and yadda yadda, an aliyah blog
by Jen Maidenberg
I so enjoyed Little Labors, the latest book out from award-winning novelist Rivka Galchen. A stunning, intimate, but thoughtful hybrid work, Little Labors is definitely a recommended read for this summer.
Check out my review and interview with Galchen, up on The Times of Israel today.
It’s not the first time I daydreamed I was
Nicole Krauss, authoress
all-around good
woman good Jewish but not so Jewish
writer I could aspire towards
and as a matter of curiosity
exactly one day
(perhaps only hours!)
older than I.
But today most of all
when I learned husband
Jonathan
Safran
Foer
(even his name sounds groovy out loud with line breaks forcing teeth against my lips)
cuts up old books to make
new books
Fresh! Magical!
I thought I couldn’t stand to
be me another day
I just want to be Nicole Krauss
just to be married to a man
who thinks up cutting up
old books to make new ones
who writes books called
Extremely Loud
Incredibly Close
and then writes a book
about not Eating Animals
because sometimes he
doesn’t eat them
out of kindness or conviction
and then – to top it all off with an all-natural maraschino cherry –
lives in Park Slope and wears
smart but sexy glasses.
I imagine him sitting there
next to her
at a wooden desk in their house in Brooklyn
(the desk was his
found at an antiques shop in New Paltz)
separating their two laptops is an
antique robin blue typewriter
maybe even with Hebrew letters like
the one I drooled over but
didn’t haggle over
(4000 shekels!)
in the artist’s colony in the Golan Heights.
There is an imposed silence every week day
in Chez Safran Foer Krauss
from 8 am to 12:45 for
Writing Time.
They write and write and write
while sipping organic espresso
a matter that is serious to both of them
but they’re considering giving up
because of stomachaches.
On Wednesdays they listen to
Van Morrison for inspiration.
On Fridays he makes her a spinach and goat cheese omelette
and takes out the recyclables
and this is their life
I imagine
unless one of their kids is sick –
then she is downstairs
on the couch watching
Phineas and Ferb and
gritting her teeth in
frustrated agony
the way writers who are also
mothers grit their teeth.
She considers calling the nanny
but she won’t while he is upstairs cutting up
old books
to make new books
new stories.
She’ll wait.
Or that’s what I’d do.
Wait and wait and wait
and grit teeth
until Wednesday when the fever breaks
and she takes
her laptop
to the café down the corner
and stays there
til the sun goes down
til closing time
so he can sing the kids to sleep
and she can see if her Wikipedia page
is longer than his or
for once write a novel on the napkins
like she’s wanted to for
the last three years
and glue them together
with Juicy Fruit gum.
Fresh! Magical!
Sometimes, she writes
in her journal
how she wishes the internet would break
so she could start over
and find the wooden desk
in New Paltz first.
Or marry a carpenter.
And this is when
I understand why
she is keeping her name
and writing poetry again
and practicing the Law of Attraction
on the door to the cafe
daydreaming it’s a portal
to that kibbutz she volunteered on
in the summer of 1990-something
a kibbutz in the Lower Galilee
a lemon tree in the front yard
that looks remarkably
like the one I see
through my bathroom window.
Three people, in as many months, have told me their creative efforts are “just for fun.”
This was in the context of showing me their wares — a brilliantly crocheted flower vase or a cat carrying-case re-purposed from a plastic water jug — and me remarking astoundedly, “This is fantastic. Are you selling them?”
Each smiled and said matter-of-fact, “No. It’s just a hobby. It’s just for fun.”
Once, I had a creative hobby that was just for fun. Once.
I used to be a scrapbooker.
<Pause for effect>
Yes, for about two years, I scrapbooked. I even had a scrapbooking friend — Debbie — who took me to a midnight scrapbooking event at a local crafts store in Tucson.
It was pretty much what you imagine.
Then I had kids, and unlike many moms who go scrapbooking crazy after birthing photogenic children, I just went plain crazy. Said craziness left me no time for cutting decorative borders and captioning weekends spent at the Jersey Shore.
My one creative hobby since then, which has only increased over the years since my day work has become more marketing focused, is creative writing.
In the last two years, especially, I have become a pretty serious creative writer and even started this year submitting some of my pieces to literary publications. No published pieces as a result of those submissions… yet.
So when each of those above-mentioned creative types told me they weren’t selling their pieces — not at a crafts fair, not to fancy shmancy boutiques on the lower east side of some city — I was taken aback; impressed, actually.
And I wondered.
Would it be possible for me to write … just for fun?
Without any expectations?
Of course, I do this already.
There are pieces (many) I have written that are sitting in a file somewhere, on a floppy disk in WordPerfect 2.0, that will never see the light of day, let alone end up in a literary journal. There are drafts of posts I don’t have the heart to delete sitting in limbo in a folder on the backend of this blog. There are starts of stories I never felt compelled to finish.
Were those all “just for fun?”
Before I get too didactic, let me clarify that I’m talking about the process, here. The intention.
Can I really write just for fun? Without the hope that what I write will become more than just an exercise,; will become
THE ONE?
The one that gets noticed?
The one that hits the right chord with the right person?
The one that gets me the top literary agent?
The one that enters me into the roster of authors that appear in a Prentice Hall Language Arts textbook?
The one that ends up sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard wrapped in a gorgeous cover with my name on it?
If “just for fun” means the same as, “for the sake of my sanity,” then yes, I write just for fun.
Or if “just for fun” means “I self-laughed a lot when I read my own blog post back to myself” then yes, I write just for fun.
But, more than anything, I write so that I will be read.
The reading by others is what makes my writing fun. This I know.
I just wish, sometimes, it weren’t so.
The other day, I asked out loud on Facebook whether my friends thought that writers were born or made.
Most answered some version of “born, but….”
As in: Writers are born with the creative spark that’s a prerequisite to creative talent, but it’s a spark that requires not only nurturing, but also education, practice, and perfection in order to mature into talent, and then success.
Mostly, I’d agree.
I think about my own journey as a writer, and sometimes, admittedly, I even hiccup a little calling myself a writer at all.
When I think of myself as a writer, I still think of myself as the girl who wrote love poems in a small, tear-stained spiral bound notebook that I hid in the back of a drawer.
When I think of myself as a writer, I still think of the jittery young woman who spilled coffee on her pants on her way to her very first feature story interview for a newspaper article.
When I think of myself as a writer, I still think about blogging as playing for a minor league team, and published literary novels as the World Series.
I still think of myself as a novice, and sometimes as a would be somebody if only I had the time.
Then there are moments, hours, days even, when I catch a scent of my destiny and it smells like poetry and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and an antique oak writing desk facing a picture window.
The leaves casually drop from the trees as if there’s still time…
As if there’s only time.
…and words to discover.
Words slowly strung together like colored beads on a braided rope.
I really, really don’t want a book deal.
Just kidding.
Which blogger doesn’t want a book deal?
Put your hands down.
Stop pretending like you blog for the fun of it.
I say that all the time, too.
I don’t mean it.
Except for when I do.
Which is a lot of the time.
But then there’s the day when a mommy blogger I’ve never met gets a book deal and my eyes bug out and steam pours from both of my ears and my heart and belly both get stuck in my throat and deep inside I
SCREAM!!!!
…In my inside voice. The louder of the two.
Where’s my book deal?!?!?
And then my other inside voice answers back,
“What makes you think you’re getting a book deal?”
And the scream, now subdued says, “Well, you know. Someone should just discover me and fall in love with my writing and offer me lots of advance money (or at least plumb royalties) and beg me to write a book. A whole SERIES even.”
“Oh,” the peaceful, reasonable voice answers with subtle condescension. “I see.”
What she’s not saying (in her peaceful, reasonable tone) is:
Stop waiting around for someone to discover you.
Stop wanting what other people have.
Stop being regretful about what you think you should have done, but didn’t. What blog you should have kept up, but didn’t. What career you should have stuck with, but didn’t. What path you should have taken, but didn’t.
She’s only being a little bit judgy, just enough to quiet the screaming.
===
I have a colleague whose dad is a celebrity.
She hardly ever talks about said celebrity, except in the context of his dad-ness.
I’ve never asked her about this. Or what it’s like to be the daughter of someone so famous.
I imagine, though, her modesty has something to do with her relationship to him.
To her, he’s dad. It doesn’t matter how famous he is or becomes, his celebrity will always be secondary to her.
And I think in all the glorifying we do of celebrity — of book deals, of magazine covers, of awards and prizes and titles — we lose sight of celebrity’s secondary-ness, its subservience.
We lose sight of the inevitable real life behind the celebrity. Why?
Because save for the tabloid spreads, we hardly see the real life behind the celebrity.
The anxiety that comes the day after a book deal was signed.
The self doubt.
The need to please, to produce, to win.
To look good. To smell good.
To smile. To have a good hair day.
We hardly ever hear of their breast cancer scares, their hemorrhoids, their financial troubles, their soured friendships. Save for the celebrities who’ve publicly shared bits and pieces of their angst in well-placed magazine features, we hardly hear of their suffering.
And they all, certainly, suffer.
No matter how many times we read Everyone Poops, we still imagine that celebrities poop with greater ease, with more satisfaction, with softer toilet paper.
And maybe they do.
But, most likely they don’t.
And, as corny as it sounds, no matter how much we wish we were more famous, more successful, more educated, more experienced, we often fail to acknowledge or recognize how famous, successful, educated, and experienced we already are.
This is what I try to tell my screaming inside voice.
You are already famous.
Seriously, I can find at least three people who believe I’m famous (and yes, their last names are the same as mine.)
And I bet I could find someone out there who is not a blood relative that wishes they could have a job like mine, or a husband like mine, or write a blog like I do.
I am already famous.
Despite that: I still scream inside every now and again when somebody gets a book deal.
And I probably will until the day I finally accept that I am already famous enough.
The day I finally accept I am already famous, is the day I will finally achieve the pinnacle of my success.
Peace, love, and ease.
Behind all our secret or public clamoring for celebrity, what we really desire is peace, love and ease.
And that, my screaming inside voice, is better than a book deal.
and yadda yadda, an aliyah blog 