Erika Dreifus

It’s been a while since I’ve published one of these posts. But a few nice things have happened over the past week, and I thought I’d take a moment to share them with you.

1. My contributor copy of Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture and Heritage, edited by Diane Gottlieb, arrived in the mail. I had the privilege of being invited to write a foreword for this lovely volume of essays.

Read more about the anthology on the ELJ Editions website.

2. Since the foreword text for Manna Songs was due at the end of May, and approved shortly thereafter, I knew that the contributor copy would arrive eventually.

But I did not expect last week to bring renewed attention to my 2019 collection Birthright: Poems in the form of Elissa Wald’s feature for Judith Magazine last Thursday, accompanied by an exceedingly generous introduction.

Read it all over on Judith Magazine.

3. Thanks to a heads-up from Elissa Wald, I had about a day’s notice about the uplift for Birthright. But I had no idea that (very!) soon thereafter, The Jewish Fiction Journal would re-up something else “archival.”

Which is what happened last Friday when “Rio, 1940”—a story adapted from my never-published novel manuscript—was featured in the weekly email from the publication.

If the poems in Birthright are “old,” the prose in “Rio, 1940” is positively ancient. (I began working on that novel in the 1990s; the manuscript went out on submission beginning in 2001.) And “Rio, 1940” made its first appearance in The Jewish Fiction Journal (previously JewishFiction.net) in 2012.

The re-up turned out to be perfectly timed: As you may recall, one of last Friday’s “finds” here on Practicing Writing was an essay by Lindsay Marie Morris on “How to Turn Real Family Stories Into Compelling Historical Fiction.” And if my story collection Quiet Americans depended in no small part on family stories, the same held true for that novel manuscript (with a major catalyst provided by a serendipitous discovery in a European archive), and for “Rio, 1940.”

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Especially since I’ve been spending so much time on matters apart from (or at best “adjacent” to) my own writing practice, these reminders that I have, in fact, written literary prose and poems (and even published some!) mean a lot to me.

And it’s very, very nice to see this “old” work reach new readers. I’ve received so many warm comments and messages, public and private, over the past week. I am grateful.