Spiders and Rocks and Poems, Oh My!

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Once again, I’ve signed up to write 30 Poems in November to benefit the Center for New Americans, which provides English classes and many other types of advocacy for immigrants here in western Mass. And once again, as October draws to a close, I’m feeling that trepidation of adding one more item to my to-do list, wondering how I’m ever going to churn out 30 poems in a month–even poems that are unfinished and far less than stellar.

It hasn’t helped that my writing life has slowed to a crawl. Paperwork related to my father-in-law’s death, last minute election volunteering, putting the garden to bed, health issues with relatives, the Jewish holidays, my grandchild’s birthday, editing deadlines, and a flurry of visits with friends and family have made it hard to get to my desk as often and regularly as I’d like. Even this blog post–which I usually aim for mid-week–is late. (I just got a warning post from SubStack, letting me know that I had only two more days to fulfill my pledge of blogging weekly, LOL!)

But one of the things I love about writing 30 Poems in November is that permission to slow down. To make writing practice front and center again.

I find I’m most successful at birthing poems when I can be out of my to-do list and into what I think of as the fuzzier part of my brain. Then, I just let the pen flow and the words come–sometimes easily, and sometimes with a bit of effort, but the trick, for me, is not to try too hard to construct *a poem* as much as let myself sense what I’m sensing and free associate from there. And from that pile of words, I can often sift through and find the gems, threading my path forward.

The hardest part is to let the chaff fall away–the distractions, the judgment– and let myself fall into the “wow” of whatever is underneath all that detritus.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And lately, when I need lessons in falling into the sensual wonder of discovery, I get them from my two-year-old grandchild Manu. Recently, he’s been entranced with the abundant display of Halloween decorations in his neighborhood: the furry spiders perched on the hedges, the life-sized dragon with the blinking red eyes, the pumpkin faces, the creepy hands sticking out of the ground, the lanterns hanging from the trees.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

Every day, he asks to see the dragon and the spiders. He takes his time, exclaiming, Oh, there’s another spider! before rushing over to investigate and dig his little hands into the fur.

 

After the “spider house,” we go next door to the Japanese rock garden, where he watches the brightly colored fish, and rains handfuls of small, cool rocks, listening to the pleasing sound they make when they hit the ground.

Poems are everywhere. Hopefully, some will come to me this November.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And yes, please consider contributing to my fundraising page for this worthy cause. No donation is too small! Many thanks. Happy Halloween and Happy November!

 

Tomorrow Never Knows

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Despite the occasional seduction of signs advertising $5 palm readings, I’ve always been afraid of fortune tellers.

Gunnshots (Don), CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

If there’s going to be bad news, I don’t want to hear it. Just as I don’t want to read disturbing news stories with clickbait headlines. Heck, I don’t even want to watch my teams lose at sporting events. Last week, I walked away from the Mets/Phillies game when the Phillies threatened the Mets’ slim lead in the 9th inning. If it was going to be bad, I didn’t want to watch.

So, I totally understand my father when he says he doesn’t want more medical testing to explore what might be causing his occasional bouts of delirium and physical instability.

Because he’d rather spend what remains of his life in ignorant bliss. He’s 93. He’s had a good life. He doesn’t want his remaining time to be consumed with thinking there may be something wrong with him.

And for the moment, the delirium has subsided. He’s feeling ok, happy to do his puzzles and watch the Mets and Yankees in the playoffs.

As I’ve continued my fledgling practice of mindfulness meditation, I’ve seen a lot of my stress ebb away as long as I can eschew the nagging of my to-do list and keep myself in the present moment. There are some definite perks in stepping off the worry treadmill and refraining from obsessing over the great unknown. Even if there’s an aspect of “flying by the seat of my pants,” when situations encroach that demand my attention, I’m convinced I make my best decisions in the reality of the present rather than to adapt to a foggy future.

And–at least for me–I feel the same way about trying to plot the trajectory of a novel (or even a short-story). I could probably save myself a lot of time if I had a better idea of where I was going when I sit down in front of the blank page or the blank screen, but the reality is I have no idea what my characters are going to do until they’re faced with the situation. Sometimes they make the “wrong” decisions and the story goes nowhere. And–unlike most of life–I get to backtrack and revise. But if I try to gauge the ending of a story before paying close and careful attention to the beginning and the middle, I end up with flat and predictable characters and outcomes, instead of carefully nuanced and surprising twists.

This is not to diss outlines for those people who find them useful.  But I would caution people not to be too attached to their initial ideas. Give your characters free agency and they will surprise you. As John Lennon said,  “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.” Tomorrow never knows.

Tony Barnard, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

So, I’ll keep trying to cherish the present–and savor the discrete precious moments of the last few days in New York watching baseball games with my parents, even as they might nod off into dreamland, and even if–unlike me–they’re resilient enough to watch when their teams are losing.

 

 

 

New Year’s Musings: Forgiveness and Aspirations

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For the past five years, I’ve done a self-reflective practice during the month of Elul, the 29 days preceding the Jewish New Year (which we celebrated on October 2-4 this year) where I focus intensely on my aspirations for the coming year, as well as my current short-comings, places where I’ve “missed the mark” in who I want to be as a person. During that month, I try to journal more than I usually do, often in response to inspirational readings and self-reflective questions I find on on-line, or books written by spiritual leaders in various traditions.

Cathryn Lavery cathrynlavery, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

What comes through loud and clear, no matter how much (or how little) I journal, or what I choose to read, is that forgiveness—especially self-forgiveness–lies at the heart of personal growth. Even when I may be regretting something I’ve done that may have hurt someone else, and feel compelled to ask their forgiveness, I find that I can’t let the incident go until I’ve forgiven myself.

Forgiveness is a hallmark of many faith traditions, but even those of us who don’t follow a strict religious path (and I include myself in that category as a mostly secular Jew), can incorporate it into our personal growth plan. In fact, forgiveness can be kryptonite to the nudgy inner judge. What would our lives be like if every time that nasty voice reared its ugly head with some critical, self-deprecating comment, you simply answered by smiling and saying, yes, but I’ve forgiven myself for this.

The flip side of forgiveness is aspirations. When I went through old papers a few weeks ago, in attempt to create a more sacred space (while practicing forgiving myself for my messiness!) I was touched to find a journal entry from the past secular New Year in January. I wrote:

I was (am) a writer who is setting even deeper roots in a community of writers. The past year brought out that it is ok to be successful. That I have a voice that matters. That others have a voice that matters. That it’s important to me to nurture other people’s voices as well as my own. I value community. I stand for expression and an artistic standard that I would like to encourage others to reach for, and what I would like to keep improving in myself. I want to communicate what deeply matters—to humans, and to the world. My writing is now central to my life. It is what I am.

I followed this with a list of wishes. Some were pie-in-the-sky, like getting a story from Immigrants optioned into a movie. Others were possible, but not likely to happen, such as getting an agent who believed in me and my work and saw it as more than a commodity. But what stood out was this:

My biggest hope was to be taken seriously by everyone as a real writer whose craft is at standard and whose art and messages matter. I would like to be seen by others as a person of integrity and depth whose words and perspectives matter.

This is my New Year’s wish for all of you–in whatever you do. May your words, images, music, movement, actions, thoughts and perspectives matter.

Shanah Tovah!

 

Lying and Storytelling

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A few weeks ago, after the presidential debate, I was inspired to write about the topic of lying. And last night, I couldn’t help but thinking about the slickness with which Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance shamelessly delivered lie after lie after lie, complaining when corrected by moderators, that “they weren’t supposed to fact-check.”

And if you didn’t have the facts, it would be totally easy to be lured into Vance’s narrative, due to his polished, smooth delivery. He delivered his untruths so confidently, it left me wondering whether Vance believed his own narrative.

And this, I think, is a good lesson for fiction writers–even if the “lies” (which I’d prefer to call “stories” in this context are not intended to do harm or be taken as factual. Writer John Gardener in The Art of Fiction writes about the importance of creating “a continuous unbroken dream” where the reader is totally ensconced in whatever reality the writer has created–kind of like a virtual reality experience that’s dependent on words, rather than 3-D classes.

And to do that, you as a writer need–to some extent–to believe in your own narrative, to present it with complete and unshakable confidence.

How do we do that? Here are a couple of things to think about.

DETAILS: In an episode of Young Sheldon, Georgie tells his out-of-sync genius younger brother that lying well involves details. You’ve got to add enough heft to make the story stand on its own. Take a random subject-verb-object sentence (i.e. The spider crawled on the corn) and let us see, hear, taste, touch and smell the action as you relay it. Note: This involves more than adding adjectives, too many of which can easily weigh a sentence down. It can often involve just adding a couple of well-chosen words, or adding another sentence or two before or after to increase the stakes and add more context.

APPEAL TO EMOTION: Many of Vance’s falsehoods last night were clearly designed to arouse anger. And while in this context, this was a manipulative attempt to sway people’s votes, for our fiction to be successful, we often need people to engage emotionally by empathizing with our characters and the situations they are facing. This means we need to work hard to create believable and fully developed characters who are sympathetic and realistic, despite whatever flaws they might have.

KNOW WHERE YOUR PLOT IS GOING: I laughed as I typed these words because I’m often not sure where my plot is going until my second or third draft. But once I do know, I cut out the tangents that weigh my stories down. Last night I was both amazed and horrified about how Vance made Kamala Harris, or immigrants, or both, the villains in nearly every lie he told–a move that was clearly plotted in advance.

When I’m in my writing groove, I believe in my own narratives, even as I know they have no factual foundation, and even as, like many politicians, I might flip-flop on the details of their creation. But whatever changes my characters go through can be attributed to my getting to know them better, or their choosing to reveal more of themselves to me. Ultimately, the details, the characters, the plot are all there as props for me to reveal my truth–or my lie, if I choose. But in this context, I always choose my truth.

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Why I Write About Immigrants

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When I was a child in New York City, I was one of the few kids who wasn’t an immigrant or a child of immigrants. I remember being awed when I’d visit my friends in their homes and listen to them speaking animatedly in another language–Spanish, or Chinese, or Greek–before switching back to me and talking in just as fluent English. I felt envious and ripped off that my family couldn’t speak any other languages.

In elementary school, nearly every year our teacher would give us a homework assignment to describe the country we, or our parents, or grandparents had come from, and then present that to the class so everyone could learn about it. “You come from many different countries,” my parents would tell me, as they ticked off the different areas on the map that my great grandparents (and sometimes great-great grandparents) had lived before sailing to Ellis Island: Lithuania, Germany, Holland, Russia, the Ukraine, Poland…

This was an odd assignment for me because I felt no connection to any of these places. We had no legacy of language. My parents didn’t know Yiddish. Even my grandparents–all of whom were born here–knew very little. I felt so American, so boring, and sad that I had absolutely nothing for “Show and Tell”

But the point isn’t to complain about my experience as much to reflect back on an instance when being an immigrant was celebrated. And I did not go to a “lefty commie school.” This was a regular public school in New York City where we pledged allegiance to the flag every morning, and learned about how “great” America was. And part of what made it “great,” we learned, was immigrants. New York was a “melting pot.”

I currently prefer the term salad bowl, a metaphor that allows us to acknowledge everyone’s individual culture rather than envisioning us all melting into some unidentifiable assimilated conglomeration. However, neither image does the kind of harm as the recent outrageous lies about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the overall vilification of immigrants put out by MAGA Republicans–who are calling for a large-scale deportation of not only undocumented residents, but also those who have obtained a legal path to be in this country.

Had this been carried out when I was a kid, it would have included nearly everyone in my class.

When I wrote my collection of short stories, I wanted to emphasize how immigrants are everywhere, just as they were everywhere in my childhood. Some of my stories are overtly political, drawing on my experiences as an activist, but most of them aren’t. They’re simply tapestries woven with real people–some of whom simply weren’t born in the U.S. I write about humans in situations with issues. That’s what’s always grabbed me in fiction–the ways we struggle to love the world, each other, and ourselves.

So I guess that’s my “show-and-tell”–only 50 years late. Hoping we can get a little of that immigrant love back. All of us belong in the salad.

 

Sounds Like Me

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I’ve taken two significant piano plunges this week–actually, make that three.

(1) A piano-playing friend of mine invited me to choose a duet piece to play with her. I picked Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba because that was a crazy-fun duet I used to play on the Cornell Chimes, which involved running around each other to get to our notes. My friend expressed some concern that the piece would be too fast and therefore, too hard, but I assured her I was totally happy to play it as slowly as we both needed to (way more slowly than in this video–LOL). I told her my aunt (whom she knows) had a chamber music group that they called The Trio Lento, because no matter what the piece was, they played it at “lento” (slow) speed. The important thing was that they had fun.

A few days ago we ran through the piece for the first time. Lento. And we had fun.

lecates, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Since my friend had most of the chords at the bottom and wasn’t familiar with the melody, since hadn’t played the piece before, she had more trouble than I did getting things to fit together. So, I offered to make a recording of the melody part–at lento speed. I have a tendency to rush when I’m enjoying the music I’m playing; so, this was a good lesson for me to pay close attention to the rhythm we’d set.

(2) Making the recording inspired me to record one of the pieces I was playing to see what I thought of it. I have TOTALLY AVOIDED doing this in the four years that I’ve returned to the piano, terrified that I’ll absolutely hate whatever I hear myself playing and fall back into an unescapable abyss of self-judgment, resurrecting all the negative messages about my musicianship that have haunted me all my life. But I’ve been feeling more confident, lately. So, I figured I’d give it a try.

To make it easier on myself, I chose a slow piece–the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, whose speed is marked adagio–only slightly faster than lento. It’s a piece I’ve been playing for years and know well, so I could focus on the expression and mostly forget about my cell phone recorder. Still, I did feel just a bit jittery when I pressed the button to play it back.

What stood out most wasn’t the mistakes, which I knew I had made, even as I managed to smooth them over and keep on going. The big surprise was that my playing SOUNDED LIKE ME! Something about how I was choosing to accent notes and how I flowed in the rhythm reminded me of that inner voice inside, the same voice that hears the words I write and tinkers until I have exactly the cadence I want.

Was it the best rendition of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata that I’ve ever heard? Far from it! But it was “in the ballpark.” And it was mine!

(3) This gave me confidence today to do something I’ve wanted, but have been too scared to do for at least a year–call the local community music center and ask about joining an adult chamber group. I had a lovely conversation with the person in charge of that project, and now I’m feeling giddy at the prospect of playing with other people in a more formal and challenging setting.

Stay tuned!

Lies, lies, lies

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taylorandayumi, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

When my partner, Shel, and I were first dating forty-plus years ago, we were enamored with a string of inexpensive and delicious Indian restaurants that spanned the entire block of East 6th Street between First and Second Avenues in the East Village in Manhattan.

One day Shel noticed that the printing for all the restaurant menus was exactly the same. “Have you ever been around the corner on East 5th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A?” I asked him. When he told me he hadn’t, I said, “There’s a whole string of print shops there that print the menus for the Indian restaurants.”

“Oh, that’s odd,” he said. And I burst out laughing, amazed that he believed my jokey little lie.

True confession: I have “a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies.” It’s one of the innate qualities John Gardner writes about in On Becoming a Novelist that I value in myself as a fiction writer. My mind is always trying to churn up believable story lines. That’s why I love coming up with pretexts when planning surprise parties for other people, even though, as an introvert, I hate surprise parties when the surprise is on me.

My lies have generally been harmless, safely ensconced in their fictional blankets, or quickly revealed as untruths, once I’ve made the joke or unveiled the surprise. But I also need to own up to the “white lies” I’ve told–or might tell –n situations when full honesty might be more hurtful to the person I’m talking to, and, yes, to the lies I told as a teenager in order to do things my parents would have never let me do. While I’m not necessarily proud of having told those falsehoods, I do admit that I enjoyed making up the details, even then.

And some lies–like the recent story about immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets, are NOT harmless, even as most of us might laugh at such incredulity, I can’t help but think of the propaganda Hitler and the Nazis disseminated about Jews, way before the Holocaust started. In writings, films, newspaper articles, political cartoons, Jews were consistently portrayed as subhuman creatures. As early as 1919, Hitler said, “the ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.”  At that time, when Jews in Germany were largely secular and assimilated into German society, it might have been easy to brush off that comment as the ravings of a racist–but look what happened!

Trump has made deporting undocumented immigrants a centerpiece of his platform. And in the debate last night, he kept hammering the falsehood that all these immigrants were criminals, when in fact, the number of crimes committed by immigrants in this country is far lower than the number of crimes committed by native born Americans. Then he drove in more nails by repeating the crazy message about immigrants eating cats. It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but it’s also a way of subtle brainwashing, depicting these people as so different from ourselves that we can no longer feel empathy for them or connect human-to-human.

Unfortunately, there will be people who believe Trump’s lies. And there may not be not be anyone around who can own up to the falsehood and quickly reorient them to the truth. As a Jew, an immigrant justice activist, and a writer, this has led me to contemplate my own love of lies. Have they all been harmless? Have I lied “ethically” and is there such a thing as “lying ethically?” Have I told the truth, even during the times I twisted or exaggerated “facts” to put the frosting on a good story? I’ve always felt, like author Madeleine L’Engle, that truth and fact are not always the same thing, something Shel and I disagree on, since he’s always correcting my stories with more accurate numerical and geographical detail–which I find highly annoying.

When we debriefed the Indian restaurant/print shop story, I told Shel I was surprised he could be so gullible. In response, he said, “I had no reason why I shouldn’t trust you.” It was a sobering moment. As writers, we do ask for our readers’ trust. There’s a truth nestled inside whatever fiction we might spew that we want our audience to believe and resonate with. That means we have a responsibility not to tell lies that have the potential to harm, no matter how innocuous or ridiculous they might appear on the surface, or how much we might enjoy telling them.

 

 

Tempering Disappointments

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Last Monday, I found out that one of my poems, Nebraska, had been nominated by Quartet Journal, for “Best of the Net.” I also got five rejections that day.

I’m totally used to those “not for us” notes. My rule for myself–and the advice I give to others–is to not to let rejections bother me for more than 10 minutes. But 5 times 10 is 50 minutes. Far too much time to be disappointed in a single day.

Besides, my average rate of rejections per month for 2024 is 9, so to get 5 of them in a single day is a bit much.

But, hey, I’m at 73 rejections for the year–so well on track to get to my goal of 100, especially with 38 submissions currently outstanding.

To tell the truth, I was more bemused by the barrage than upset by it. I didn’t waste my whole ten minutes per rejection feeling blue. Like life, you can look at the glass half-full or the glass half-empty, and I was really pleased that a journal liked one of my poems well enough to put it on their A-list.

I’d touched a few souls. That’s what really mattered to me.

And the volunteer tomato plant that had taken root in the flower bed between the bee balm and the day lilies was putting out bright red cherry tomatoes. So, how could I be unhappy after such an unexpected miracle?

It was a glorious day, hinging on that edge between summer and fall. I made a huge Indian-inspired dinner with all my harvested potatoes and kale (chana aloo saag) and took a walk in the woods.

Then I sent out more poems.