Confessions of a Prompt Queen

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I’m writing this post today in celebration of being featured today in Rattle Magazine’s tribute to prompt poems.

And while I’m not a fan of bragging, I can’t help being delighted to be published in such a reputable magazine that I like so much–makes it worth all the hours of submission/rejection drudgery.

One of my writing groups calls me The Submission Queen because I spend so much time trying to get my work out there and encouraging others to submit, as well. But I’d prefer to think of myself as The Prompt Queen. Truly, I don’t know where I would be in my writing life without prompts.

I’d written all through high school and in college (as an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing) and slogged my way through a couple of drafts of a novel, but I didn’t feel like I’d even begun to find my voice until my late 20s, when I took my first workshop with the late but immortal Pat Schneider of Amherst Writers & Artists. Choose an object, Pat would say as she’d lay out a bouquet of ordinary things on the coffee table: an egg beater, a hand-crocheted doily, a jar of French’s mustard, a hammer with nicks on the handle. And if you don’t know why you’re choosing it, that’s a good thing. Then write whatever this object inspires you to write. 

There was something about the freedom granted, the atmosphere in the room to say anything (or nothing–no one ever had to share their writing) that unlocked a gate in me, and in nearly everyone that took part in this process, whether we wrote about childhood memories this object evoked or sauntered off on some surrealistic language adventure where the object had, at most, a cameo role.

Pat would usually follow up her object exercise with pictures, or lines from poems, or a collection of things to smell or touch, or a meditation to bring back a memory or dream scene. It didn’t really matter what she offered. Following the prompt bypassed my inner critic’s need to write something “good.” I could simply pick up my pen and play, and with that playfulness came surprising turns of language and metaphors and scenes from my subconscious I would have never conjured up with my mind on more active patrol. So, I’ve continued to seek prompts wherever I can find them: in writing groups, in online subscriptions, or in my own collections of poems and pictures.

This doesn’t mean that all prompts work for me or that whatever I write comes out perfect and polished. I still file away a lot of this writing in the dead zone in my computer marked “Inactive.” But often I’m able to take what I wrote in a prompt and wrestle it into a poem, or flash fiction piece, or develop it further into an essay or short-story. Occasionally I’ve used prompts to enhance scenes in my novels or longer creative non-fiction projects.

And whether what I write turns into something finished or not, I have fun! And I often get to vicariously release whatever useless stressful thoughts are gnawing at me in a creative and playful way. In these dark times, there’s a lot to be said for the value of playing.

Revital Salomon, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

So, if you choose to read it, I hope you enjoy my Rattle poem (while I enjoy my 15 minutes of fame). And here’s a link to the poem (prompt) that inspired it.  And a picture of the moon, because that also could have been a prompt that inspired this poem.

And to jumpstart your own prompt process, I highly recommend Pat Schneider’s book, Writing Alone and With Others.

The Wrong Bus

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By Bashar Nayfeh – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73232226

In 1986, during the first of the two trips we took to Israel/Palestine together, my husband Shel and I waited for the bus from Bethlehem back to Jerusalem. We had a choice of two buses: the Jewish bus and the Arab bus. We stood between the clumps of Jews and Arabs, each of whom were waiting for their bus, and I remembered feeling as if I wasn’t in Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, but in Alabama before de-segregation. We were Jews, but we were also New Yorkers, so we were going to take whichever bus came first.

When the Arab bus arrived, all the Jews stood back. Only men and women in flowing robes and headgear got on. We followed behind like stowaways. The bus was crowded, but an old man offered Shel (who was in his 20s at the time) his seat–insisted on it. Someone asked where we were from. Obviously somewhere else, or we would have known we’d taken the wrong bus, even though it was going where we wanted to go. “America,” we said. “Massachusetts.”

“Boston?” Someone had relatives in Boston. “No, a small town.” we said as the bus belched its way back to Jerusalem, getting louder and more crowded, as people shouted in Arabic over our heads. Years later, I tried to learn Arabic from a big orange book and a professor who emphasized the ways words might end differently depending on the situation, not admitting for weeks that this was the classical version of the language and all these endings were dropped in common speech. I had wanted to learn common speech. For years I used to dream of going to villages, trying to make peace in two languages I didn’t speak, so I dropped the course.

I remember wondering why more Jews didn’t take the Arab buses, simply because they might be safer. After all, weren’t the frequent suicide bombers of the 1980s on the Jewish buses? And if some of the Jews had taken the Arab buses, would anyone have offered them a seat? Or did we have special status? Was the label “American tourist,” branded on us by our clothing, or simply because we didn’t know any better and had taken the wrong bus–which in my mind, turned out to be the right bus.

On that trip, we sought out peace activists, including people from Oz v’Shalom, an Orthodox Jewish peace movement, and Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, a mixed community of Israelis and Palestinians who ran educational dialogue programs for children and teens. We stayed with a Palestinian family and made labne, a soft yogurt-like cheese, under the stars. And we stayed for Shabbat with Shel’s religious relatives in a West Bank settlement. Everyone we met, regardless of our differences, treated us with warmth and kindness, piling on food, smiles, hugs.

I’m thinking about this today as I try to make sense of the latest wave of violence in Israel/Palestine, risking the discomfort of potential hate mail as I wade from the comfortable topics of writing, or music, or my sheltered life, into a landmine of emotions and suffering. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law and three of my nieces and their families–people I love–have chosen to make their home in Israel and I fear for their safety and well-being. I’m also grieving for every parent, Palestinian or Israeli, whose children were killed, kidnapped, or are now facing death due to air strikes or lack of food or essential medicines.

The situation is complicated, but war is ugly. It’s the wrong bus. And it’s full of people who, unlike me, didn’t choose to be on it.

 

 

 

 

Accepting the Hard Stuff

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I’ve been in Florida for the past few days visiting my 92-year-old father-in-law, who was been plagued by dementia. Despite the warm, sunny weather and proximity to the beach, this is never a trip I look forward to–even as I’m touched by N.’s stretches of cogent lucidity between the storms of anger and confusion, where he talks poignantly about how sad he is that his life has changed so much. As someone who valued his independence above all else, as he continues to point out when asked to look back on some of the happier times in his life, having to succumb to 24-hour care and supervision often makes him feel that his life isn’t worth living any more.

But I know I need to accept things, he says to me over dinner. And enjoy what I can, like this food. And be happy that I can stay in my apartment, and that I have a wonderful family. I know I need to be grateful for all of that.

It’s an easy adage to repeat. But much harder for anyone–those with dementia and those without–to implement. How do we truly reach a place of gratitude and acceptance of whatever happens to befall us? Especially, when we can’t change the situation, but even when we think we can?

I recognize the extreme privilege I’ve had in my life up until now of not having dementia or some other life-changing debilitating disease. And yet, as both a continually aspiring and a recovering perfectionist, I find myself constantly navigating the question of when I should push myself to do something better than I’m currently able, and when I should accept the status quo. Especially in my creative pursuits. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about learning Kol Nidre on the piano, and trying to accept that I would likely never play it at the level I wanted to. And in writing, as well, while I’m generally pleased with many of the things I’ve written, it’s hard to stop berating myself for not writing as well as ____________ (hundreds of names could fill in that blank) or not having accomplished as much in my writing career as more recognized writers.

As I sit on the beach, I try to practice some of the meditation techniques I’ve learned from the app I’ve been using this past year. Label the breaths: in/out, try to match them up with the waves. I get distracted easily. There’s a radio playing. A helicopter overhead. And I’m still on edge from just having to tell N. at least five times–or seven–or ten–what the plan is for the next day. He’ll have lunch with his aide at the senior center, as usual. We’ll come over after he gets back–in the afternoon, and take him back to our place and make him dinner.

He frowns. I need to go to the senior center.

I tell him one more time that we’ll see him after the senior center.

The lady (his aide) will be lonely if I leave, he protests.

I’m sure she understands that it’s important for you to spend time with your family. 

I keep trying to understand things, he tells me. And when I ask someone to explain it to me, I can tell that they think I’m a pain in the ass, but I’m just trying to understand. 

You’ve always been very persistent, I tell him, remembering the hours and hours he put in every day, writing down steps, studying videos, when learning to ballroom dance. It’s both a strength you have, but now it’s also a curse, because there are some things your brain can’t process. Please trust us and don’t worry so much about tomorrow. The day will work out. 

But he doesn’t let go of the worry. And why should he, just because I tell him to? Cultivating  faith that things will work out is a hard habit for those of us who’ve spent our lives priding ourselves on our own agency in making things happen.

I get up from the beach. No way I’m going to get anywhere near a state of inner peace tonight. Yet, I make sure to express gratitude for the sloshy sound of the waves and their dependable rhythms as the world just keeps doing its thing–with us, or without us.

 

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Stupid Rejection Letters

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We’ve all heard the stories of famous writers who suffered through many rejections before getting published, like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. Kate DiCamillo got 473 rejections before publishing her Newberry Award novel, Because of Winn Dixie. And one of the most telling rejection stories is about the man who retyped a National Book Award-winning Jerzy Kosinski novel and sent it under an unknown name to a bunch of major publishers, all of whom rejected it.

And since many agents and literary journals report their acceptance rate as around 1-5%, none of us should offer our work to the wider world unless we expect to get rejections. A lot of them. A common recommendation is to aim for 100 rejections each year.

If you send out that much work, the chances you may get a few acceptances are much higher. My batting average is around 10% acceptances for poems, less for other projects, but that’s because I submit to a range of publications. If I only submitted to prestigious journals, my acceptance rate would be much lower, though I do review journals and only submit to those I like. I didn’t track how many longer fiction queries and pitches were rejected before I had a novel accepted for publication–the fourth one I wrote. But I can say with confidence that it was well more than 100. I remember gawking at the acceptance letter when it came, thinking this can’t be real, and then hoping I wouldn’t die before the publication date, which was listed as two full years away.

Usually, rejection letters are neutral. Thank you for submitting, but this work doesn’t fit our needs at this time. Good luck placing it elsewhere. Sometimes, an editor will tell you that your work came close and invite you to submit again. This is considered an encouraging rejection and should not be lamented, but celebrated.

I make a point not to let a rejection bother me for more than five minutes. Nonetheless, I was a bit ticked off last year when I got the following letter in response to an anthology looking for published and unpublished “cool short stories.”

Thanks for submitting ‘Will This Be the Last Time.’ We appreciated the premise of a couple who tries to escape the U.S. to Canada, but we’re not sure this story fully committed that premise; in fact, as this story’s plot points unfolded, we weren’t quite sure what this story’s premise was. (To us, it felt a bit more like autobiographical fiction than it did like a well-plotted, tense, suspenseful short story–which is what we’ve promised our readers our selections will be.)

I’m sure these editors are patting themselves on the back for taking the time to offer feedback. And feedback can be useful in knowing how our work is hitting people—or isn’t. But if the goal for giving feedback is to help the writer improve, what could I possibly do with this comment? If a reader thinks the story’s premise is faulty, which is totally fair game, then they should take the time to say where they think it veered off course and what scenes or plot points made the premise confusing to them. Then as a writer, I can ponder those scenes with that feedback in mind and think about possible changes. And if that’s too much work for a submission editor, it’s fine to say the story doesn’t meet their needs.

And the last sentence! I take issue with the implication that autobiographical fiction is inherently bad, even though the only autobiographical elements in this story related to the fear I felt during the Trump years rather than any actual truth in my life.

And instead of saying something reader-centered at the end, like “Good luck placing this elsewhere,” this anthology ended its letter by asking me to follow them on Twitter because they need more followers.

A truly reader-centered rejection letter will often add the extra-nice element, saying, I know these decisions are subjective. Which they are. This story had already been accepted and published–amazingly by the first journal I sent it to, and it’s included in my upcoming collection, Immigrants.

What ticks me off the most is that this is the kind of letter that will send many rejection-sensitive people burrowing back into their dens, when they have so much beautiful writing that the world would be better for reading. So that’s why I’m highlighting this rejection, which, I admit, did annoy me for more than my allotted five minutes, and still rankles months later. Caveat scriptor—writer beware. If you get a letter like this, ignore it and keep writing—and submitting. In fact, add five extra rejections to your goal for the year. That’s I’m going to do.

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Re-Learning Kol Nidre–Yet Another Lesson in Piano Perseverance

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Many years ago, when my my younger child, Raf, was a teenager, they asked me to accompany them as they learned Bruch’s Kol Nidre, a composition based on the prayer  sung on the evening of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. My piano skills at the time were rusty, and what I remember was slogging through it, mostly making up easier versions of what was written in order to keep up. My ability to play by ear is a superpower. Though at times, it can also be a curse, as I’m not always that good at paying attention to the details of the music in front of me.

But the other thing I remember from that time is how much I LOVED this piece of music–how the harmonic progressions drizzled inside my skin and made me shiver. The dynamic markings are mostly piano and pianissimo (whisper soft), yet I wanted to bang them out, chime them like bells from high up on a sunny day. Even when I stumbled, I didn’t care; I just wanted to share the intensity and richness of the sounds. I had to keep reminding myself, this was a piece for violin–or traditionally, cello. The string instruments were the ones that were supposed to shine.

A couple of weeks ago, with Yom Kippur coming up and three years of daily piano practice now back into my fingertips, I decided to try to play this piece again. Maybe, it wouldn’t even seem very hard, now that I was back in my piano groove.

Well, it still is pretty wicked hard. But I’ve been practicing it every day, and it also still makes me shiver. And since there’s no violin player at home any more to shine it forth, I’ve been singing that part out loud as I play. Or sometimes, I play the violin part in my right hand while improvising a one-handed version of the two-handed piano line in my left.

And good news: I can read the notes much more easily than I could all those years ago. And mostly keep up with the long arpeggios without slowing down the tempo.

And more good news: Every day, the piece feels more fluid, an easier ripple off my fingers with fewer and fewer rocks in the way.

I just keep coming back to the hard parts and breaking them down, one measure at time, one note at a time, remembering the words of the Kol Nidre prayer: All vows and oaths you make from this Yom Kippur to next Yom Kippur are nullified. My mistakes are forgiven before I even make them.

And I’ve already accepted that I will not play this piece at the level I’d like by this year’s Yom Kippur, which starts Sunday night. Perhaps by next year. Perhaps not.

Still, it’s been good lesson in perseverance. And self-acceptance. And hope.

I hope you enjoy this version of Kol Nidre, played by cellist Jacqueline Du Pre and pianist Gerald Moore.

 

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Making Friends With Your Writing

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I’m glad I’m better at my relationships with humans than I am in my relationship with my writing. With humans, I’m loyal: I’ve been with my husband for over 40 years, and I have some dear friends who have been in my life for even longer. None of the people I’m close to are perfect, and none of these relationships have been bump-free. But, we work out our differences and I can genuinely love these people despite whatever frictional annoyances arise between us.

But my writing, that’s a different story.

Usually, when I first write something one of two things happen: (1) I dismiss it immediately as a ramble or rant, suitable only for my own cathartic release, and either file it in the folder marked “inactive” or don’t bother to save it at all, or (2) I fall hopelessly, madly in love with my words, convinced this is the best thing I’ve ever written, and perhaps the best thing ever written on the planet because what I had to say matters so much. The love factor generally lasts for 24-48 hours, enough for an intensely passionate hook-up before I look at the piece again and, at worst, wonder if it belongs in category #1, or at best, think… Meh…

So what’s a girl to do?

elisfkc from Orlando, FL, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

As enticing as the fairy-tale version of love, complete with handsome princes (or princesses) and happily-ever-after might be, it’s unsustainable. In writing, as well as in life. As with people, your relationship with your writing can be complicated. And it can change not only over the course of years, but also the course of moments, depending on your mood and your attitude. And if, like me, you struggle with keeping your inner well of self-criticism from flooding your being, it’s good to have a strategy.

For what it’s worth, here’s mine:

(1) When I totally love something I’ve recently written, it gives me pleasure to share it pretty immediately, breathing more life into it by reading out loud. My various writing communities are my best audience for this, but I’ve also occasionally shared a piece with close friends who understand the writing process. I make sure to tell them only to comment on something they liked or how the piece made them feel, not to offer any criticism.  

(2) After the initial surge of elation has passed, I put the piece in a file I’ve marked “Work On” and don’t look at it until at least the next day. Many writers I know recommend not looking at a first draft for at least 3-4 weeks, but I find that I sometimes lose or forget the energetic nugget of what I’m trying to communicate if I wait that long. In my next writing shift, I read the piece again as if someone else had written it and asked me for feedback. This helps me keep my own self-criticism somewhat tempered. I mark the places I like and the places that seem murky. And then I dig in and revise, writing notes to myself along the way like WTF are you trying to say here? 

(3) I repeat this process in every writing shift, reading as non-judgmentally as I can, and making revisions. Sometimes the revisions make me feel elated–Wow, that’s brilliant! I say to myself. And off it goes into the “Send Out” file. Other times, I say, this is so cliched, confusing, pedantic, etc. While this may sound like more self-criticism, it’s also when I know I’ve reached a point where I can’t bring the piece any further by myself. So I ask myself if the piece still has energy for me. If yes, I bring it to a writing group. If no, it goes to the “Inactive” file.

(4) Every few months or so, I go to the inactive file, and see what’s there. Surprisingly, under the chaff are always a few gems, some of which I don’t even remember. I wrote this? I say to myself, as I once again feel the energy in the words. Wow! Now I think I know what it needs. And off it goes again into the “Work On” file, en route, hopefully, to the “Send Out” file.

I’m glad that my process of managing friendships doesn’t involve these elements of selection and rejection (except for people I’ve recognized as toxic to my mental health or writing process). But even in relationships, sometimes a small break can be all you need to rekindle the flame to see the good in the people you love. It does seem to work that way with words.

 

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New York, New York

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I moved out of New York City more than 40 years ago. Yet, in my upcoming collection of short stories, 5 of the 14 are fully set in New York, and another 4 have back story that involves New York. In contrast, only one story is centered in western Massachusetts, where I’ve lived for most of my adult life.

This may not be significant. After all, I know many writers who prefer to write about fantasy worlds, and while I’m more of a realist, I’ve occasionally set fiction in places I haven’t lived or spent significant amounts of time. One could argue that I’ve taken the easy way out since I’m so familiar with New York geography and culture. But at this point in my life, I’m just as familiar (if not more familiar) with my area of New England.

Yet, while I feel gratitude every day for finding my little corner of paradise in western Massachusetts, it just doesn’t speak to me with the same verve and intensity as the place I spent my childhood and came of age as a young twenty-something. Perhaps because New York, for me, is the place of unfinished business. It’s impossible for me to think of my early life without the heavy layer of a nearly treeless concrete landscape infused with litter and noise, a place where I was taught early on to assume anyone I didn’t know was a likely threat to my physical safety. But these weighty aspects were balanced with ongoing excitement, a pulse of discovery of art, music, theater, poetry, and a melange of multicultural experiences that dominated my life from the time I became a teenager and was able to go to museums and shows and restaurants with my friends. The city was my personal playground, and there was always something new to taste, or feast my eyes and ears on.

Sculpture on the High Line

Last weekend, my husband (whom I met at a poetry reading at a 5th floor walk-up in Greenwich Village) and I took my visiting niece and her husband on a walking jaunt through Brooklyn. As we navigated the crowds on the Brooklyn Bridge, my husband recounted the time some crazy friend of his decided to climb up on the cables to hang a political banner.

On the promenade I remembered going to see the fireworks, and how the cars on the expressway below came to a complete standstill to watch, then honked as if their lives were at stake a millisecond after the last blast. As we continued to walk to Prospect Park, we made sure to point out the general direction of the building I worked at when I was a VISTA volunteer in Brooklyn helping people deal with utility shut-offs, and the dumpy apartments we lived in when we first started dating. These weren’t the landmarks you’d find on the Michelin tour, but they are the stuff of scene–salient moments and memories of places from your (or your characters’) pasts.

There’s a scene in the movie, My Dinner with Andre, in which after listening to Andre bash New York in an endless dinner conversation, Wally takes a cab home through the city and notices that on every block he passes a place that he feels deeply connected to. That’s how I feel about New York, even after all these years away. You can take me out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of me.

And this is a good question to think about when developing fictional characters. What places do they care about and why? How has where they’ve grown up affected the way they interact with the world around them?

Perhaps I did take an easy way out in setting so much of my book in New York. I understand New York mindset and mentality, and I could bring up the flavor of neighborhoods and streets through personal experience, rather than having to do a lot of research. But I didn’t make that choice consciously, or for that reason. I’m still resolving the contradictions and ambiguities in my own “love-hate,” relationship with the city by zeroing in on how the city affects others, even if these others are creatures of my imagination.

 

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I Am Here

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Yesterday, as my husband and I took a walk on one of the unmarked bike trails on the Mount Holyoke Range, that dread feeling I get from being lost started to rise up. I could feel my stomach tightening, my heart beating harder, not from the mild ascent, but from the sense of not being sure where I was. Even though I’d taken this path several times and it’s always a longer trek than I anticipate before I reach the familiar red-blazed trail that leads to the parking lot, I started to worry that I’d taken a wrong turn and would be wandering in circles for the rest of the day before I found my way back.

Where am I? I frowned at a rock display, which I was sure I’d never seen before.

And then the answer came, soft and quiet:

You are here. 

Photo by Shel Horowitz

No divine voice–just my mind chattering back to itself. Nevertheless, it was a revelation. Instead of looking at this moment as confirmation that it was absolutely time to launch into full-blown panic, I could look at it as a blessing. Whether or not I was lost, I was here–in a spot worth finding, surrounded by moss-covered rocks, listening to a stream rippling in the distance.

In the Jewish tradition, the month that we are in (Elul–just before the new year) is a period of reflection, a time to seek forgiveness for “missing the mark” in our quest to be our best selves and to contemplate the obstacles that prevent our essential selves from shining through. As I gazed up at the sunlight slicing through the trees, I realized that the point was to be present with this moment, and each discrete moment, rather than focusing so much on the destination, or even on the next step of the journey.

When I practice hard parts in a piano piece my inner perfectionist has a blast chastising me for not being able to get a complicated or fast progression down smoothly. But when I really focus on slowing things down, listening to and enjoying the notes as I repeat them, and sometimes intentionally manipulating the rhythms or dynamics in order to zero in on what I’m doing, rather than to think about the passage as a link to the rest of the piece, eventually I can trick my fingers into learning. In other words, if I focus on the moment of the passage, rather than on the ways it’s impeding me in getting to my “destination,” I can often get a little bit closer to playing with more fluidity. And in writing, delving into “the moment” of where I’m at can give me a whole new level of appreciation and attention for a single sentence, or even the choice of a word.

Ten minutes after I had my “you are here–wherever that is” moment, I found myself at the familiar intersection at the head of the path. There was the red-blazed trail, with the broken v-shaped tree trunk and the pile of rocks that marked the fork. I’d never been lost! The path merely looked different, as it often does in varying seasons and periods of rain and drought. Maybe, if I continue to pay attention to the discrete moments of beauty it offers me, I’ll stop having those panic moments and can simply enjoy being “here.”

 

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