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A Poem About a Poet by Anne Whitehouse

by Erika Dreifus on
1

I have a superb offering for you today: a poem by Anne Whitehouse. This poem is included in Anne’s new poetry collection, Blessings and Curses (Poetic Matrix Press). And, appropriately for this blog’s purposes, it’s a poem inspired by a writing workshop. My deep thanks to Anne for the gift of permission to republish this piece.

CURSE IX

He was not good or kind,
but he was memorable.
He was the Poet,
and we the disciples
each week seeking
the benefit of his insight
as we sat around the table
listening politely
while he free-associated,
his random thoughts
drifting into aperçus
delivered in a high-pitched
nasal voice, the ash
hanging off his cigarette
until it dropped by itself.

At the interview
for admission to the class
I was in awe of him.
“These are yours?” he asked,
indicating my Fogg Poems.
In suspense I assented.
“Not bad,” he continued,
and paused. “But there are
so many of them.”
He sighed, leafing
through the seven pages
as if they constituted a burden.
“You’re in the class,” he said,
handing them back to me.

Believing he must be right,
I let him influence me.
From that day on
I dared not add another poem,
though possibilities still
occurred to me,
I ignored my ideas
until they went away.
At the time I didn’t know
he was writing his own series
of loosely-titled sonnets
hundreds of them
he would publish
in multiple versions
under two titles.

**

As winter melted into spring,
his mind grew unhinged.
One afternoon in class,
hearing workmen
making a racket
in the room below us,
he flew into a rage
and shouted at them
through the ceiling,
banging his chair
on the floor in retaliation.

Another time I saw him
shuffling across Mass. Ave.
in bedroom slippers
looking lost and dazed.

At his poetry reading at The Advocate,
he could barely speak.
The week before his collapse
he put aside student work
and, ignoring us,
closed his eyes and intoned,
“A bracelet of hair about the bone.”

“A bracelet of hair about the bone,”
he uttered the line again
and again, in a trance,
his voice growing fainter
until at last he grew silent.

We fled, leaving him
clutching his dead cigarette,
the ash scattered on the table,
staring into nothing.

(Bonus: Check out practicing writer John Vanderslice (Creating Van Gogh)’s review of Blessings and Curses for the Santa Fe Writers Project.)

Friday Find: An Essay from 1989

by Erika Dreifus on
10

This evening marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur is not very far away. These are the Jewish High Holy Days, the Days of Awe, a time for reflection and repentance.

They were also the catalyst for an essay I wrote 20 years ago, when I was a college junior. That fall semester, I was lucky enough to be admitted into a creative nonfiction workshop taught by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It’s safe to say that Verlyn and I agreed that “Reflections During the Days of Awe, 1989-5750” was the best piece I wrote that term.

The essay is written in segments divided by portions of the Unetaneh Tokef liturgy, which is an essential aspect of Holy Day worship (and I’m far from the only one to have found creative inspiration in it: Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire” provides an extraordinary musical perspective). In honor of the Holy Days, and with the benefit of a creation that was inconceivable when I first wrote the piece – namely, hyperlinks – I would like to share it here.

Thank you for indulging my return to what remains for me a deeply meaningful piece of writing. And for all of my fellow practicing writers who are also celebrating the new year 5770, shanah tovah!

==========

REFLECTIONS DURING THE DAYS OF AWE, 1989-5750
by Erika Dreifus

ON ROSH HASHANAH IT IS WRITTEN,
ON YOM KIPPUR IT IS SEALED:
HOW MANY SHALL PASS ON, HOW MANY SHALL COME TO BE:
WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE;

I don’t remember feeling any special ties to my religion as a young child. “Chanukah” was simply a time to receive a new Barbie doll or board game or book. “Passover” meant that one April night each year we’d have a big meal at Aunt Mimi’s Westchester house with all of Mommy’s family, and the next night we’d eat with Daddy’s parents, and then for a few days there would be cracker-like food called “matzah” in our apartment. Nearly everyone in our Brooklyn neighborhood was Jewish. All my friends and I looked forward to those days we could claim as school “holidays,” spending the insignificant Sukkots and Shavuots playing in the autumn and spring sunshine. I cannot remember even being inside a synagogue before my eighth birthday. I did know that my grandparents went to “shul” on days that were called “Rosh Hashanah” and “Yom Kippur.” Those were days when people tried to dress especially nicely; everyone greeted each other with the words “Happy New Year” in the middle of September; and for one day, my grandfather refused to eat.

When I was eight, my mother decided that it was important for me to have some sort of Jewish education – she and my father had both been raised in fairly Conservative Jewish households – so she enrolled me in a Conservative Hebrew school that expected attendance four afternoons each week from 3:30 to 5:30 and Saturday morning “Junior Congregation” worship as well. For the first time, I was called not “Erika,” but rather the Hebrew name, “Yocheved,” that I shared with my mother’s grandmother. At that congregation’s school, I first became acquainted with the Hebrew language and prayers and Bible stories, and when our family moved to a New Jersey suburb at the end of that school year, I had become more conscious of a Jewish identity.

WHO SHALL SEE RIPE AGE AND WHO SHALL NOT:
WHO SHALL PERISH BY FIRE AND WHO BY WATER;
WHO BY SWORD AND WHO BY BEAST;
WHO BY HUNGER AND WHO BY THIRST;

Our new home was the only Jewish one on the block, and perhaps that is why my parents began to search for a congregation affiliation almost as soon as the cartons were unpacked (and they were unpacked fast) that summer of 1978. I remember the Saturday morning the four of us visited the township’s Conservative synagogue. The Sanctuary was small and dark, and all I could see was a cluster of old men chanting Hebrew. “Let’s leave,” my father said. We drove ten minutes to another temple, a more modern construction crowning acres of beautifully landscaped property. The parking lot seemed a maze to my sister and me, winding around to assure enough spaces for the cars of the thousand member families. The short summer service, held in an airy chapel, was conducted mostly in English. The Rabbi offered my sister and me flowers from the large arrangement at the front of the room after the Benediction. We became members of the Reform “TBJ” the following week.

WHO BY EARTHQUAKE AND WHO BY PLAGUE;
WHO BY STRANGLING AND WHO BY STONING;
WHO SHALL BE SECURE AND WHO SHALL BE DRIVEN;

TBJ required only one afternoon and one weekend morning of religious instruction each week. My Hebrew did not improve much over the years I studied there, but as a TBJ member I have learned to consider myself a Jew in a way I never did before.

Last weekend, I flew home to New Jersey and celebrated the new year 5750 with my family. Again I listened to Cantor Summers chant the Avinu Malkeinu, his voice and those of the choir mingling in the vast Sanctuary, pleading in ancient Hebrew, “Our Father, our King, hear our voice. Our Father, our King, we have sinned against You. Our Father, our King, have compassion on us and on our children.” Again I watched Rabbi Greene, robed in Holy Day white, look out into the faces of the congregants. Again I basked in the love and friendship shown to my family, warmth that has increased every year as we have become “regulars” at Friday night Sabbath worship, as my mother involves herself caring for so many Temple members, as my father has assumed the congregation’s Presidency, as my sister and I have become B’not Mitzvah, “Daughters of the Commandment,” on our thirteenth birthdays, and Confirmands at the end of tenth grade, and Temple Youth Group leaders during our high school years.

WHO SHALL BE TRANQUIL AND WHO SHALL BE TROUBLED;
WHO SHALL BE POOR AND WHO SHALL BE RICH;
WHO SHALL BE HUMBLED AND WHO EXALTED.

My Grandma Rose died five years ago, during the ten “Days of Awe” between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Her favorite worship service took place the night before Yom Kippur, when the Kol Nidre prayer is chanted openly in synagogues throughout the world, chanted as it has been for so many generations, chanted now as it was even behind closed doors in Inquisition Spain when those Jews who pretended to convert to Catholicism – the Marranos – gathered in secret to make sacred Kol Nidre, “All Vows,” to God.

Grandma’s younger sister Esther stayed at our house last weekend. She came to services with us and blinked back tears as Grandma’s name was read aloud from the Yarzheit list, the roll call of people who died, as Rabbi Greene always intones, “at this season in years past.”

Esther’s twin, Syl, lives in a nearby nursing home, and Saturday morning, before going to Temple, I drove my sister and some of her Youth Groupers over to the Theresa Grotta Center to lead the Jewish residents in prayer. Syl did not recognize me at first, and since she is almost completely deaf I had to repeat loudly, “I’m Erika, I’m MADELINE’s daughter,” for her to place me as her favorite niece’s child – but I sat with her throughout the brief service and turned her prayerbook’s pages. At the end of the service, Syl, who has been the despair of many a mental health professional, reached for my arm and said, “I wanted my sister Rose here with me – I wanted her picture with me and I forgot – but she was here, all the same.”

This year, I won’t be with my family for Kol Nidre. I will go to dinner with friends, and then walk to Memorial Church, where Harvard Hillel runs its Reform services (“Yom Kippur in a church?” my grandfather asked increduously during my freshman year). The next morning I will stand at the pulpit and lead part of the day’s worship. I will break the day-long fast later that evening at my roommate’s home in Lexington, with a family as loving and as imbued with tradition as my own.

BUT REPENTANCE, PRAYER, AND CHARITY
TEMPER JUDGMENT’S SEVERE DECREE

According to the Holy Day prayerbook, according to the pages that I will read with the Harvard community on the Day of Atonement, the decision whether I shall live or die this year has been made and will be sealed as the sun sets Monday night and I resume eating. That is a profound thought. I don’t know how strongly I believe it. Often, I think that I don’t know what or who God is. I do know that my Judaism means more to me than words. It is a mosaic. Judaism signifies family. It means thinking about others and giving special consideration to the weak and the old. It means celebrating in times of joy and consoling in times of sadness or trouble. It signifies holiday traditions and food and melodies and culture. It means that there are some things about me that some of my non-Jewish friends have never understood and may never understand, and that there exists a special bond between me and many of my Jewish friends. Judaism commands responsibility and bequeaths a heritage. And Judaism means that Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the Days of Awe will always be my time for contemplation. Life and death take on richer meanings in the days of enhanced “repentance, prayer, and charity.”

(Way back when, I dedicated this essay to my mother, and to all of her mother’s family. I still do.)

After the Retreat: A Guest Post by Chloé Yelena Miller

by Erika Dreifus on
3

AROHO Retreat: Digestion
Second of two guest posts by Chloé Yelena Miller

AROHO, pronounced as one word, is the acronym for A Room of Her Own.

Oneness was the unofficial theme of this year’s retreat. A group of 80 or so women gathered in the red desert to share ideas, challenge each other, and form one community.

I wanted to write this blog post at the weeklong retreat. In my creaky bed, I tried to summarize what was happening. But even at the airport returning home, I was overwhelmed.

So I asked AROHO friends on Facebook what their favorite moments were:

Barb Johnson, Gift of Freedom Award Winner and author of More of This World or Maybe Another, wrote, “Rita Dove. Transcendent readings. Wonderful conversations. Dancing. Discovering that hummingbirds chitter.”

Jennifer Mattson, NPR contributor and instructor, added, “Rita Dove, twice. Conversations with Barb Johson, hiking and the Georgia O’Keeffe tours…. and of course late nights with the roomie.”

“Two moments: The first evening, one of the women explained the perseids (she goes somewhere each year to see them), which was a first clue this would be an interesting, informed group. Also, Meredith [Hall]’s exercises for memoir writing” were oral historian Abbie Reese’s favorite memories.

Summer Wood, Gift of Freedom Award Winner and author of Arroyo, shared: “Ellen [McLaughlin]’s phenomenal monologue following Rita [Dove]’s lovely, generous reading. I thought I was going to explode out of my skin.”

I filled up a notebook. I wanted to remember Mary Rose Betton teaching us about reading our work aloud, starting with our natural voice (which can be found by simply saying, “uh huh”). I wanted to remember Rita Dove saying: “After a project, I promise myself to do something completely different. Something that scares me.” On writing for public radio said, Jennifer Mattson said: “Always mumble when you write. Read and write at the same time.” I keep thumbing through the notebook.

Many women arrived planning to write throughout the days. Since I work alone from home, I wanted to meet people and attend classes. I tried not to sit in my room, but rather talk with other writers who were up for conversation.

I mentioned in the previous post that I attended Smith College, an all-women’s school. Perhaps because I’d already experienced being part of a supportive, all-women’s network, I was particularly interested in finding honest critiques of my writing.

Luckily, author Laura Fraser’s workshop on creative nonfiction did just that. She was firm and clear. I’d read her book An Italian Affair before leaving. I knew she was successful in her freelance career. She was candid in class, shared tips with us and encouraged us to be precise. She noted the “one rule.” Every piece, paragraph, and even sentence should have one point. She recommended On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and as I reread the book on the plane, it reverberated with Laura’s points and her writing. She helped the students in the class trust each other, ourselves and our writing enough to want it to be as good as possible.

There were moments the setting distracted me from the writing. It turns out that I am as afraid of coyotes’ howling as I am of sleeping in a room with an unlocked door that opens up to the outside. This retreat caught me a little off guard with how rural it was. This Jersey girl needs a tougher skin.

That said, I’ve never been anywhere where the stars shone as brightly as they did at night. I’d also never felt as safe and as challenged as I did there.

As soon as I got back home, I took a long, hot shower and then logged into Facebook to find my new friends. I trust that some of us will be sharing writing for years to come and prompting each other not only to write, but to write well.

Thank you to everyone who worked to organize this wonderful retreat.

Guest Post: Chloé Yelena Miller on Preparing for a Writing Retreat

by Erika Dreifus on
4

Please extend a warm welcome to our guest blogger, Chloé Yelena Miller, whom you may remember from a previous post. Today, Chloé shares some thoughts as she approaches a writing retreat. She’ll be back with another post once she has returned home. Chloé has poems published or forthcoming in Alimentum Journal, Lumina, Privatephotoreview.com, South Mountain Poets Chapbook, Sink Review and The Cortland Review. Her manuscript, Permission to Stay, was a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. She teaches writing online for Fairleigh Dickinson University and edits Portal Del Sol. She received an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a B.A. from Smith College.

A Women’s Writing Retreat: One Woman’s Treat and Necessity
Chloé Yelena Miller

I have never seen a desert, and I am obsessed with Georgia O’Keeffe. The Writers’ Retreat, hosted by A Room of her Own, adds writing to the mix of a desert landscape and O’Keeffe’s home. What could be better?

I have been in love with O’Keeffe’s work since I first saw an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a child. The landscape that helped to form her art was so different from my own setting: urban New Jersey. I remember sitting cross-legged on the carpet in my parents’ living room looking through her oversized book One Hundred Flowers. This upcoming retreat feels like a homecoming as visual art brings me to a writing space.

A black and white portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe has been pinned over my desk since high school. It has traveled with me from New Jersey to Massachusetts to Italy to New York and finally to Michigan. This year’s retreat’s theme is “My Country is the Whole World” (Virginia Woolf.) Perfect.

We all need more time and space to write. While I am working part time and have been dedicating much of my time to my writing this last year, being surrounded by other writers and attending classes (far from laundry, bills to pay, and other time-
consuming tasks) can only spur my writing, editing of past work, and contemplation of ideas. I truly can’t wait. (On the other hand, there is a pile of procrastination that must get done before I can leave.)

I enjoy the company of forward-thinking, creative women. There are always potential risks to gathering folks around one aspect of themselves, but since we will have two – writing and our gender – in common, we shouldn’t have any problems. I imagine this will be similar to my experience at Smith College. I chose Smith College not because it was an all-women’s school, but because of the type of motivated students it attracted. There is indeed something special about being surrounded by women.

I look forward to attending classes, writing and hopefully talking at length to the other writers. I will be in a workshop led by Laura Fraser, whose book An Italian Affair I recently gobbled up in three evenings. From the memoir, I think she is a woman after my own heart. I have been doing some freelance writing and hope to improve my hand at not only being honest, but including facts in my writing (a puddle-jump from my poetry.) I promise you the same in a blog post when I return.

I hope to return rejuvenated and with a long list of books to read, craft challenges, ideas for future pieces and if I’m lucky, the start to a few new pieces.

Aside from small festivals and short workshops, I haven’t returned to the humble state of student for some time. As a writing teacher, I know how important this is. I was a poetry writing graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College and attended the Western Michigan State University’s program in Prague (where I met our lovely, creative and energized Erika) and was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center. I learned something new in each program.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, as perhaps it might keep me honest), I will be finishing teaching an online course during the retreat. I hope I will have some time every day to log into the class and grade papers as they come in. I’m a wee bit nervous about combining the two activities and doing both well simultaneously. I will also admit that while I can’t wait to see the desert, I am not someone who loves the heat. I will report back about how hot “dry heat” really is.

Writing students must expect as much from the program itself as from the other students. We all have a lot to do to prepare. I’ve been reading works by the authors who will be there, listening to interviews online, and tweaking my own writing for workshops. I’m ready.

A Contest Win

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Not long ago I told you (both here and in the Practicing Writer newsletter) about the Revenge-Lit contest. I am happy to tell you that one of our subscribers, Charlie Conley, has won that contest!

I met Charlie five summers ago, when we were in Arnost Lustig‘s Prague Summer Program fiction workshop. He’s a very talented writer, and I am thrilled for his latest success. Congratulations, Charlie!