A Writing Life Can Include Art
On a recent trip to visit my sister for her birthday, she invited me to play with her in her studio. She has taken up watercolors after years of incredible art quilting. Since I had played with Japanese and Chinese ink brush painting, watercolors sounded like fun to me. For two days, I was enraptured with this new right-brain exercise, and I left Denver with a list of purchases, some of which my generous sister is gifting me. Whatever the artistic process is, it is good to have alternative ways to get the right brain going again when you have unknowingly crossed over to the left brain. When one is writing historically based fiction, the research can comfortably go on forever if one doesn’t push oneself back into right-brain functioning. At least, that is...
Celebrating sisters: Women’s History Month
As many of you know from my book Myopia, a memoir, my mother was disabled by an aneurysm at my birth. For the next few years, she was in and out of the hospital for surgeries and forced to take heavy-duty medication that left her sleepy and depressed. My sister was eight years old at the time. Some sisters would have blamed me. After all, she was only eight and very angry at the loss of the mother she had known before I was born. My mother had graduated first in her class in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s. She was a brilliant and talented woman who was suddenly, overnight, no longer engaged in life. But instead of trying to get rid of me or ignore me, my sister embraced me. She turned the love my father was too busy to receive, and my...
Reflections on the Future
I never had a child of my own, so naturally, I will never have grandchildren. But I have worked with many, many children over the years. For a time, I worked in the Zero to Three Nursery at the Lexington Center in New York. We helped hearing families with deaf children, deaf parents with hearing children and deaf families with deaf children. Some of these cases were quite challenging. In certain instances, we were overjoyed with the progress our families were able to make. Most of these folks could not afford private services. Medicaid was our source of payment. Eventually, the funding was cut. They said the program was too expensive to run. There is no longer any soft place for these families to land. A young friend discovered that her young son has muscular...
Time to Stretch: My New Beginning Rank
Some folks may be wondering how my retirement schedule is going. After hearing so many stories, positive and negative, regarding retirement, and knowing people who promptly returned to work, I also wondered what it might be like for me. The key for me was to plan. This is not always so easy, but it has worked well for me. I cut back. Early on, I went from five days a week to four. After a few years, I went from four days to three, and I stayed there for several years. The next step was not to take any new patients. This was the most difficult, and I did take on a couple of people because I liked them and was curious about them. But because I worked psychoanalytically, beginners usually started at two to three times a week. This can result in many working hours....
A Few of the Wonderful Places Writing Takes Me: My Upcoming Book Talk with Anna Ornstein in Boston
This past Monday, Martin Luther King Day, my publicist, Carolyn Flynn, initiated a dialogue for me with Dr. Anna Ornstein. The connection came about through a conversation that Carolyn had with my publisher, IP Books, which suggested that I think about presenting and reading with Anna. She was not completely unknown to me through psychoanalysis and her publications on trauma, but I had no idea of the amount she has written. And I did not know about her book, My Mother’s Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl, a collection of stories she read to her children over many years of Passover seders. Because I have read so much Holocaust writing, I was certain that I had read her book, but when I went to my Holocaust shelves, the book was not there. IP Books kindly...
DACA Dad: What If…?
My father did not become a citizen until he was an adult. He fled the Russian pogroms to create a better life. Gratitude can shape some pretty good citizens. My sister is now an activist and works for the rights of immigrants. I am so proud of her. I did most of my activism during the 1960s and 1970s, although I do sign many petitions and support special candidates and causes. We were on the phone chatting last week, when she said something that really made me sad. When I researched our father’s papers for Myopia, a memoir, it was the first time I realized that my father did not become a citizen until he was an adult. What the reason could be for this is only speculation. I am sure that they were too busy surviving to consider this issue. They had no money and...
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