The Story Teller: Ruth Knafo Setton

Ruth Knafo Setton is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel The Road to Fez. Born in Safi Morocco, she is the recipient of literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and PEN. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies. Ruth is the Writer-in-Residence for the Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh University. She is working on a new novel and a collection of poetry. Ruth’s story “Living Between Question Marks” and poem “My Father Eats Figs” appear in the Bibliotekos collection, Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration.

~*~

            Every night for the past thousand years, under moon and stars in the Djma el Fnaa, the fabled square of Marrakech, a man tells a story. Wearing a white turban and djellabah, he stands in the center of a circle of people. Wide-eyed and rapt, they lean forward to catch his every word and see his every gesture. He is competing with the human circus in all its barbaric grandeur. Crowds stream past, drums pound, people dance, steam rises from food stalls, beggars wail, the snake charmer lures his six-foot python from a basket, the Berber pharmacist spreads his cures on a blanket, the henna woman tries to embroider your arms and hands with henna scrolls. Surrounding the magic circle of the storyteller are voices, a multitude of voices—beggars, vendors, the muezzin, singers, musicians, snake charmer, the crowd—yet his voice stands out.

I have watched the storyteller for hours as he weaves a web of magic around his audience. You don’t have to understand the language he is speaking to understand the power of story. All you have to do is listen to his voice, watch his eloquent gestures and you find yourself responding to the rhythm of his words, the dramatic pauses, the sense of tension and suspense he creates. Story is the answer and it is also the question.

Who are we? Why are we? What are we? Why do we want what we want? What is truth? What is true?

Story is you and me. Story connects us to each other and to the world.

            I am a storyteller. I tell stories to my students, I tell them to my children, I tell them with my pen—and in my daily life. When I write poetry I tell a story that pulses with images. At night I dream in story. When I see strangers I imagine stories. For me, always and forever, it comes down to our most ancient, necessary need: story.

*

            For my ninth birthday I received my first diary. The first words I wrote: “I want to be a writer.” This was the first time I articulated what I must have always known. It was always about words—and story—for me.

            When I was three, we left Morocco, where I was born, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. In America I received a hand-made gift: a picture book of the alphabet with an object illustrating each letter. A = Apple. B = Boat. C = Cat. That was the beginning of my love affair with English, a passionate love that has never waned.

            At age four, I sat on my mother’s lap as we puzzled through the first American picture book I brought home from the school library. We trembled as we opened the book to the first page. Flicka, Ricka and Dicka, pretty blonde triplets, smiled back at us, beckoning us into their black-bordered world where nothing evil could enter, no djnoun or rampaging mobs, no shrieking nightmare figures or serpents with human heads. For the moment, we were safe. What my mother didn’t know, what I already kept secret, was that I was not simply pointing out words, I was pressing and digging my index finger into the illustration, trying to penetrate the black borders of the story world and find the doorway that led from this world to the other world.

            That desire has never changed. Okay, so my finger wasn’t powerful enough to transport me from one world into another, but my imagination did the job with ease. I’ve always tried to bridge the world in which I live and the world in which I dream—with my reading and my writing.

            As I grew up, books were my food and air, their authors my earthly and spiritual guides. I read indiscriminately, haunting old book fairs, cracking open dusty volumes with inscriptions that offered glimpses into other lives—and connected me with people of other times and places. My fourteenth summer, in particular, was an orgy of passionate encounters. By day I flirted with neighborhood boys as I rode my bike, swam in the local pool, sneaked cigarettes in the evening and chased fireflies. By night I huddled under the cover with a flashlight (not to wake my sister) and let Colette, Isak Dinesen, Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Halliburton and the Brothers Grimm wrap their winged arms around me and fly me to lands that made me tremble and cry. Afterwards I collapsed in bed, shut my eyes and dreamed. My dreams were mini-series (the budding novelist) and cliff-hangers, sagas of adventure, mystery and romance. In the morning I awoke, dazed, reddened and exhausted. Like the twelve dancing princesses, I felt like I’d danced all night in an otherworldly kingdom. I already knew I wanted to be a writer, but that summer I decided I wanted to create magic with my pen. I wanted to transport my readers to a dream-land they never wanted to leave. 

            I read constantly, hundreds of books a year. Words are still my sustenance. This past year I’ve discovered the gorgeous world of contemporary young adult fiction. I’ve been on a reading binge … loving the dark bittersweet chocolate of The Hunger Games trilogy; the tart lemon of Incarceron, and the even tarter, almost sour sequel Sapphique; the gorgeously imagined Graceling and Fire; the spicy cider of Jellicoe Road; the lush Hush, Hush; the coolly frightening worlds of Matched and Across the Universe, and so many more…. It’s a cornucopia of riches, a feast. Reading them, I am fourteen again, dreaming of a world of infinite possibility, enchanted gardens of unimaginable beauty and horror, love so passionate it transcends death. I’m also teaching a young adult literature course this spring, which allows me to read more.

And yes, I’m writing a new novel that can be called young adult. It explores the power of myth in modern-day life, particularly myths of female power, through the eyes of a sixteen year-old girl. This new novel is profoundly inspired by a recent Mediterranean voyage during which I sailed and taught on a ship that stopped in Athens, Rome, Naples, Istanbul and Casablanca, among other ports. The experience of wandering through ancient-new cities while feeling the weight and timeless presence of history and myth was very moving on many levels. I was returning to my roots, retracing the voyage my parents made when they sailed from Tangiers through the Strait of Gibraltar, and across the Atlantic to New York City. This new book is set in contemporary America, but it goes back to our most ancient stories, myths, rituals, human dreams and yearnings.

I’m also working on a collection of poetry, several memoir-like essays, and the revision of my novel, Darktown Blues.

*

            While raising three children and working fulltime, I trained myself to write while changing diapers, packing lunches, helping with homework, doing private tutoring, and teaching in elementary schools and universities. Like Hamlet, I learned to find “eternity in a nutshell.” When people ask me, ‘How could you write with three children?” I tell them, “I couldn’t have written without them.” My children—and my family—taught me not only to be disciplined in the pursuit of my goal, but also to discern between what is important in my life, and what can fall by the wayside.

            It took me nearly seventeen years to write and publish my first novel, The Road to Fez. A coming-of-age novel that explores the interweaving lives of two Moroccan-Jewish girls, one fictional and the other, the legendary Suleika. A beautiful seventeen year-old Moroccan-Jewish martyr, Suleika refused to renounce her faith and was beheaded in Fez in 1834. In over 300 versions of her story, Suleika represents the shifting mirror of the Jew, particularly the Jewish woman, in the imagination of Muslims in pre-colonial Morocco and European Romantics. Spaniards and Frenchmen wrote plays about her tragic, mysterious life. Jews and Arabs prayed side by side at her tomb in the Jewish cemetery of Fez. As I pieced together the puzzle of her life, I realized she was a figurehead who stood on the border between Africa and Europe, Judaism and Islam, tradition and modernity, women and men, sacred and profane. Who was this girl who bridged so many worlds? And why would a young girl choose death over life? To me the subject was profoundly fascinating and disturbing with no easy answers, exactly what one hopes for from literature.

I rewrote the novel at least five times, trying to squeeze Suleika’s life into a semi-coherent narrative, the way I tried to squeeze mine, eliminating the hyphens and inconsistencies in my own identity, immigrant memories, dreams and longings that made no rational sense, the search for a home that didn’t seem to exist in daylight, the key that unlocked my grandparents’ house in Morocco, and even earlier, the house we had abandoned in Spain during the Inquisition. In my search for Suleika I discovered my own family: rabbis, Kabbalists and philosophers—and a grandfather who composed poetry in Classical Arabic and played his oud on a roof terrace against the sea wind. I faced constant discouragement and received enough rejection letters to wallpaper my room, including one so painful it was almost funny—yet it paralyzed me for several years: “You write well. Next time try writing about the real Jews.”

But I picked up my pen and notebook and soldiered on. There was no other way.

*

I write every morning, a cup of coffee in one hand, pen in the other. I write by hand in sketch books—no lined pages, no computer screen—nothing but my pen painting the white pages. The act of writing is intensely physical and sensual, and deeply personal as well. I hug this private world I’ve created between the covers of my notebook and keep it intimate and mine for as long as I can—until the story threatens to burst from the notebook. Then I type it up. That’s the movement from personal to public. That’s when I can edit, see clearly (at least more clearly), and share it with the world.

I write poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Poetry has taught me the importance of each word and how to speak in the language of images: a wreath of yellow butterflies, a killer jewel, a sunken stone library, a block of ice colliding with the Old World…. Fiction, on the other hand, knows that the image, no matter how breathtaking, is never enough: we need the story. We crave narrative momentum, suspense, desire. When I write, my poetic and fictional impulses collide, struggle, interweave. My nonfiction attempts to see the pattern, to discern the method in the madness.

As I write I am like a detective searching for clues. I don’t know the solution, I don’t even know exactly what the mystery is about, but I do recognize a clue when I stumble over it. I pick it up and examine it in the light. And that leads me to the next clue. A detective groping in the dark, bumbling and blind, yet given moments of grace: a door blows open, light shines on a hidden path, a whispered word lures me around the corner. I have no idea where it will lead but I’m up for the adventure.

Every morning you can find me, pen in hand, working on a story or poem or essay. The shadows of palm trees sway over the pages of my notebook, even though I may be writing in wintry Pennsylvania. I hear the storyteller’s resonant voice, see his gestures and watch the enchanted faces of the audience. With the power of his story he has drawn a black border that guards and protects: the magic circle Scheherazade drew night after night for a thousand and one nights. The sounds, smells, sights of the frenzied, chaotic Djma el Fna’a recede. Time holds still.

Once upon a time … and they lived happily ever after. What a story lies between those words! Listen.

Text and Images Copyright c. 2011 by Ruth Knafo Setton

“Stitching and Unstitching” - The Life of a Writer: Anne Whitehouse

We are quite pleased to share an extended Interview with poet, fiction writer, and author ANNE WHITEHOUSE.  Anne has been writing in multiple genres for her entire life - has been developing her craft for a lifetime - and if you are familiar with her work (if not, read some of her books), what she says here will offer insights into her origins as a writer. We are impressed with how Anne continues to challenge herself as a writer and mature as a poet. The life of a writer, as W.B. Yeats describes work in “Adam's Curse,” is one of stitching and unstitching, penciling and erasing - the toils of the writer are for the benefit of the reader.

~*~

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer? As soon as I learned to write, when I was about five or six, I used to create illustrated stories with ballpoint pen or pencil and sometimes with crayon. When I was about nine years old, I wrote longer stories in installments that were read by my younger sisters and my friends. At the age of 16, I read Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Snow Man.” The triple use of the word “nothing” in the last stanza made me want to write poetry.

Why do you write? Writing begins in desire and need. I write because I feel incomplete without writing. I write out of a love for literature, reading, language. I write to convey what is authentically mine. I write because of a wish to create something durable and permanent from evanescent experience.

Is being a writer/poet anything like you imagined it would be? It never gets any easier to face the blank page or the blank screen. I thought it might get easier over time, but it really doesn’t. That said, I also write because I love to play with words. For me, writing is rewriting.

What do you think makes a good story? I find it satisfying when the story coheres and comes together on the immediate narrative level and on deeper, symbolic and thematic levels. I am more of a character than plot-driven writer; character is what interests me. I am a student of human nature and a close observer. I try to understand what motivates people. I look for the context. My undergraduate major was Social Studies, an interdisciplinary major in the social sciences. I am interested in psychology, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology. I have also loved myths from a very young age. I was raised on the Bible and Greek and Roman myths. As I grow older, they seem ever more mysterious and inexhaustible. I love literature that incorporates these elements in different ways. For example, James Joyce’s Ulysses has been a favorite of mine for many years for the ways in which he recreates and retells a myth for modern times. His mind is so fertile and his ear is so musical that I continue to delight in his writing, no matter how often I reread it. I also love and revere Kafka, whose writing is more profound in the sense that he creates his own myths. His writing is mythical, allegorical, endlessly suggestive and allusive. I love the major novels and especially I love the stories and tales about small animals and freaks. I admire the way in Kafka that nothing is quite what it seems, and yet his prose is so tactile, so focused and pared down on the sequence of events he is depicting. It develops logically, one thing leading to the next, yet the result is anything but conventionally logical.

What's your favorite genre to read? I have eclectic and catholic tastes. I will read anything that is printed, including cereal boxes when nothing else is available. I love literary fiction, memoir, poetry, history, and biography.  I love art and photography. I love books on natural history. I have worked as a book reviewer for many publications; my bibliography is available on my website.

Who is your favorite author or poet? There are so many I love. I feel a little bit like Roberto Bolaño (another writer I love) as I start to compile a long list of beloved writers. In addition to Joyce and Kafka, mentioned above, I would add Shakespeare (of course), Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Baudelaire, William Butler Yeats, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, John Donne, William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron, Stendhal, Horace, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Marquez, Albert Camus, Yasunari Kawabata, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Leo Tolstoy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, T.S.Eliot, Oscar Wilde. I love Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë (I like Jane Eyre better than Wuthering Heights), Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Mansfield, Shirley Hazzard, Bruce Chatwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Machado de Assis, Marianne Moore, Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, Pablo Neruda. Writers I love that are somewhat forgotten and deserve to be better known include Iris Origo, Katharine Butler Hathaway, Isabel Bolton, Virginia Hamilton Adair.

I was a tremendous reader as a child; children’s literature is still very important to me. Children’s writers I love (from my own childhood and my daughter’s) are Robert Louis Stevenson, Laura Ingalls Wilder, J.K. Rowling, Louise Fitzhugh, George MacDonald, Noel Streatfield, Rosemary Wells, E.B. White, A.A. Milne, Andrew Lang, Maira Kalman, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Hugh Loftis, L.M. Montgomery, L. Frank Baum, Frances Hodgson Burnett.

There are lots of writers I love selectively (in other words, I love some of their works)—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene O’Neill, Graham Greene, Susan Sontag, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Gustave Flaubert, D.H. Lawrence are a but a few.

There are writers whom I once loved but have not read in decades, and I need to rediscover them again. That includes Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville—these are writers one has to feel willing to grapple with. I hope to once again, but I am not ready quite yet.

There are some writers I love for one book: Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird, Ralph Ellison for Invisible Man, Anne Frank for her Diary, Tobias Schneebaum for Keep the River on Your Right, Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag.

I think the generation of poets born in the 1920s and early 1930s was an extraordinary generation—better than my generation. To name a few: James Merrill, William Merwin, A.R. Ammons, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Robert Bly, Jane Cooper, Philip Levine, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Anne Sexton.

Some contemporary writers I’ve read in the past year or so with great pleasure include Donna Tartt, Roxana Robinson, David Moolten, Lewis Hyde, David Castronovo, Alexander Chee, Valerie Martin, A.E Stallings, Ben Macintyre, David Benioff, Alison Light, Garry Wills, Erika Dreifus, Bob Zellner, Joseph O’Neill. I am riveted by Malcolm McDonagh’s plays.

What books or stories have most influenced you the most as a writer? Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves inspired my novel Fall Love. I already mentioned the effect Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” had on me. I think that writers aren’t aware of their influences at the time that they are being influenced. I think that if one is aware of the influence, then it’s not really an influence. It might be a model. But influences are more mysterious and unconscious. One only knows in retrospect.

What books or stories have most influenced you as a person? As a child, I had The Golden Book of Greek Myths. I vividly recall my shock when I first read the story of Oedipus. And the truth is, every time I read it, I still feel the shock. What a story! Writing doesn’t go any deeper than that. The Biblical story of Joseph is another one. The family is the basic human social structure, and our deepest conflicts and yearnings; our desire, terrors, and taboos, go back to it. 

In a larger context, The Iliad has never been surpassed as the great story of war and society and capricious fate. As Simone Weil wrote in her wonderful essay, “Its bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjections of the human spirit to force. This subjection is the common lot, although each spirit will bear it differently, in proportion to its own virtue. No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is.”

Where/how do you find the most inspiration? I find inspiration wherever I can. One cannot will inspiration to come, but one must allow oneself to be receptive enough to recognize it. It’s a certain kind of attention, a readiness. I think it gets harder and harder every day as our attentions are fragmented and scattered. We’re supposed to pay attention to so many things at once. We’re in touch with everything and everyone but ourselves. It’s hard to go deep, to concentrate. I’m as guilty of the above as anyone else. Some days my mind can’t seem to settle on anything. Yoga and meditation help me to create a welcoming space, a willingness to receive inspiration with a proper sense of awe.

When I am trying to work out something in my writing, and I feel stuck, I try to focus my mind on it before falling asleep. Sometimes it works. When I was taking calculus in high school, I used to figure out math problems this way. I’d have the answer when I woke up. I don’t always have the answer now, but sometimes it helps.

What does your family think of your writing? My husband Stephen Whitehouse says, “I am very proud of my wife’s writing.” My 18-year-old daughter Claire says, “I like my mom’s writing, and I am proud of it.”

What is your work schedule like when you're writing? I start each day reading over what I worked on the previous day or previous few days, in order to get me back into the right mindset. Sometimes I move back and forth between several things I am working on; some days I put all the effort into one thing I am working on. It all depends where I have an insight. I take notes for everything I do, and I refer to them.  I prefer to write in long, uninterrupted blocks of time. I am a social person but not when I am writing. I have found talking antithetical to writing. If I have to talk when I am writing, it breaks my flow of concentration, and it’s hard for me to get it back. This is hard on my family. I need solitude to write. Solitude can be found in a café full of strangers, but it’s not the family living room with everyone sitting around and the television on.

Do you have any writing quirks or rituals? I don’t do my creative writing sitting at a desk. I sit at a desk at my job, and I sit at a desk at home when I am paying bills and the like, but when I am writing poetry or fiction or anything creative, I usually sit on a comfortable seat. Or I like to sit on the floor. Often I like to spread my legs out in front of me or tuck my legs under me.  I like to be physically relaxed and comfortable when I am writing. 

Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing? Sometimes, in fiction more than in poetry, I write myself down a wrong direction, and I have to discard writing that has taken me weeks or even a couple of months. It can be hard to let go of it, but it is absolutely necessary. You’ve got to be ruthless. In order to write fiction, I have to be able to visualize my characters clearly. It sounds easy, but for me it’s not. I begin with ideas about my characters, but it takes a while before I know them. Knowing my characters, working out their stories, is what keeps me going and what I care about in writing.  If I know everything in advance, I can’t write the story.  If there is nothing for me to discover in the process of writing, then the writing will be dead; it will lack suspense.

I read in amazement of writers who are able to plot their stories out completely and then go back and write them. They make it sound like filling in the blanks, so much easier than my struggles. I know some very good novels have been written this way, and I’ve tried to do it, but my mind draws a blank. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. I’m still trying. Sometimes I wish I were a different kind of writer, but I have to use the gifts I have and be grateful for what I’ve got.

Many writers, I among them, take comfort from Henry James: “We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

What are your current projects? I’ve recently completed the first volume of a two-volume novel about a Southern Jewish family in Birmingham, Alabama, called Rosalind’s Ring. It’s set in the 1950s and early 1960s. The first chapter can be read on the Santa Fe Writers Project Journal. I’ve completed a new volume of poems, The Refrain, almost all of which have appeared in literary magazines (linked on my website).

What are you planning for future projects? About a half-dozen of my short stories have recently appeared or will be appearing in literary magazines or anthologies, and I am planning to put together a book-length collection. I am also working on a new collection of poems. I am beginning the novel that will follow Rosalind’s Ring. And I have a couple of other irons in the fire that I am not ready to talk about yet.

Do you have any advice for other writers? Whatever subject you choose to write about, be sure that it interests you enough and you care enough about it to devote yourself to it the way that you’re going to have to. There’s no doubt about it, the practice of any art requires a great deal of sacrifice. It’s hard for people who don’t feel that need and passion to understand why anyone would give so much effort and love and time—at the expense, often, of one’s family and friends—to what seems to offer back so little, certainly in terms of a financial reward. In the end you’ve got to please yourself, or it’s not worth doing. It’s too hard, and it’s too demanding.

Don’t expect other people to understand why you write, not even people you love. For example, one of my closest friends invariably comments when my poetry is published, “I hope you made money on that, Anne.” I know she loves me and she means well; deep down, she wants me to make money on my poetry, because she doesn’t understand why else I would write it. Yet I can’t quell a sense of despair at her familiar comment. To demand of poetry that it be profitable is to burden a frail, delicate creature with such a weight that it can’t take off, much less fly.  I thank G-d that I don’t have to make a living from poetry; otherwise I couldn’t write it.

My fiction, alas, has proved to be as much a labor of love as my poetry. That’s the way it is, and I accept it. Society doesn’t value literature, not really. Or else, there’s no telling if society will value it. If society does value it, it’s probably for a reason other than a literary one.  As Yeats wrote in one of my favorite poems of his, “Adam’s Curse:”

A line may take us hours maybe

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather,

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.

I often reflect that the literature that has been passed down to us is what has survived arbitrarily. There may well have been other, greater works that we will never know about, because they were destroyed and their authors forgotten. Think about the tales of Kafka, or Anne Frank’s diary--how easily they might not have survived.  One might indeed invent a hypothetical catalogue of destroyed literature. Perhaps this is something Borges wrote about. It sounds like a Borgesian idea. I hope I’ve written something that will survive in some way, but I feel properly humble. As I wrote of my character Althea, an artist, in Fall Love: “...if the thought of leaving a couple of items to a catalogue of thousands didn't daunt her, then perhaps she deserved to have something survive.”

My last bit of advice is practical. Make sure you get enough sleep and are well rested. Writing is a huge mental effort. Some of it is frustrating. You are creating something that was not there and has never existed. You have to stick with it day after day, abiding with it. When my writing has gone well, my mind feels great afterwards, as if it’s gotten a lot of exercise. Some days, on the other hand, it’s hard to accomplish anything. Yet I’ve also come to realize that the frustration is part of the writing process and often precedes the insight. I try to be patient with myself and give myself permission to follow my instincts and inclinations. And if it’s not working, I don’t force it. I do something else, anything else, even dusting the bookshelves.

Something to add: Like Stephen Sondheim in his wonderful book about creating musical theater, Finishing the Hat, I regard teaching as a sacred activity. I was a dedicated and determined student, and I taught for many years, both adults and children. I feel fortunate in having had some wonderful teachers who helped me, inside and outside of the classroom. I am grateful to them all.  At its best, education shapes who we are and helps us to live. Once we have it, it can’t be taken away. I’ve written about two wonderful teachers outside of school who influenced me as a child, Miss Don and Miss Praytor. I had some excellent teachers at Mt. Brook High School. Harvard was a revelation and a transformative experience for me. At Columbia’s graduate writing program, I came into contact with some amazing writers and began to think of myself as a writer as well. As an adult, I would like to credit the remarkable Eleanor Worthen, to whom Fall Love is dedicated, for teaching me how to edit fiction.

Where can we find your work? Please go to my website, www.annewhitehouse.com

Here I would like to credit the publishers I’ve worked with recently: Poetic Matrix Press, Finishing Line Press, Editions Bibliotekos, Modernist Press, Atticus Books online, and the many literary magazines that have been so supportive of my work. Links are on my website. And thanks to Anzelina Okarmus Coodey, who designed my website, and Ginger Nagy, who keeps up the website and designed my last two book covers. I’m also grateful to Joe Milford for his labor of love on his poetry show, which featured me: The Joe Milford Show and all of those who love literature and labor for it.

My novel FALL LOVE can be downloaded as an ebook free of charge from Feedbooks  and Smashwords  or for Purchase or as KINDLE edition. 

Some other, recent titles, include:

Bear in Mind (Finishing Line Press, 2010), poetry chapbook.

Blessings and Curses (Poetic Matrix Press, 2009), full-length book of poetry.

Poems in the anthology, Pain and Memory: Reflections on the Strength of the Human Spirit in Suffering (2009).

Copyright c. 2011 by Anne Whitehouse

All Rights Reserved

Battle Runes - Writings on War





BATTLE RUNES: Writings on War is now available. (28% off list price - Barnes & Noble online! - ask about our discounts!)  The book consists of twenty-one authors – thirty-seven works (short stories and poems) from all over the world – writing about the physical and psychological ravages of war on individuals and families.  Parts of the book are shocking and horrifying, but in the end there is hope.

In the PREFACE, publisher Fredericka Jacks writes: “Battle Runes opens in a child’s voice and ends with a child’s concern; the book begins in horror and terror and ends with care and hope; the collection starts in darkness and ends in color. The stories and poems – while focused on war – include private and public spaces, often addressing family relationships, such as those between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, or parents and children. While there is blood in these pages, the emphasis is on the complex psychological dimensions of war.”

In her FOREWORD, Professor Wendy Galgan, Ph.D. (English Dept., St. Francis College, NY), says: “These authors possess the remarkable ability to allow the reader to see what they see, to take an unsentimental and painfully clear look at what war – fighting it, witnessing it, surviving it – does to human beings. We experience war and its aftermath through the eyes of victor and vanquished, infantry and insurgent, parent and child. . . . . We are there, witnesses to each battle, observing not from the safety of the sidelines but from the very middle of the action. We watch as soldiers return home to struggle with both the physical and emotional aftereffects of warfare. And we experience the fear of civilians watching their world crumble beneath the machines of war.”

Contributors:

Muhammad Ashfaq; Thom Brucie; John Gifford; John Guzlowski; Alamgir Hashmi; Margaret Kingsbury; Geoffrey A. Landis; Mitch Levenberg; Hunter Liguore; Mira Martin-Parker; Rebecca Newth; Norah Piehl; Nahid Rachlin; C.R. Resetarits; Nancy Riecken; Dawn Sandahl; Lisa L. Siedlarz; Lisa M. Sita; Patty Somlo; Marko Vešović; Jenny D. Williams.

Contributor Awards and Honors:

Nominations: Pulitzer; Georgia Author of the Year; Bakeless Award (Bread Loaf); Pushcart Prize; Best New Poets Anthology.  Won: Illinois Arts Award for Poetry; Hugo and Nebula Awards; Rhysling Award; Honorable Mention Award; IFWG Story Contest; NEA Grant; Arkansas Arts Council; Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship; Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford); Bennet Cerf Award; PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award; Leo Connellan Award; Ross Feld Award; StorySouth’s Million Writer’s Award; Solas Award; Rockefeller Fellowship; The Roberto Cellini Memorial Award

ISBN: 978-0982481943. 186 pages, paperback. January 2011. $15.95US. Amazon/B&N online – Ask your local Bookstore (Distributed by Ingram). Google e-Bookstore (future).

Finding One's Muse: Ruth Sabath Rosenthal

In our effort to give you the face behind the author and the person behind the author, let us introduce you to Ruth Sabath Rosenthal. We had a chance to get some quick answers from poet Ruth about her work. This is not a full-fledged interview, but rather a sketch of a poet in motion. Ruth has had many poems published widely over the past decade, and her first chapbook, “Facing Home” has just been published by Finishing Line Press.

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* On Beginning.

I first considered myself a writer when I purchased my first computer and learned the basics of Microsoft Word, followed by my signing up for a poetry class at the 92nd Street Y in NYC and the rest is history. This was in the year 2000.

* On Inspiration.

I think my true inspiration came from the fact that, although my mother was not a lover of poetry to the point of reading it or keeping it around the house, she did however make it known that she loved one poem “Abou Ben Adhem” by Leigh Hunt. I must have heard her recite it or she showed it to me. That was the only connection to poetry either she or I had, and that was 40 years or so before I started writing and studying poetry. [Ruth also tells us that she gets inspiration from her dog, Sweetie-Pie, pictured here.]

* On Ideas.

My ideas come from life experience—mine and those around me and those in the world at large—the joy, the suffering, the humor and optimism.

* Where a Good Poem Comes From.

I believe that a good poem comes from truth, whatever that truth is—ugly or pretty, sad or happy, serious or funny, and even if that truth is bent to protect someone.

* Concerning Messages in Writing.

I’d like my readers to come away with, after reading my poems, a feeling of being familiar with me, of having shared in an experience that touches them and feels like what they’ve also at one time or another, on some level, experienced. I’d like them to laugh, shed a tear or two, maybe even read one of my poems more than once.

* Realism in Poetry.

My writing is truly rooted in realism, although I bend the truth and often project myself into a situation, as opposed to me revealing my own personal experience and view point. In other words, I’ll write as if I’m someone else—perceiving things as they do or would.

* Surprises in One’s Own Writing.

I surprise myself all the time. I’m often in awe of a poem I’ve finished working on. I don’t mean that to sound immodest, but I often feel that someone’s words are being channeled through me—someone with something profound to say. And I’ve heard other poets say the same thing. It’s a fantastic experience when it happens. And usually the poem comes fast and needs very little revision.

* Personal Favorites.

I have so many favorite poems I’ve written, but among them are those I regret having not kept to myself. I always worry about hurting someone’s feeling or besmirching the memory of someone who’s passed. I’m cognizant of this when I write, and may hold back because of it.

* Working Schedule.

I am blessed that I have a husband who is both supportive financially and who I can bounce poems off of. He has a good ear although he’s not a poet or writer. Being so fortunate, I write whenever I feel like it and seem to go through spurts of productiveness.

* Types of Poems.

Some would call them “confessional” but I don’t like that term. I write some formal poems such a Sestinas, Villanelles, Sonnets, but mostly I write poems that, though in stanzas, are not in form, and their rhymes run throughout the poems, as opposed to end-rhymes.

* Great Influences.

First, I have to say that I don’t read enough. I need to be in a quiet place, both physically and mentally to do that. And when I do read, it’s always out loud, as hearing the words is essential to me. I love the masters like Yeats, Frost, Whitman, Stevens, Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, May Swenson, but then again, I do read today’s poetry from time to time.

* Reading Now.

At present, I’m not reading. But when I start up again, you can be sure I’ll be writing, because I can’t seem to read for more than an hour or so, when suddenly I am compelled to write. I guess I’m easily inspired and quite impressionable.

* Upcoming Projects.

I plan to publish a series of chapbooks and I’m currently finalizing a full-length manuscript, working with a publisher.

* Current Work.

My current work is much like the poems in my chapbook just recently published by Finishing Line Press, titled “Facing Home.” The subject matter of my current poems is not much different than that of the poems I wrote at the beginning of my writing career, back in 2000. What’s changed is my crafting of poems—I’ve learned so much over the years and have honed my craft to the point of having a strong voice and style.

Copyright 2010 by Ruth Sabath Rosenthal

Garden of Verses: Rebecca Newth

Rebecca Newth is a poet (five books of poetry) and fiction writer. She has also written Milk Horses: A Memoir as well as a play. She has just finished a new book about time travel and friendship during the Civil War for third and fourth graders. Her favorite subjects for writing are our current predicament, nature, and people. She has been awarded an NEA prize and a Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council to work on a novel. Born and raised near a lake in Michigan, Rebecca lived for many years in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Rebecca now lives near two lakes, and she writes about fluid things, redemption, grief, and cherished places. We recently sent Rebecca some questions, and what follows are her responses – with some insightfully poetic lines included. Rebecca’s latest book (Fall 2010) is The Pass-Key (Will Hall Books)

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When I was eleven, I began looking at A Child’s Garden of Verses to find out how poems are made. It was hard to convince my parents, even when little poems started to get published, that I would be a poet. My mother was practical, getting rid of needless things, and didn’t give me a middle name because it would be extra when I got married. She was proud of me but not a writer in her heart and my father was a saxophone player. My husband’s brother is writer Jim Harrison, and when I got a poem published he said, “Well!” as if he were pleased and that was nice. We were all at Michigan State. My husband was not a writer but rather a facilitator, a librarian, which fits. I think being sad and uncomfortable caused me to write. Also I think seeing the lake where we went on weekends, so beautiful, made me write.

I do not know any rich people, was that one of your questions? – No, it wasn’t, but in the sixties I once knew that Dan Gerber thought my poems were written by an eccentric lady in Cambridge with beads around her neck. He had wondered what kind of person wrote them and was almost the first person to accept my work for publication in a journal called Sumac, printed in Michigan.

In the seventies we lived in Connecticut and met James Laughlin of New Directions Publishing. He gave us one sheep, which we put in our VW bus and brought home. I can barely believe any of that happened. My husband called him “boss” and offered to write the bibliography. Last year I finished it – a massive list of all the books published. Would that be four decades late? At least I finished. But of course meeting the man who established New Directions and published Tennessee Williams and Dylan Thomas and brought to our country those books from other countries in the black and white covers – books like Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca and Rainer Maria Rilke – was an incredible jolt. We went into his “basement” where the copies were housed. We tiptoed.

In the eighties we moved to Northwest Arkansas thinking it was out in the country, but Sam Walton beat us to it. Because of Wal-Mart we have direct flight to Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and D.C. My husband was eager to start to work in a new, smaller college library, and I got snarled up in all sorts of endeavors such as going back to school (at first in Geology), working as a secretary in a law school, conducting interviews with authors on local NPR, and doing scholarly work on Marianne Moore and H.D.’s The Gift. When the college part of my life was over I felt lost, and I promised my mind I would take care of it. “I will find you things to read and to delight you,” I promised it.

My poetry has always been inspired by some unbelievably interesting or beautiful event. I have a rather odd mind, however, people tell me, and sometimes my poetry is oblique. I do not have trouble thinking up ideas although not all of them are good, or rather, I cannot handle them well. Often, also, a think I have a finished product when what I have is incomprehensible to others or merely notes.

My favorite story is one called “Milk Horses” from a memoir by that name. I am comfortable in my writing using the focus of being age eleven or so. That seems the optimum time to observe the world as a poet. I am sure that is not true about the writing of essays.

When I had young children I used to write at night in the kitchen under a hanging lamp. Later, when they were in school I wrote in the morning at a desk that overlooked an orchard. I usually keep another book near me for inspiration, and I read from it and that gets me going. I very much believe we learn from other writings. There is no way to progress without the writings that have come before us. I was very fond of a book by Merwin called The Lice. I am excited by words and sometimes as I am reading another author I let my eyes blur and I see one word for another and then I start to write with the odd word stuck in there to see what happens. I am interested in taking a poem and going all over it trying to start it in different places with different syllable counts and sometimes going from bottom to top. All this is to establish an immediacy and freshness.

Sometimes I wake up in the night thinking scary thoughts when I could be thinking glorious ones. I want to write about people in daily life in Crete – the shepherds, the bandits, the librarians, the heads of villages, the way to make raki. We went to Crete on sabbatical. All these details are the glorious things. I want to write a play about a church breakfast where the priest is excitable, the chef has a dark cloud over his head, and the choir drinks spiked mimosas and then goes out to sing the anthem.

I think poets are modern day prophets giving us the best they can of truth and beauty, sense and nonsense, requiems and evening prayers, prose. Poets (writers) need to be persons of enormous appetites and curiosity, and generous because we are asked to give. Even some tiny shred may mean a world to someone.

My latest book, published this fall, by Will Hall Books, 2010, is The Pass-Key, a book for younger readers. My models were Sounder and Huck Finn. I am working now on a book about the village in Crete.

Copyright c. 2010 by Rebecca Newth

Story Weaver: Patty Somlo

Patty Somlo tells here her story about becoming a story writer – and what a story. We are awakened emotionally and intellectually by what we read in these Profiles. Learning about a writer’s background, values, and beliefs really adds to an appreciation and better understanding of her stories. Patty has a book coming out 15 November: From Here to There and Other Stories (Paraguas Books). Be sure to support writers like Patty and small publishers by getting your copy!

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In my early twenties, I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico with my boyfriend, Marshall, who was working on a documentary film, and I started to weave. I had been drawing and painting for years but reached a point where I felt I had nothing to say in those media. The Navajo weaving I saw in New Mexico dazzled me, along with the light and amazing skies and landscape, and I attempted to capture that in some very rough, beginning work.

I was also teaching art at an alternative elementary school in Albuquerque and helping my boyfriend on two documentary films. The second of those films, Warpath Against the Devil, focused on Native American Pentecostal ministers. I traveled with Marshall and the rest of the crew to camp meetings on the Navajo reservation near Monument Valley, where Navajo and Jicarilla Apache ministers preached sermons to the beat of rock music that built to such a pitch that people – mostly Navajo women in their velvet shirts and long skirts – would get up and dance and speak in tongues, eventually falling on the ground and sometimes even fainting. I was so amazed by those experiences, I decided to write an article about it. I never got anything published but that experience led me to want to write more.

I thought the way to write was in a writing-related job, so I gradually worked my way into public relations, and eventually doing PR for a nonprofit organization. My work for The Institute for Food and Development Policy (also known as Food First), got me interested in issues surrounding world hunger and inequality, development and poverty. The organization published books and one in particular – about the dumping of banned pesticides in the developing world – got me interested in doing investigative journalism. I left the organization and started writing freelance articles, mostly investigative pieces, which led to a job as news editor for a weekly newspaper. A number of years later, after a pretty stressful year of researching and writing an investigative piece about the harassment of refugees from El Salvador by the FBI and the possible connections between the FBI and Death Squads in El Salvador, I went back to school and started studying poetry. A year later, I entered a creative writing program and started writing fiction.

Many of the ideas for my stories come from things I read in the news, or rather, my feelings about what is happening in the world, as reflected in the news. The craziness surrounding the debates over health care reform inspired me to write, “Emergency Room,” a story about a group of injured people waiting for medical attention that never comes. Political campaigns were the inspiration for my story, “Candidate of the Third Eye,” about a Gandhi-inspired, Indian-American candidate for governor, whose Policy on Right Living transforms him from a virtual unknown to the frontrunner.

I also get ideas from my own life – mostly from past memories. Having lived in Central America and fallen in love with the people, the landscapes and the culture, I often return there through stories. The landscape in my story, “Bird Women,” which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, is the mountainous, coffee-growing region of Nicaragua. One of the closest stories I’ve written to my real life, “Even with a Stack of Dollars,” was inspired by my former Nicaraguan landlady’s walking outside on unpaved dusty sidewalks in her backless, gold lamé high heels. My father, who commanded an Air Evac squadron in Vietnam, was the inspiration for my story, “Neither Sweet Nor Sour,” which will appear in the forthcoming anthology, Battle Runes: Writings on War.

I am drawn to stories about people I don’t normally meet in life and places I may never go. The best stories, to me, are ones that take a surprising – and sometimes magical – turn, in which ordinary people, especially the excluded, find unusual ways to cope and survive. Humor is an especially attractive part of good stories, in my view.

Part of what draws me to write is a need to find some hopeful solutions through art to the terrible problems I see in this country and throughout the world. Having grown up in a military family – moving every year or two and living in places from Hawaii to Frankfurt, Germany – I have an odd sense that I don’t really fit anywhere but that I have a connection to all types of people throughout the world. I don’t actually have a message I want to convey in my writing, other than having readers see some of the issues that get so distorted by politicians and the media in a more truthful and compassionate light. I wrote a series of stories, one of which appeared in Common Boundary, that focus on an undocumented Mexican immigrant. As the granddaughter of Hungarian immigrants who were once as denigrated as Latinos immigrants are today, I have a great respect and empathy for immigrants and write many stories about them.

My stories are almost always completely fictional. Some of the settings, as in “The Island,” are mythical places. I rarely am a character in my stories but my views do come through in how the stories play out. In my story, “A Nightly Interruption,” about an unlikely relationship between a Jewish and an Arab man, my view that people can get past stereotypes that cause hatred if they get to know one another comes through. I occasionally base characters – their looks or mannerisms – on people I know. In that story, the Jewish character’s looks are based on a friend and the Arab character’s mannerisms are based on my Turkish hairdresser.

I get up every weekday morning at 5:00 and write. Before I met my husband, I used to make my coffee and write in bed. Now, I make the coffee and write in our finished basement. For some reason, I like to have the light very low when I’m writing. I adore that first cup of coffee (dark French Roast) and love the little cave I feel like I enter when I write, so this is just about the happiest part of my day. After the initial session, I shower and have breakfast, and then go back and either revise a story, continue working on one, or look for places to submit. I’m usually working on several stories at once, and I jot down ideas all the time that I keep in a messy pile on my desk. When I run out of ideas, I pull something from the pile.

I don’t really have any favorite stories, but there are stories I continue to like, no matter how many times I read them. Mostly, I continue to like the stories in which I feel connected to the characters. That is the case for the main character, Hari Shiva, in “Candidate of the Third Eye.” I also like the two women characters in “The Island.” I especially like the characters of mine who have an innocence about themselves.

When I first started writing short stories, the characters and plots were pretty depressing. I suffered from undiagnosed depression for many years and I see now that my own despair came out in the writing. After years of therapy, meditation and yoga, the depression has eased, and my stories, while frequently focusing on serious subjects, have lightened up, many now including a great deal of humor.

My favorite short story writer and the writer who I think has most influenced me is the late Julio Cortázar. Cortázar loved jazz, and his stories feel like improvisations to me. He had his own style of magical realism, in which he looked at life almost as a child and took situations to their not so obvious conclusions. I feel like I see the world in the same way Cortázar might have seen it, and that might be why I like his work so much.

I tend to gravitate toward foreign writers more than American writers. I went through a long love affair with Latin American writers and now am enamored of many Indian writers. Salman Rushdie and Aravind Adiga are two of my favorites.

My other favorites are the Victorians – Charles Dickens, all three Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy. I keep saying I’m going to spend a summer re-reading all of Dickens, but never seem to find the time.

My first collection of short stories, From Here to There and Other Stories, will be published by Paraguas Books on November 15, 2010. So, I’m deep into the least fun part of writing – preparing to market the book. I am also working on new stories for a possible second collection. I am hoping to work on a series of creative nonfiction pieces about my relationship to beaches and how growing up as a military brat and continuing to move around as an adult, beaches have been a strange sort of home place for me.

Copyright©2010 by Patty Somlo

The Peripatetic Author: Janice Eidus

Do you know about Janice Eidus? You should – and if you don’t, here’s your chance to read about her. Janice has just published a new novel, The Last Jewish Virgin (Red Hen Press). What follows is a guest biographical Profile written by Janice, covering her early years in the Bronx, her literary influences, her themes, and what she's reading now.

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Although my Jewish atheist parents prided themselves on their rationality and secular beliefs, ours was nevertheless an irrational, volatile, secretive, and at times quite violent household. From a very young age, writing provided me with escape, not only from my unhappy family, but also from the Bronx public schools I attended in which indifferent, unprepared teachers did their best to stifle students' creativity and originality.

As an emotionally and intellectually hungry kid, my childhood reading and writing was all over the map. Louisa May Alcott showed me how to look deeply at the inner lives of female characters. I adored Noel Coward, who lived in a sophisticated, glamorous world so unlike mine, and I was influenced by him to write short, witty plays with dark undertones.

The Beats taught me how to rant and opine, and dig the rhythm of language, and I wrote free-form poems, emulating in particular Ginsberg's Kaddish and Howl. I felt I knew Ginsberg, the archetypal Jewish outsider from a dysfunctional family.

Patrick Dennis (author of Auntie Mame and Genius, among other books) inspired me to write manic-edged fiction featuring grande dames who were nothing like the often bedraggled, mah-jongg playing Bronx moms I knew.

Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis -- my parents' literary idols, and also major influences on me -- integrated their fiercely progressive values into compelling and imaginative -- sometimes risk-taking and innovative -- stories about decent, hard-working people, and I tried to do the same. (I still try to do this; if I have one concrete, unchanging goal as an author, this is it.)

My youthful writings, diverse as they were, reflected the writer I became -- a writer who prefers not to feel bound to one style or theme or message, a writer compelled to keep seeking new challenges, to try to "make it new."

So I wrote and wrote and wrote throughout my childhood and adolescence, never thinking much about getting published or earning money from my writing. Such goals seemed entirely unlikely from my vantage point as a kid in a Bronx housing project. I couldn't imagine becoming a "success" by any mainstream standards. I had a ferocious "me" versus "them" mentality, with them being anyone in authority. My rebellious, anti-authority streak influenced all aspects of my life -- creative, emotional, physical. (Of course, nowadays, as a mom and writer, I've become "one of them" myself, as Joyce Carol Oates says.)

Wild child or not, my drive and passion for writing didn't go away, and eventually I realized I wanted to be a "real" writer who reached readers beyond my own circle of rebellious, like-minded friends. So I applied to and was accepted by the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. It was there that I began calling myself a writer. For the first time, I was socializing with others also new to the writing world and forming writing identities. For the first time, I learned about literary magazines, literary agents, and prizes. I began submitting my work, and sometimes -- miraculously, it seemed to me then and seems to me still -- getting published.

Certain obsessions have always fed my work: a desire for social justice; the tragi-comic complexity of love in its many forms, including familial, romantic, and amongst friends; and the intersection and collision of classic myth and popular culture. I also love writing about the places I've lived: Manhattan, upstate New York, the Virgin Islands, the Midwest, California, Brooklyn, Mexico … I love traveling to new places, meeting new people, trying to make sense of cultures and customs that are at first unfamiliar. I'm drawn to understand that which feels different to me, and my reading choices reflect this: I read across landscapes, genres, gender, etc. And I'm always urging my writing students to do the same, to routinely expand their reading choices to include the works of writers much older and much younger than they are, writers of other races and religions, of the opposite gender, living in other parts of the world, writing in styles and with messages to impart that seem wholly unlike their own, although reading carefully and deeply will often reveal unexpected commonalities.

My two most recent novels are The War of the Rosens and The Last Jewish Virgin. The War of the Rosens is realistic, rooted in the autobiographical truth of my life, although not literally autobiographical. It takes place in a Bronx housing project and "stars" a left wing, Jewish family much like my own. It's told from multiple points of view: the Rosen father, mother, 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old daughter. While writing The War of the Rosens, I found that I needed to become each of my characters so that I could inhabit and express each character's particular voice and worldview. I also had to find a way to learn to love them all, as well as to forgive their imperfections, foibles, weaknesses, and even their cruelty.

My new novel, The Last Jewish Virgin (which I call my "Feminist Fashionista Jewish Vampire Novel") is rooted in contemporary New York City. It plays with reality and myth, and my intention is to subvert, honor, and tweak the traditions and tropes of the vampire myth, which I've long been fascinated by. The main character in The Last Jewish Virgin is Lilith Zeremba, a young woman determined to become a mega-successful fashion designer. Completely dismissive of love, lust, romance, and sex, she feels they all must wait until her career goal is met. Despite herself, she finds her true love in a totally unexpected way, replete with vampires, the supernatural, feminism, and a seriously funny exploration of contemporary Judaism.

I feel especially close right now to those two novels, as well as to the other writing I've done since becoming an adoptive mother of my beautiful daughter from Guatemala. Much of my recent work explores mother/daughter relationships, and the nature of adoptive, transracial families. (This includes my essay, "The Color of Cinnamon," which appears in Editions Bibliotekos' Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration.) Motherhood -- the complexity and the generosity of spirit it requires -- has helped me as a writer to merge the fiercely progressive and earnest side of myself with the playful, risk-taking side.

I wish I had a regular schedule, but mine is erratic: days devoted entirely to family, or doctors, or errands … or the business side of writing, or teaching … But throughout I burn with the desire to write. By nature, I'm very peripatetic, and so I love to write in cafes, hotel bars, diners, etc. I love being out in the world while at the same time feeling entirely alone and connected to my own work.

I used to do much of my best writing away from home at artists colonies such as Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I'm forever indebted to those colonies for providing me with the time and space to separate from the "real world," and to write uninterrupted and (almost) stress free.

In the writing I love to read most, I feel the author's passion -- for character, place, message … I love to see unbridled passion balanced by attention to detail; imagination balanced by keen logic; an original way of saying a universal and great truth. None of these are easy to do, and yet there are always new writers who figure out ways to "make it new."

I recently read a short story collection called Simpaticas: San Miguel Stories by Elva Treviño Hart, a child of migrant Mexican farm workers who's now a fiction writer and memoirist. I very much admire the way she tackles major issues of race and class in a deceptively simple style that's not simple at all. The stories all take place in the town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I own a home and live part time. It's a place I love deeply -- it's imbued with a complicated history and a thriving contemporary cultural scene. Not to mention that it's in the mountains and has spring-like weather all year round. While in San Miguel, I love writing the old-fashioned way, with notepad and pen, in the large, sunny sala of my house, while my husband takes long walks on the sun-splashed cobblestone streets, and my daughter attends a bilingual school where she sings songs about Tia Monica and learns to make tortillas from scratch.

At the moment, I’m reading Model Home, a novel by Eric Puchner, that takes place in the 80's and is set in the affluent world of Southern California, not so very far away geographically from San Miguel, and yet worlds away. It portrays one family's rude awakening from the American Dream. It reminds me a lot of Neal LaBute's dark, compelling film, The Joneses, in which characters played by Demi Moore and David Duchovny are nearly destroyed by their own materialism and greed.

I also recently finished A&R by Bill Flanagan, a novel about the music business. It's the third novel of Flanagan's I've read this year, so I guess I qualify as a bona-fide fan. I enjoy his wit, keen eye, and cynical-yet-ultimately-sweet insider's view of the world of pop culture, which he knows inside-out as someone who's been a top dog at both MTV and VH-1.

I've read some other wonderful books this year, including Bettina Aptheker's brave memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought For Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, an amazingly honest and insightful tale of growing up during the 60's in a family that was considered U.S. Communist Party "royalty."

Finally, inspired by The Last Jewish Virgin, I've been revisting lots of my most beloved vampire literature, including Bram Stoker's Dracula, a tale that for me never grows old. I've also reread Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, written in 1872, an extremely sensual tale of an irresistible lesbian vampire. And Keats' Lamia, about another vampire enchantress, this one heterosexual. And The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas, a terrific reinvention of the vampire genre about an intellectual anthropology professor/vampire seeking to understand his own nature.

And films, too -- Frank Langella in John Badham's sensual and intelligent Dracula … And The Hunger, a film in the tradition of Carmilla, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. And Near Dark, the best (perhaps the only!) vampire/Western horror film ever made. And The Lost Boys, the teen comedy/horror film that speaks as much to adults as teens.

As for outsider Jewish vampires pre-dating mine in The Last Jewish Virgin, there's Roman Polanski's comic The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck. Whatever Roman Polanski and I may not have in common, and clearly there's a lot we don't share, we apparently both take pleasure in creating fictional Jewish vampires.

Currently, I'm working on a number of things: a young adult novel that I like to describe as "Romeo and Juliet in Brooklyn -- with a Jewish twist," and an anthology related to living with and healing from illness, and stories and essays as they come to me, all surely drawn from one or another of the obsessions I harbor so lovingly.

* * *
Copyright©2010 by Janice Eidus

The Certainty of Uncertainty: Short Story writer Mitch Levenberg

Interview conducted and written by Chandra Persaud

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Levenberg is "A combination of Woody Allen and Franz Kafka." (Gregory F. Tague)

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The journey begins when the cover is pulled back and you land upon a page with a title that leaves you eager for more. Then, in just a few sentences you find yourself captured in a world of dilemmas, secrets, and tales as though these characters opened their doors and allowed you into their homes. “Welcome to the strange world of Mitch Levenberg.” The mixture of humor and surrealism, all compacted in a few pages, will either leave readers speechless but with a smile upon their lips or puzzled about the underlying meaning of the work.

Even before the tender age of 10, Mitch knew he wanted to be a writer. Enamored with George Washington, Mitch’s earliest memory of his writing was a biographical piece he wrote about this founding father. It’s not surprising that Washington was this author’s first subject given the fact that his father was, what Mitch calls, “an amateur historian.” His father loved to read and while he never read aloud, he would share his new discoveries with Mitch. “I remember my father being so focused upon what he was reading that he would block everything else out…I always thought he should have been a history professor and not a podiatrist,” laughs Mitch.

Growing up, Mitch kept much of his writing exclusively for his eyes. Perhaps, it was because “I was a little shy or embarrassed and so I never really showed my parents my work,” says Mitch. He also explains that conventions at that time did not consider writing as a career. “When I was growing up writing was viewed more as a hobby and an emphasis was placed on finding a real ‘job.’” While Mitch was very secretive about his writing in his youth, he did allow one person to enter the realm of his thoughts. Mr. Piorkowski was Mitch’s 9th grade English teacher and “was the most encouraging and supportive” individual of his writing at that time. It was in his class that Mitch wrote his first official poem, verses describing what the world would be like 10 years down the road. The assignment sparked a deep interest in poetry and soon Mitch went out and purchased a composition notebook, jotted down about twenty titles, and then created a poem for each title. It was here, at the age of 14, that Mitch realized he “wanted to be a writer more than anything.”

Mitch says, “Writers usually start out imitating other writers” and he was no exception. At the age of 10, Mitch found Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” riveting. In fact, Mitch engaged in a “reading race” with a fellow fifth grader, each reporting to the other how many pages of the book he completed each day. Although he cannot remember who won that race, Mitch was extremely impressed with “To Kill a Mockingbird” and was amazed that it was possible to configure such a plot. “That is perhaps my earliest memory of being inspired,” he says. In college, Mitch drew inspiration from writers such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Anthony Burgess, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway. While all these writers had a significant impact on him, Mitch identifies deeply with Kafka’s style of writing as well as his personal life. “I felt connected to him [Kafka] especially as a very young man from a Jewish family living in a big city, feeling alienated, having a dark vision of the world, a sense of foreboding, and yet personally [being] a prankster, a self-anointed comic, always maintaining a sense of humor, a sense of the absurd.”

Writing soon became much more than a hobby for Mitch. As he matured, Mitch realized that writing satisfied a deep yearning for expression, for human connection, for escape. Mitch describes his writing as an act of “submersion,” drowning in a world of characters that often experience circumstances that he knows all too well but who can sometimes take him to places he has never been. “Sometimes new emotions come up through my characters without me really knowing they are going to,” says Mitch. While he may know the ending of a story or have a good opening line, the journey before or after those points (respectively) is quite unknown to Mitch until he actually sits down to write. This unknown, this mystery waiting to be solved, is perhaps one of the most thrilling (and potentially frustrating) experiences for a writer.

In 1988, Mitch became a published author for the very first time. “The Cruller,” a short story surrounding a coffee shop whose balance is maintained by this pastry forever staying under a glass bowl, was published in Fiction. “The Cruller” conveys the message that change can sometimes be an upsetting factor in our lives; we are more comfortable, happier, with the known. While we may yearn for some kind of excitement, when our routines remain the same they bring a sense of serenity into our lives. His first published work gave Mitch a sense of joy and pride so much that he decided to drop out of graduate school (he would later return). “Whether or not it [his decision] was a mistake, I don’t know,” laughs Mitch, “but I always believed I would write the great American novel and who knows… it’s still not too late.”

Of all he’s written, Mitch’s favorite work is “The Cruller.” This may be so because it is the first work he’s written that was published and so he has a special fondness for it. Yet, another reason he feels connected to “The Cruller” is the fact that the short story is a reflection of a phase in his life. “In just a few pages it sums up what I thought about life up until that point,” Mitch explains. “The Cruller” is not the only story that made his favorite list. “Some stories I’ve grown to like” says Mitch. One of these stories is “Dyspnea,” a short story that has become much more meaningful to Mitch over time. The story follows a young woman, Dyspnea, who suffers from a breathing difficulty. However, Dyspnea’s life is about much more than just slow speech and gaps of silence. Her shocking past is revealed to her new love interest, the narrator, when he and Dyspnea attend Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ home. “I love that story because it has become more profound to me as I’ve gotten older. I used to think of it as dark humor and while it is that partly, it has really become much more than that. Now, I always tend to get choked up towards the end,” Mitch reflects. Another story that hits home for Mitch is “Vigo,” a tale based on an actual bus trip Mitch and his wife took from Portugal to Vigo, Spain. These stories and others appear in Mitch’s anthology of short stories Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants.

Mitch is also proud of the work he’s done where the subject is his father. A World War II veteran and voracious reader, Mitch’s father has been a source of inspiration for some of his non-fiction work. Originally named “My Father’s Stains,” but renamed “At My Father’s Table” for publication in the Common Review, Mitch says that the short story derives from him observing his father read at the dinner table. With a glow in his eyes and occasional laughs, Mitch recalls how his father would eat and read simultaneously, leading to his books being forever scarred with food stains. “When my father passed away a few years ago, I inherited all of his books. It was comforting to go through them and see the collection of food stains, mostly from meat sauces, he left among the pages.”

When he is writing, Mitch does not have a specific routine or habit. In fact, the author works best with positive stimuli or noise. “I find it difficult to sit down at a desk in a quiet room and write.” Some of his best work was produced sitting in the main office of a departmental division at NYU, surrounded by students, faculty, and conferences. Mitch likes to have music playing in the background when he is writing, and his favorite lyrics come from Bob Dylan. “He has been a tremendous influence on my writing, especially my poetry while I was in college.” Mitch even does some “BlackBerry writing.” While walking his dog, Mitch will spontaneously jot down some ideas or lines for a story on this gadget, occasionally “making sure my dog is not jumping on any joggers.” Mitch sums himself up as “the kind of writer who likes to close the shades while writing and only see the beautiful view behind the shades when I’m finished writing.”

Although Mitch does not know what genre his work falls under, he knows that his writing style differs vastly from a New York writer. “I don’t write very realistic stories with a lot of description and really complex relationships. I try to write sudden or flash relationships…I try to conflate life as much as possible…I try to create a unique world” explains Mitch. “I would say my writing fits under the quirky genre, if there is such a thing,” he laughs. Mitch also believes that his voice is an important vehicle that gives meaning to his work and which ultimately affects the way his work is interpreted. That is why Mitch loves every opportunity he gets to read his work to an audience.

Mitch hopes to share some humor with his readers and listeners. He believes that is it very important for each of us to accept and appreciate the humor and absurdity in the world. He thinks that a sense of humor makes living in this world much easier. “If we want to live and survive in this world, we have to know how to laugh,” says Mitch.

The author is currently working on a play that he started this past summer. Entitled Ellipsis, the play is based on “a series of interviews with a woman of power who becomes involved in an ‘elliptical’ relationship with her interviewer,” explains Mitch. While he finds writing a play to be more difficult than writing a short story, he is enjoying the challenges and rewards of the process.

When he is not writing for his blog, mlevenberg.blogspot.com, Mitch is rewriting or revising work that he has put aside. When he is not writing, Mitch says he is “agonizing about not writing” and when he is not agonizing, he enjoys reading and playing with his dogs. Mitch says he would have loved to be an actor or stand-up comedian, but he is more than satisfied with life as he knows it. He currently serves as Director of the Academic Enhancement Center at St. Francis College and teaches writing there as well. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, whom he calls one of his biggest fans and “loving” critic, and his daughter who at this point seems “more interested in math and science than writing.”

As for his advice to future writers, Mitch says “keep writing. Don’t ever give up, don’t ever get discouraged....be true to yourself and be honest about what you write…and always bring a pencil and pad or BlackBerry wherever you go,” smiles Mitch.

Copyright c. 2010 by Chandra Persaud - cannot be used without permission.

Make 'em Laugh, Make 'em Cry: Meet Daniel Cartaina

We recently had an informal, virtual chat with Danny Cartaina – writer, playwright, and comic. We finally met Danny when he stopped by to visit us at the Brooklyn Book Festival – and we are very happy we had a chance to meet him. Danny’s story in Pain and Memory is quite powerful – about the death of his father, gripping in its detail and wide-ranging in its emotional import – it makes us laugh and cry. As with many of the other writers we have had the pleasure to come in contact with through Bibliotekos, we found that Daniel Cartaina, too, is multi-talented: the evolution of a writer from multiple disciplines. (See, just for instance, Rivka Keren and Muriel Nelson, whose Profiles also appeared on this blog.) Thanks for chatting with us, Danny.

On First Becoming a Writer.

I don’t think I ever thought at one particular moment that I wanted to be writer, like some epiphany that changed the course of my life, a sort of “Where were you when JFK was shot?” moment. I started out in the visual arts as a photographer and later a print-maker. But I think over time I felt that I could not communicate (whatever that would be) with photography. With writing I could create multiple images and landscapes that weave in and out across a story. So, I slowly found myself transitioning into writing over time.

On Initial Writing Inspiration.

I’ve always been a curious person, especially about life and the human experience which sometimes puts me in interesting places both emotionally and physically. This, combined with an early aspiration to do stand-up comedy inspired me to start writing down my observations on life, usually with a comic twist. Intelligent comedy I guess it would be called, which doesn’t always fly in a comedy club environment.

Where Ideas Come From.

Ideas come from everywhere. But typically if I’m moved by a story or personal experience I find myself wanting to give my observation on it. Other times, when I thought I had nothing in the tank creatively, someone challenged me to write. It could be workshop teacher or a call for submissions might provoke me to investigate. Some of my best ideas come to me at 4am, out of nowhere. This is when I get up immediately and jot down everything that comes out of my head.

On the Elements of a Good Story.

There are many things that make a good story: a strong narrative, character development, but in the end I want readers to be captivated and moved in a way that makes them want to read the next page, and the page after that. I try to be efficient with my sentences, more so if I am writing a play.

Does Creative Work Have (or Need) a Message?

Doing mostly comedy I don’t think I have anything deep that I often want to say. Many times my stories are born from some adversity, or a difficult time, and I often try pull out the absurdity in these moments, something that the reader can relate to so they know at least someone in the world “gets it.” Life is not easy, and if I can bring some laughter to some one’s life that makes me very happy. It is my gift to the world. In Italian they call it a touch of “alegria.”

Do You Write True to Life (Your Own or Someone Else’s)?

Much of my writing is realistic, creative non-fiction. And sometimes it’s fiction that is based on a true story. The theater work I’ve done goes way out there sometimes. In the play “Prosciutto, Mortadella and Ricotta; A Love Triangle” I basically gave Italian meats and cheese their own personality and placed them in a romantic Shakespearean type setting. It was produced in San Francisco two years ago and went over quite well. But to bring this answer back down to earth, the common mantra is, “write what you know”, and I know ethnic, urban neighborhoods, especially Italians. I’ve started characters that I thought were me, but then they blossomed into something beyond my boring life and I enjoyed being them for a while. It makes you want to return to them each day at your desk.

Surprises (From Writing).

That they were accepted and published, first off. Actually I’m a little surprised at my ability in dialogue when doing plays. It must come from many Italian Sunday dinners.

Favorites (of Your Writing).

I can’t say I have a favorite. But I should say that I have regretted doing a reading of something that was not finished. This happens because I am impatient and I want to get audience response and see how it reads. Sometimes it’s good to do this, but sometimes not. You have to feel it out.

How Do You Work as a Writer?

When I was in Europe I typically got up and wrote between 9am and 12 noon each day. Then I had to take care of other things like teaching, running errands and cooking, etc. If I was lucky I would return to it later that day. That was wonderful! In the United States, it is more difficult, my writing is streaky, due to more demands on time. I don’t like it. I also find that my approach to writing changes slightly depending on whether I’m in New York or Italy. Because you are obviously exposed to a different culture and if your “antennas” are up, paying attention, you will process differently. Lastly, your immediate environment around you is key, whether it be a desk by the window, or on a porch. You have to feel comfortable.

Talk About Your Genre.

I write short stories mostly, both fiction and creative non-fiction. Just started a little poetry. I also write short plays, essays and even flash fiction (under 500 words). The short plays I sort of stumbled on to and I’ve had a lot of fun doing them because you get to see the work evolve in rehearsals. Plus you get to hear the audience’s reaction live. It’s thrilling!

Reading – Favorite Authors?

Very often I am reading informational, non-fiction work like Michael Pollen’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” or “In Praise of Slowness” by Carl Honore. Yes, I am a gardener and foodie to some degree. I am also a news junkie and pay close attention to current events. This is what feeds my writing, my observations on the crazy world out there. It possibly goes back to my early interests in stand-up. Comics are all over current events for their work. David Sedaris is a writer that I like a lot. Spaulding Gray also. Sarcasm is a beautiful thing. When I laugh out loud at something I’m reading and I whisper the word “brilliant,” that is a high compliment from me, because to do intelligent comedy well, the writer really needs to be brilliant.

Reading Now.

I recently finished “Brooklyn” by Colm Toibin, a wonderful writer, who really gets into one’s feelings at the moment. Again, a story of Irish emigration from Europe to Brooklyn.

In the Works.

I have some short stories that I’d like to expand further into book length and I’m also getting more involved in playwriting, like short play “festivals,” stuff that has more dialogue in it.

Stars are shining

The Midwest Book Review gives Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration a 5-star rating on Amazon and says that the literary anthology is "a thoughtful look into immigration and what it means to be a new person in America. With differing tones and much in the way of thought for the country, Common Boundary is an intriguing look at immigration and provides an entertaining and thoughtful read." Thank you again to our talented contributors and devoted readers.