Midweek Notes from a Practicing Writer

Three quick updates from my desk.

1. ICYMI: My latest freelance article, an overview of recent Jewishly-focused picture books, went live last week. (Thanks to Moment magazine for the assignment.)

2. I’m still thinking about Joshua Cohen’s highly erudite letter to The New York Times Magazine as published in last weekend’s print issue. (I provided a single line from it as my most recent #SundaySentence; unfortunately, the Magazine has not made the full text available online, although I, for one, have inquired more than once via Twitter.) Like Cohen, I noted a certain “silence” in the publishing-focused article that he responded to, and I think it’s important for his comments to be made as accessible as the article itself remains. (Surely, the Magazine would wish to avoid further conveying the impression that, to borrow from David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count.)

3. I’m just back from a beautiful wedding weekend in Massachusetts. The bride is the eldest daughter of one my dearest friends (this friendship dates back to freshman year of college; I was a bridesmaid at the bride’s parents’ wedding twenty-something summers ago!). Having known the bride since before she was born, I expected to dissolve into a puddle the moment she emerged to walk down the aisle. But I kept myself together until the rabbi referenced the people who weren’t with us for this happiest of days, including the bride’s late paternal grandfather—the focus of a poem that I’ve shared here before.

an open spiral notebook with a pen resting on a blank page, plus a text label that reads, "Midweek Notes."