plugging in where you can.
But even these things feel like very small steps to address the morass–like trying to fend off a big wave with a small flick of my hand.
How not to drown?
The only way I know is to make sure I take time for the self-care I need and keep on plodding. One action, one poem, one blog post at a time.
And to remember the story of The Hare and The Tortoise. How the tortoise won.
Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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The night after the election, instead of doing my regular piano practicing, I sat down with Rise Up Singing and played John Lennon’s Imagine. It’s become my anthem. Then I went through the entire book, and played a whole bunch of songs that give voice to hope–even if hope is so wispy right now, it’s hard to find enough to lift myself out of bed every morning.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
I played Let it Be, Love Call Me Home, The Rose, If We Only Had Love, and How Can I Keep from Singing.
And I sang along.
I’ve been struggling with vocal issues during the past couple of years, which has made singing difficult. But I’m now taking voice lessons and it has been thrilling to start recovering my singing voice. When I can sing without losing my breath or croaking into raspy-ness, I feel giddy with power.
And these things feel like what I need right now–giddiness, and, at least, a flicker of power.
In the writing world we talk a lot about finding or accessing one’s own writing voice. It can often take months or years before we find our “groove,” a way of expression that feels uniquely our own.
And in writing, our voice can change over the years as we experiment with new and different approaches. As in singing, we might at times lose our voice (writers’ block) for a while before we find it again.
Let’s trust that even in this very difficult and scary time we will find our voices and use them to speak our truths.
And let’s keep holding onto the vision of Imagine.
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Today (Election Day) is going to be a hard day for many of us. And it’s likely we won’t know the outcome tonight–or what the aftermath will bring if the election is contested and violence erupts. It’s pretty f-ing scary.
Some people say they’re feeling optimistically nauseous. Others just report feeling nauseous. And again–likely thanks to climate change–it’s going to be unseasonably warm in New England. One of the three maple trees that shares my property is still quite glorious.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
I will lean into the beauty of that tree as a way of reaching toward hope.
According to Rabbi Shai Held from the Hadar Institute, Hope is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism belies the gravity of the moment by painting it over with rosy-ness. Hope, according to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is “a passion for the possible.” Philosopher Terry Eagleton in his book, Hope Without Optimism defines hope as, “a movement toward the good, not simply a craving for it.”
In other words, Rabbi Held argues, “hope involves commitment.”
I’ve already voted, so today I will continue to research phone numbers for voters in Pennsylvania who need to cure faulty ballots. And I’ll also write my daily poem for 30 Poems in November, because art matters. Here is the poem I wrote for 30 Poems in November on Election Day 2020. I think it’s still relevant. Hopefully it will be reassuring. Or inspirational.
ELECTION DAY 2020
D. Dina Friedman
Remember, a strong rain is what we need.
Plant the tulips, the daffodils,
before the ground hardens, and remember
the miracle of mud on your baby fingers,
your great-grandmother, who crossed chopping seas
to avoid the mobs with the knives. Remember,
as you stand outside today holding your sign,
or entering to make your mark in the oval,
you are one of a chain of humans
whose most grievous sin was trying
to make the world better. Remember
the small creatures taking refuge
under the lawn, and the children ripped
from their parents’ arms at the border.
Reach for them. Remember waves
are part of the ocean and you are water.
Swim. Let it hold you from the outside and in.
Drink a river of water today. Hold the flow
in your trembling belly and remember the moon
and your magic. How you were born
to hold the world like a large water-filled bowl.
Ask a loved one to touch your cheek
just above where the mask ends, and tell you
the morning sun will rise out of the desert,
the wind will blow away the dust.
And here’s another poem that burrowed deep into my heart: Accepting Heaven at Great Basin by Nathalie Handel. I’ve found it so helpful in getting through the past few days. Hopefully you will, too.
I may also go to the garden center and buy some bulbs to plant. And knowing that my candidate smiles more than the other one, I’m wearing this shirt today for luck. And trying, myself, to keep smiling.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
In 2014, I visited the Galilee, and stayed with one of three Jewish families in the Druze village of Peki’in. They were an older couple, Holocaust survivors from the Netherlands, and they lived right next door to the carob tree that Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, author of the Jewish mystical book, the Kabbalah, supposedly subsisted on for 13 years when he fled the Romans and had to hide out in a cave.
In addition to visiting the tree, we visited a “national park” nearby, which was mostly filled with scrubby desert flora. But in the middle of the area sat an old stone church, and in front of the church sat an old man wearing a keffiyeh. Our host asked the man why he was there and the man told us his story. He had been 11 years old in 1948 when the Israeli soldiers came into his village. They told his mother she had to leave–for just a couple of weeks, they said. They needed to do some work and then it would be fine to return. They could leave most of their things–no need to take the donkey.
When they returned, the entire village had been razed. Only the church was left standing. Later the government turned the area into a national park, ironically charging admission for this man to enter his own village, where he sat day after day on a one-person vigil to commemorate what had happened to his home.
Later that night, our host told his story. He’d been a “hidden child,” sheltered by a Christian family during the war. But the trauma of being left by his parents (who ended up killed in the death camps) had never fully subsided.
Last night I went to hear a reading and talk from the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who, in response to a question about the value of writing poems at times of such death and devastation, said that as poets we need to hang on to the stories–and we have a responsibility to tell them.
Mosab Abu Toha’s work does just that. He portrays Gaza through the lens of the people that live there. I think this is one of the reasons that poet Audre Lorde said, Poetry is not a luxury; it’s a necessity, the quote that begins Abu Toha’s new book, Forest of Noise.
When I went to the border in early 2020, I heard many stories from people that kept me awake at night, and kept me crying for days and weeks after I returned. I wrote poems about some of these stories; and I also wrote poems about the man in front of the Church in the Galilee and our Holocaust survivor host in Peki’in. But I continue to worry that capturing these stories in poems is not enough. For weeks, months, and even now, all of us on the border trip have continued to feel the weight of these stories. How can we keep ourselves healthy and lean into joy without discounting or ignoring the moral imperative for action that these stories should lead us to?
And how do we untangle the knots when stories contradict each other? How can we move into a space that rejects the idea of right and wrong, a space that has no sides?
My friend and compañera on the border trip carried this sign everywhere she went.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
May it be so. B’aruch Ha’Shem. Inshallah.
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