And now it’s August. Mixed report. Weirdly, I was stricken with an ear ache the other night and while it’s clearly on the mend, I still feel like half of my head is in a bucket. I don’t love it.

Also, I’ve fallen in with an old addiction, chess. A lifetime ago I played chess a lot and I found that I had to quit. To my surprise it is happening again, though I’m now playing people around the world, online. I used to have to get dressed and go to the chess club (there were two where I lived in the West Village) or the park. But up and go I did. Found the chess club on campus too. Students would come to my office to play. There was something about chess that made me want to do it all the time. It ate time. Now it’s on my ipad. When the game ends, for some reason, even if it’s tiring already, I always want to start another. Maybe it’s the adrenaline rush. After all I don’t play any of those exciting looking video games. Sometimes I feel quite good at chess and sometimes I suck. Either way, as soon as the little war is over, I want to start another.

Saw the Odyssey and will forever now know how you change men back to pigs. I’d always imagined it as a blink of an eye magic, and how wrong I was. The rest of it was loud and pretty and only the whirlpool has replaced my mental image. Memorable but not new canon was Matt Damon listening to the sirens and wailing. My image of the Siren’s song was always an exquisite torture, beauty unto anguish, not pure agony.

Anne Hathaway didn’t do anything for me. These are two clever people. They both do famous deceptions, her with the weaving and unweaving, him with the hollow horse. So something wily should show between them, something worth fighting through ten years of trial.

If I learned anything, it’s what I already knew, which is don’t piss off Poseidon.

First sentence for a novel: Sometimes I feel like I pissed off Poseidon.

Speaking of whom, funny the gods that weren’t there. So much Zeus’s Law and no Zeus. Hard to cast?

As I heard someone else write, my Odysseus is more of a flirt. Damon knows how to be that guy but wasn’t being him here. Otherwise Damon seemed like my mental sense of Odysseus.

Left side of me still in a bucket, and it’s days later. So I went to an Urgent Care and the doc said there’s nothing wrong except some fluid behind the eardrum, he said chewing gum might help, but basically there’s nothing to do but wait, he said he was optimistic it would be gone in three days. The loss of true stereo has me tilted.

What did you think of the Odyssey? Of Emily Wilson’s takedown piece? Of Joyce Carol Oates critique of Wilson’s piece?

My Cyclops is of course living with other Cyclops nearby.

Why do I keep writing about it?

So yeah, chess. I have a productivity thing, I am always writing. The brain is only top notch for about three or four hours and I get something done for four hours almost every damn day. I think the chess hasn’t changed that but it eats some of the time that I used to do word puzzles, read, or something useful in the house. But yeah, it threatens even the work time, which is why I quit last time.

Ear still weird. Perhaps I listened to half a siren? Or pissed off Poseidon?

Sign on to the class — we’ll talk about how important a personal style becomes now that AI is here. And that comes down to the fundamentals of voice. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and am eager to hear your thoughts as well.

Well captains of industry and soldiers of fortune, I hope your summers have been going along swimmingly whether or not you’ve been swimming and that the gods haven’t been at your heels.

Stay cool, stay weird, and stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

I’m teaching an online course in Finding Your Voice in the Age of AI. It’s Aug 9th and 13th, two Sundays. It will be fun! (The course will only go if a few more people sign on, so sign on quick if you are going to! I guess Aug. is slow for classes. If you like small groups this will be one!)

The deep problem is to not understand that there are ecosystems everywhere, and that means there are consequences to the most benign actions.

He wanted the reflecting pool to be blue, so he had it painted. Now it was too light to reflect. Worse, there was an algae bloom in response to the change in water temperature, which made the whole thing green. They poured in chemicals to kill the algae, and these were corrosive enough to peel the paint off the bottom of the pool, so big chunks of it float to the surface.

And it reflects him. Swamp thing.

I don’t watch a lot of basketball, but I thought it would be fun to watch the game the night that turned out to be one of the most exciting games in history, where the Knicks came back from 29 point behind and won in the final minutes. The ball had bounced away from the basket and a hand reached up and tapped it and somehow, it went in. The crowd went insane. The celebrities made faces of amazement, reflecting our amazement at home. Outside the window the city honked and shouted and someone set off fireworks, and on the news the city went wild. A tiny tap with colossal consequences. Very satisfying.

Then for the final game we had tickets to a burlesque show at the Coney Island Side Show, friends were in it. It was a comedy show and was hilarious and wonderful, and it let out in time for us to watch the end of the game with a bunch of people, still in the Coney Island Side Show, on someone’s iPad. It was fun to be with friends and strangers when the Knicks came through. We added our hollers to the general eruption.

Another story of mine came out, Working Dogs. It’s flash fiction and is in Flash Fiction Magazine. I love flash fiction, often defined as under a thousand words, and not just because like most people, my attention span has shrunk. I also like it because it is close to poetry. Close to poetry, but fiction. So, usually, a story. Closer to poetry the shorter you go, but still, fiction.

Happiness studies show over and over that what matters is the quality of your relationships. I think it’s also true for fiction. I like plot, but insight into the quality of imagined relationships is also great fiction. People are strange and if you invent one, they have to be strange in their own, yet believable, way. Once invented, you discover what they want and the story is about how they try to get it.

My Working Dogs story is about a woman finding a dog abandoned at the dog park. She takes him home. He’s restless, so she sings to him and he relaxes. When she sings one of her mother’s songs, the dog magically falls asleep. It works the next night too.

She turns out to be the daughter of a rock star mother who never quite made it big. She had one hit and her daughter sang on it, and so was famous at eleven, a tiny thing with a mop of blond curls. That’s the song the dog falls asleep to. In therapy what she talks about is the unlived life of her mother. The dog makes her think about her past, but she’s no longer alone; he makes her happy.

At the very end of the story, another working dog shows up. Friends visiting are so impressed by the dog that they want one too. One of these friends happens to have accidentally killed another kid, when he was a kid. He still feels guilt and shame over it and tells anyone who he talks to for very long. To everyone, he’s the guy who shot a kid when he was a kid. He gets a Great Dane and becomes the guy with the huge dog.

The four of us went to the Pride parade as we have done for many years running now. We hoot and holler for the people as they march by. Bowen Yang rolled by in a decorated car. He waved and we went, “Wooo!” Major contingents of the gays of various banks marched by and we gave them love. We wore buttons and waved flags. Then we ate. Then we walked over to the Pride street fair, a symphony of rainbows. Then John went to the movies and the three of us who felt like going home, went home.

My Alexa says the temperature is 95, feels like 110! John just came in with the dog and says it’s fine out, not that bad, there’s even a breeze, not a cool breeze, but not a hot breeze either.

_________

The Five Points issue with my story came out too. Mine is not online, but it’s a great issue, if you get a chance to read it.

Journals have personalities and they’re usually hard to describe, you just have to read them and get a feel for it. If you want a shortcut, try Amy Holman’s What Where: Literary Journals, most recently on Ploughshares.

If you want to see some writing about me, check out this piece by poet Linda Stern on poet David M. Katz’s substack.

_________

Okay cats and cowboys, as always, I’m touched that you came by. Stay cool and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

My short story came out in StoryQuarterly: Green Is Dead. It’s my first publication of fiction which is both exciting yay and exciting yikes. Let’s call it a thrill. You write a vulnerable character and then you let him out into the world. Sean is meant to be funny in his turn of phrase, though I leave it to the reader to decide how much he’s exaggerating to be funny, if at all. Everything in the story is made up, except the grief and the surprise of the first months without the person, which is when I wrote it, just after my therapist passed away.

I invented a lot of patients to tell about them each grieving Green. Some of them know each other and show up in each other’s stories. After I wrote this one I wrote a couple more with Sean’s voice. Two more Green stories will come out this summer, one in Flash Fiction and the other in Five Points.

I gathered together some stories into a book of short stories, with much thought and rethought, then I mercilessly cut and trimmed, and called the whole thing “Green Is Dead” and sent it out to the Flannery O’Conner short fiction collection prize. Odds being what they are I’m focusing on the fact that I have the collection now.

I’m waiting for summer already. Spring missed its chance. Last night I went with John and Jessie to Coney Island to see the Cyclones play. It wasn’t their night but the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. (and the highwayman came riding, riding) And I just love a night game, the brazen refusal of darkness. For what else do we go night for day? Just the movies.

Well, I checked the weather and it looks like it will be summer by this afternoon. Writing fiction is hard but it feels good. All writing feels good when it’s going, and the one that’s easiest to get going is nonfiction, but that doesn’t mean nonfiction feels the best. Let’s say it’s an easier drug to maintain.

Fictional characters are just as out of control as widely reported. I start them and then they go.

I’ve been watching a lot of tv. It’s mostly meh. Still I report for binging when the sun goes down. I’ll follow Tina Fey anywhere so have already watched all of the new season of The Four Seasons. I followed James Marsden back to Your Friends and Neighbors even though I’d ditched it mid season during its first season because it was insufferable. Even though I like Jon Hamm and Amanda Peet. But this latest season was fun enough.

I’m a little haunted by The Crash, the doc on the girl who crashed her car into a wall killing her two passengers. She was of course very injured, but lived. Spoiler Alert, but you’ve likely encountered this already, They put her in jail because the judge believed she did it on purpose. The argument was that she was willing to die to kill her boyfriend and she had callous disregard for the other friend in the car. I wouldn’t have convicted her. Dumb kids drive too fast and misgauge when the turn is, right? And the evidence they have on her being nuts was weak imho, lots of people say super awful things when they fight with their boyfriend or girlfriend but that doesn’t mean that they would kill, let alone drive themselves into a wall. Don’t get me wrong, the girl is highly unlikable, but so what.

What else? What I don’t want to talk about is the gentle rain of rejections that have been coming in lately because I got a burst of try hard energy a few months ago and put some things out in the mail. Obviously if you have a nice acceptance in the recent past it can act as an umbrella, but you know, you still get a little drenched in No.

I don’t want to talk about it because it doesn’t make me feel or look like the shiny penny I’d like to be, but what can you do? I love when other people confess their ongoing experience with No, especially those who seem to be living in a world of Yes. So yes there’s been a lot of no.

Despite that reality, I encourage you to finish the thing you’re working on and send it out. Send it out a few places. Don’t think about the odds.

Writing is of course another way to go either night for day or day for night. Take your pick. Break all the laws of the universe. True I am determined and constrained, but my characters have free will.

And if my characters have free will, my poems have a bronco of a will all their own. For instance, rhyme is not in favor at the moment and yet I rhyme a lot of the time. also I joke. How to keep the poems from joking? Write them anyway but cut them from the manuscript.

Well this has been an eclectic post and I hope something for everyone. Anyone. At the game there was the giant net between the players and the seats, but still the baseballs came down pretty frequently on our side. Kids swarmed for them and often caught them. Men here and there grabbed them out of the air. Meanwhile, there were tons of kids and not a few babies, with their soft baby heads. It seemed dangerous but was just one of those things.

Ok Molls and Mobsters, Dolls and Monsters, Calls and Answers, I am, as always, humble in your midst. You make the rockin’ world go round. And special thanks to my new paid subscribers—it means a lot. Thanks to all of you for coming by. Stay in it, stay salty, stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

A lot of people get depressed. Sometimes it’s more or less situational, sometimes chemical. Potter suffered down time and enjoyed a more manic side, which wasn’t diagnosed. He didn’t want to take pills in fear that it would dull his creative blade. I don’t really get that, it’s not like it’s an irreversible operation; if you don’t like the pills, you can stop. Well stopping isn’t easy after a while, but the experiment seems worth making. Ditto therapy which I don’t remember being mentioned at all in the four hours, but which might have been a good idea.

You remind yourself to breathe.

Up, up, up. It’s quite unlike Alice’s fall down, down, down the rabbit hole, because it’s such an effort. And yet how like it is, too, since ascending or descending are both, after all, a way of leaving.

Television can be a way of leaving, but isn’t always super effective. There are shows that I like but that neither require nor seduce my full attention, and that leaves a part of my attention free to worry about things. Not that I’m exactly a worrier, it’s more of persistent sense of doom, at times, which I don’t love.

It’s stunning how the free solo climbers cling to the rock, using their bodies as vices and rope. A lot of them die. There’s a lot of footage of these daredevils, so you feel you get to know them. You feel it when their wild lives crash to a terrible end. They are mostly young, mostly men. Do they know about death? Why is that risk okay with them?

Until the mid twentieth century, women died in childbirth at a rate of about one per 100-200. Because women had many children, their lifetime likelihood of a childbirth death was between one and ten per cent. And yet they did it, over and over. Sure some got out of it, but most went with the program. It’s still not the safest thing you can do with your weekend.

Unlike free solo climbing, you get a baby at the end. What do the climbers and the base jumpers get? A thrill and a peak memory. What if they keep doing it, over and over? It can’t be a peak memory the twenty-third time you do it, so why do it so many times? Is adrenaline seriously addictive?

What makes them go up these walls?

Soldiers go to war, some happily, knowing the odds but feeling, it often seems, exempt from them. Then after they’ve seen some shit, they seem to act as if they are already dead so they are kind of invincible. When they die it’s not a surprise, but also it is a terrible surprise. Everyone forgot it could happen.

What is life like, that so many cling to it, and so many risk it or throw it away?

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a sailor faced crazy odds too. On a long journey it was common for ten to fifteen percent of the crew to die. It wasn’t storms and shipwrecks. It was mostly microbial disease, followed by starvation and scurvy. And it wasn’t modern medicine that made it so much safer by the end of the nineteenth century. It was better nutrition, citrus, and the simple fact of steamships which made trips shorter, so there was less exhaustion, fresher food, and less time exposed to diseases. New developments in public hygiene helped too. New developments in seafaring made it much less likely to get lost or caught in a storm.

By the mid nineteenth century, a whaling voyage was much safer than a 17th or 18th century regular voyage. Scurvy had been controlled by then and improvements in navigation were significant. Still, a whaling voyage was commonly a two to four year endeavor and dangerous even after the whale was dead, as the giant hooks and chains for processing the great body maimed many. Why do it?

The question brings to mind the unforgettable first paragraph of Moby Dick, 1851.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

He goes off to sea to escape depressive thoughts of death. He knows that the salt’s life whittles people down to peg legs and eye patches and florid scars, and kills, but dry land gets to him in other ways. Dry land gets to a lot of us, but we don’t all get on an actual boat and chase a white whale, or climb El Cap without a rope.

What do we do? The important things, we cook, we tend, we read, we think, we try to make words click out of our fingertips, and of course, we watch. Sometimes it can be a kind of meditation. Up, up, up.

Hey there gorgeous. It’s a grey rainy spring day in Brooklyn, colder than it should be for mid May. Will it ever warm up? I’m excited for this conference coming up. My whole little family is coming with me—it will be super fun.

Also, Stay came out in Japanese!

Okay love you lads and ladies, Brads and Sadies, fads and crazies, you’re the best and it’s important that you keep it in mind. Stay warm, stay on it, and stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

I spend too much time in my home and I want to get out more. Some things I like best are being in comfortable clothes and reading, writing, doing puzzles, and watching screens. Also, napping. All well and good, but there’s a world out there, not to mention steps. I’m off the hook until spring springs, which it hasn’t here in NY, in any consistent way, but then I must venture. Even if it’s just errands, it would be a good.

I mean, I go to the theater, and to events, and a few talks or readings, so it’s not like I don’t get out, I just like staying in, so I do. A lot. And I want to break out of it some. I guess I’m talking about it here as a way to be a bit accountable about it. I’ve always been a bit of an indoor cat, often because of a big writing project, but I think the world being so foul these days has only enhanced the tendency.

I’ve been working on a few things but mostly a book of short stories possibly to be called, “Green Is Dead,” which is also the title of one of the stories. That titular story is coming out in StoryQuarterly, which may be why I am favoring it in this way, but it also lets you know what the book is about, which is grief and change. Another story about someone losing Green is coming out in Five Points, soon. I’m thrilled about both—it took a big haul of rejections to land the few acceptances.

About the theme of my stories, around this time last year, my therapist of many years fell ill and soon after, passed away. It felt sudden. I was stunned, and missed him. So, in the stories, I made up a bunch of other people who were stunned and missed him too. And of course, they all have problems, since what gathers them is that they were seeing a therapist to deal with something. The world isn’t clamoring for short stories, but this book might be special enough to get made. We’ll see.

I’m teaching my two session nonfiction class starting this week, Sundays April 19 and 26. I always look forward to it. Most people who sign up have a project they are working on, or just thinking about. I find it fun helping people figure out how to go forward with what they have got, usually towards a book. After many years of helping students write theses, and many years of publishing nonfiction, I think I have a knack for it. People who don’t have a project at all at the start of the class sometimes end up with one. All are welcome.

The class is not a workshop. I invite the class to send me a page or two about their project, and I write back by the following Sunday. So the first class is a lot of information on all stages of writing and publishing nonfiction, the second class is similar but by then I know the projects of most people in the zoom room and I can speak more directly to the issues people need to talk about most. There’s still time to sign up!

Well it’s a few days later and spring has finally, definitely, sprung. Last evening, Jessie and I went to a reading/meeting of a nonfiction group, about six people briefly presented their books and took questions, and while content was very much of interest, the group’s focus is on process, how’d you get the idea and how’d you know to run with it, how was the process getting a publisher, and perhaps most of all, how’s it doing? I don’t tend to know many people there, but the group meets four times a year and feels a little like community. It meets in the EastVillage, and I used to live there and loved it, so was nice to be back, especially with one of my kids.

Before the reading, Jess and I stopped at a little restaurant across from Tompkins Square Park and sat outside. We didn’t have too much time so just had small plates. I had the beets with goat cheese and walnuts, which I enjoyed tremendously, and Jess had chicken fingers, less of a hit but still good. The people watching was as fun as ever.

The political world, I’m afraid, is too much for me. I’m at a stage where I can’t believe the world we are living in is real. It still feels like my job to know something about what is going on, but trying to talk about it here ends up silencing me lately.

But I missed you so I thought I’d say hello and tell you what’s going on with me. Anyone else out there challenging themselves to get out and do more, now that the weather is cooperating?

Okay sweets and tarts, noirs and neons, dreams and dreamboats, I am as always honored that you stopped by. Love you. Come join the class!

Stay rowdy, stay busy, stay with me, get a bit of writing done, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

It’s all in how you see things. I see the birth of each religion as a great blooming of doubt in the old religion. What pried them loose?

What pries anyone from deep habit? How do people change identity?

Pretty much only when they have no choice. The old identity is kaput. You just aren’t that anymore, so you have to make some adjustments in your image of yourself, and fast. We change our minds about ourselves when there is no other way to survive. Of course, sometimes we refuse, and don’t survive.

Last night I watched Blue Moon. Ethan Hawke was terrific. He was Lorenz Hart, the songwriter, and the movie was mostly a monologue given with a riveting performance. It was a heartbreaker, a man who senses that the good part of his life is over and he is coping with that over one night, in a bar. Talking for a great deal of the film. Me, I loved it. He’s nominated for best actor for it, and I’d give it to him.

For the first year of this Substack I stuck to a rotating schedule of themes and when I came to the topic I had to find something to say. One topic was me reading books found on a top one hundred books list. I’d read a lot of them when I started. I’d taught some of them in lit classes, and taught about many of them in history classes. Still a good many had slipped through the cracks. Some of the books I read and wrote about here are Infinite Jest, Don Quixote, The Magic Mountain, The Invisible Man, and The Bell Jar. I’d already read enough on the list so that it was reasonable to ask why a given book had been heretofore overlooked. Scared. Of length or perceived subject matter. In all cases unwarranted. These books were a great time. I remember each like a secret life I lived.

I read and listened to them. Let’s take Infinite Jest at 64 hours on audible. Well, no, let’s start with Pride and Prejudice, at 22 hrs a listen. Twenty-two hours is not that much, in terms of listening material. You can read Frankenstein in 8.5 hours of listening. Slaughter-House Five or Notes of a Native Son in 5; if you listen for half an hour every night as you fall asleep, you’ll have read either book in ten days. Or you can decide that over a long weekend you will knit, garden, walk, or clean while you listen for a few hours a day and get to know the great Frankenstein, start to finish, weird book though it is.

But the thing to face is that, let’s face it, listening, especially to a recording, is different from reading. When you read with your eyes, you space out now and again, and when you do, you go back and reread a little. Think of meditation and how difficult it is to keep the mind on a simple task like counting breaths. Except when the book has really got you, the mind will wander. Sure I read faster than I read aloud, but the actual getting done with a book happens faster when you’re listening, because it just keeps going. I do sometimes speed it up, when the natural voice is too slow.

I used to say that, to say that I’d read a book, if I listened, I have to have listened twice. You just miss too much the first time. The mind strays and the recorded reader keeps reading. You tune in again and you may have only been gone a moment but a lot of important information can get lost.

I still listen to many books more than once, because I can enjoy them more than once. But with lots of key books, I now do a combo of listening and reading, often at the same time. Yes you have to own two copies of the text, but very often you can get classics for free on the internet. Or buy a used physical copy, cheap. Sometimes there is free audio too for the classics. If you have the disposable income to just buy either the book or the ebook, and also get the audio, it’s worth it. I know we resist this as overconsumption, but it’s a better indulgence than many.

Why? Because the brain takes the story in more fully in text, hears the individual sentences, catches the details. But being read to is faster, easier, and more convenient. You can close your eyes for a while, move around. Also it just feels easier. So I do a combo, sometimes just reading, sometimes just listening, and sometimes both at the same time. For the most speed and comprehension, reading and listening, at the same time is best. The brain still reads along with the reader. You catch everything, because you are reading, but the assist of an interpreting voice in your head helps you to not pause and repeat, which makes the read faster, more fun.

I’m presently reading and listening to The White Castle by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. I’m halfway through and enjoying it a great deal. I do love to underline the best bits in books, and after I’ve listened for a while, I can find most of the ones I liked by scanning for them in the paper pages.

One problem with listening to books is that you lose your place. If you lose your place somewhere in chapter five you likely restart at the beginning of chapter five. That listening overlap can mess with one’s sense of time in the book. For me, a paper copy solves that. It lets me see and feel where I am in the experience, and not get the parts mixed up.

Tonight is the Academy Awards and I like watching it live, for the outfits and in case something interesting happens. I did better than most years at seeing the nominated movies, but still haven’t seen a few major ones. Funny, I was just talking about reading books in order to tick boxes and here I’m talking about doing it with films. I guess I’d say that having a motivator in this form helps me do things I want to do—though it’s not a trait I’d have associated with myself. Interesting.

I’ve been writing this Think Bank piece over a couple of days. I saw Blue Moon a few nights ago by now. But now that I’ve said the Oscars are tonight, I really should post. Anyway, I thought I’d send up a flare.

_____

And you my dear ones? Do you listen to your books? Will you watch the Academy Awards?

The few days of spring weather we had recently were lovely but we’re in the cold again and it is stepping on my patience. I grow blue, or if not fully blue, maybe lilac. I’ve got to get more exercise, but again, waiting for spring. How are you keeping your mood up in this strange age in which we find ourselves? I retreat into writing, and can recommend it. Stay warm, stay safe, stay with me and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

I know a lot of history and literature, (I have a PhD in history and I’ve taught literature in MFA programs, publish in both) but it was a lot of study. Well, no I think I do have a facility for that. So maybe it’s a trade-off? That’s always the fantasy, isn’t it? When there is a deficit we try to believe there’s a gold lining somehow. Another gold lining is that maybe I have a generalist memory—I can keenly recall the feel of all sorts of distinct eras in my life and my children’s lives.

I could be wrong about this, my foggy memory, it’s all perception. I just can’t get over thinking about how many character traits could just be a result of someone with a bad life memory. Too, it’s possible that memoirists and fiction writers are better off with foggy memories because it makes the key ones so visible.

My husband John’s memory is better than mine. It’s better than most people’s, but I forget that. It’s good to have this off shore memory bank, but there’s a down side. I feel like my life is only partially mine because he’s got more of it than I do.

I’ve always laughed along with Nora Ephron’s I Remember Nothing, where she jauntily confesses that she was at some of the most iconic historical moments of our time, covering them as a journalist, and that all she remembers is where they went to eat afterwards. She was backstage at the Ed Sullivan Beatles show, all she could recall is that the screaming girls were obnoxious. It’s kind of tragic, but here I am reading her book and laughing for the nth time. She wrote and directed some iconic films. And reading anything about her life tells you she was a wildly social person—the kind that had a-list celebrities coming to her for advice. So she had marvelous gifts. She just couldn’t remember. A flicker, here and there.

I’ve learned some tricks about remembering from memoirists writing about memoir. Say you get a reminder of something that happened that you don’t remember. Say someone says that you saw a stage version of Rocky Horror back in 2001 and you say, No, John, I’d remember that. And then they break out a Playbill from the show and you see the narrator was played by Sally Jessie Raphael and ping ping you remember that: your brain shows a still image of Sally Jessie spotlit, way over on stage left. Oh and the guy who played Frank’s face looks familiar. Ok, damnit, I was there.

Now when you get a glimmer of a memory like this, don’t walk away.

Sometimes if you sit with what you’ve got, you can get some more. For me it can take more than a day for the memory to resolve with clarity. My memory likes being reminded of things in this way, but my feelings are somehow hurt about it. It’s a little bit about ego, I feel bad at being bad at something. But more it’s remorse for what of my life has been lost to my weak memory. Only lately have I thought that it may have cost me a lot in life. It’s hard to build on what keeps disappearing.

I remember when I first heard of people who can’t recognize faces, I thought maybe I had that. But no, it’s more that it takes me a few times to remember someone. And now I’m thinking that I must have seemed socially weird some times because I simply don’t remember past meetings.

Meanwhile, I think I am super present in the moment.

I’m thinking about Rocky because there’s a new one on Broadway with an amazing cast. Rachel Dratch is the narrator. We’re going to the show with some friends who had never seen the movie, so we invited them to go to the Saturday night movie with us at the Angelica East. It was a blast. We’ve been to this theater’s show a few times when our college-age kids wanted to check it out. There’s always a preset shadow cast—unlike when I was a kid and whoever wanted just went up front and acted out a scene.

People yell out whatever they want, of course, but before the show the leader of the shadow cast gives the audience a little lesson in some call backs to the screen that even a complete newcomer, a “virgin,” can do. Yell out “Asshole” whenever Brad Majors says his name. They even sell a little bag of props: a rubber glove to snap when Frank snaps his, cards to throw when cards are mentioned, a sheet of newspaper to cover your head during the rain scene, like Janet and Brad. People brought lots of props from home too. When Frank proposed a toast so much toasted bread flew threw the air that the whole place got the giggles. It went on a while, as people rethrew what landed in their laps. Ditto the toilet paper rolls when Brad says “Great Scott!”. At the opening wedding scene, there was so much rice thrown that you could scoop it off your lap and throw it again.

When I was a teenager, me and my friends went to see Rocky Horror almost every weekend, either Sat night or, more often, the Sunday matinee. My sister, older, and her friends went too. You could buy weed on line for the movie and smoke it while you watched. Cigarettes were allowed back then. Mostly we just watched but we also came dressed up sometimes, and sometimes went up front and acted out our pet character. I was Magenta. Now I’m there with my husband who also misspent his youth with Rocky Horror, and our nineteen year old son, along with friends and relatives.

I will say that to me Rocky Horror was rebellion, and sex, both things you don’t want to see with your parents, and it was my husband who thought it was all just good fun and bought the family tickets the first time. Meanwhile I do actually remember that I first went to see the movie when I was a kid and they were showing it at Adelphi University, where my dad taught, and we went as a family. I don’t remember much but I do remember wanting desperately to join in with the callbacks but being too timid to do so, and then when I finally dared, I went too loud. The adults near me were surprised, held their ears, laughed. I was embarrassed, and that’s why I remember the event, from that one wince. Why had our parents taken us to this? I have to think they didn’t realize what was in it. I’ll ask them, but why would they remember?

Some of my favorite callbacks are predictive ones. You have to be very sure when to say them, but the payoff is big. I dare these less often than the straightforward callback, which you can’t get wrong. I love when someone says, “Hey Tim, whose movie is this?” And then he pops onto the screen singing, “My my my, my my my, my my my” which sounds like, “Mine, mine, mine, mine mine mine mine mine mine.” From where I am now, it’s so dear, he’s so young, so young and just eating the screen.

And what do I remember? I remember everything.

Hey there captains and cadets, how’s the weather? Late February is my favorite time to hate winter, because it’s almost over. But this one is giving us a run for our money.

To create in these days isn’t easy but helps. If creating is a bridge too far, consider considering your own memory for your life. Is it pretty good or do you to find out things—that happened in your life—from other people? Does it help or hurt to have a memory like yours? All thoughts welcome here. It’s interesting right?

Stay warm, stay cool, stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

We were looking in the wrong place. The lives of nineteenth-century Protestant weavers in Europe don’t have anything to do with David, a Jewish whiz kid from Toronto. But the weavers are losing to new looms that do their once skilled labor better and faster and, not too long ago, David’s father lost his job to the robots. David knows about this emotional link but accords it no significance. He can remember when his advisor pressed this topic upon him. He has forgotten the topics that were pressed but didn’t stick.

How do we choose our nonfiction projects, or do they choose us? With memoir we know what the personal connection is, but I’m talking about all the millions of straight nonfiction subjects that people get into and write books about. And what I’m saying here is that even they are a kind of psychological memoir.

Surely some people are just curious about some subject, with no subtextual personal connection? I don’t know. I think curiosity comes from personal interest, so maybe not.

Like the woman working on sixteenth century family law. She keenly remembers her father embarrassing her in front of a crowd of family. She’d talked back and he’d told her that in Ancient Rome he could kill her if he wanted. For her the two things have nothing to do with each other.

Once you do start thinking this way about other people, you have to ask yourself why you want to study what you want to study. Then again, you can just wait, since time seems to tell people what their subject really was all along. I like to think that the imaginary David above is by middle age actually writing about the job-thieving robots, and by older age is just writing about his dad.

Still, even if you are sure that you just find your topic interesting, you can ask what your interest is. That is to say, the very word “interest” means both attraction and stake. So what’s your stake in your subject?

I’m being fanciful. I’ve so disguised my examples that we’d have to say I invented them whole cloth. This is poetry not science.

***

My Notes on Nonfiction Class, Two Sundays, Feb 1 and 8, 2:00-3:30. On zoom.

I’ve got so many practical and conceptual things to talk about regarding Nonfiction projects that the above musing on why we choose what we choose is actually encore material, stuff I probably won’t get to (unless someone brings up something to do with the question). But it’s interesting, right?

So yes, come take my Notes on Nonfiction and we’ll think about everything from how to make your thesis more original, to how to approach an agent, pitfalls to avoid in writing, and how to get the project finished.

Also you can ask me anything about my own books and my experience writing them. And the special feature is that you are invited to send me a short piece of writing about your project and I’ll respond with individual feedback by the following Sunday.

So come join us! All levels welcome including “just curious”; no need to have a project to attend, sending me something to read is totally optional.

About the vile slithering fraud presently running the country, grabbing at Greenland like a deranged toddler, I keep being further horrified, ICE is inexpressible evil, we are in one of history’s dark holes and… I sputter and digress. Making art in times like this becomes essential, the fiery artist heart a little campfire in the dark.

Okay then my ducks and drakes, drunks and fakers, givers and takers, hunks and he-men, kooks and their keepers, grand dames and minor demons, I have to say I’m super impressed we’re all keeping it together as much as we are. Historians will look back to this time and see us as living under enormous political pressures and they will look for ways that we collectively buckle. So if life is feeling a bit crush-y, give yourself a break. The barometer broke a while ago and everybody’s got the world on their shoulders. Stay with it, stay with us, stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

One thing that makes this class a little special is that I’m inviting participants to send me a short piece of writing (a page or two) which I will respond to by the next Sunday. When I teach this class there are often fascinating people in the zoom room, and this way by the second class I have an idea to whom I’m speaking. The writing is generally an excerpt of their project or a description of it and of how it is going so far. I’ll give it a lot of careful thought.

Master Class: Notes on Nonfiction with Jennifer Michael Hecht

$200.00

2 Sessions: Sundays, February 1 + 8
2:00-3:30pm ET
Jennifer Michael Hecht

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), as well as Doubt (Harper Collins) and Stay (Yale), and her three poetry books include Who Said (Copper Canyon). Her prose and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Vox, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, Tin House, and The Kenyon Review. She has taught writing in the graduate programs of The New School and Columbia University.

If you’ve got a nonfiction project, or just an idea, there’s a lot I can tell you about writing it and getting it through publication. I’ve got five nonfiction books, with four different publishers. They have met with a variety of success from heartbreaking, to significant, to bestseller. I’ve worked in many forms: academic, popular history and philosophy, creative nonfiction, memoir, and journalism. My work has won some major awards as well. Along the way I’ve learned a lot about writing nonfiction and I’ve also learned a lot about what agents and editors are looking for. I’ve got a collection of insights to share. So if you have a nonfiction idea, or something you’re trying to finish, I’ll give you a nice leap forward. If you don’t have a project but want to know more about it all, I’ve got a lot to share. All are welcome!

There will be an optional invitation to send me a short piece of writing which I’ll give notes on by the second class session.

Workshop Highlights:

• Learn how to attract agents and editors.

• Discuss techniques for exciting prose and developing your own voice.

• Think about how to hone an idea towards an original thesis.

This class has 2 partial scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, January 23.

Now just for a little fun before I go, I’ve got this new author photo of myself, not professional but I kind of like it.

I asked ChatGPT to make it better and it did this:

It looks AI, but it also looks a little more like me than the real picture does. The real picture is a snap my son took of me, I picked one out of a bunch and sent it in. I think with a professional photographer they work with you until you don’t have that tense look of being photographed, so I look sort of uncomfortable here, compared to the AI which looks like I’m relaxed and refreshed. But one doesn’t want to look fake.

Well, in any case, we live in the future.

And I never told you about how the poetry reading went, which was great. I got to meet two Think Bank readers which made my day. If you were there, thanks for coming!

I also want to thank my new paid subscribers. It means the world to have your support.

Ok, love you pals, stay safe, stay curious, stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

He was always youngish in my imagination; not so young as Meathead, but Spinal Tap Rob Reiner, director of his string of magical movies age Rob Reiner. But to be killed by one’s son makes one forever a father figure. And to see a father figure destroyed hurts.

A nation with a tyrant in charge is going to feel a loss like this one.

Both symbolically and really, this sucks: Symbolically Archie Bunker’s in charge and really, we have to take in that dear Meathead met with a violent end.

Just like what happened to America, it came from inside the house. Unbearable. The instinct is always to think danger comes from outside, from the stranger at the gate, but it’s not so.

That Reiner was such a phenomenal fighter for progressive issues also makes this all hit to the gut. It’s another way we’ve lost a protector.

There’s the mother killed too. I can barely bear to think about it. The anguish of the other two siblings.

The images of a mansion and now we know what chaos it contained. Chaos unrestrained.

It’s not nothing that history has put into our imaginations a bloody scene of horrible proportions.

What’s the point in me talking this through? In a sense it’s just a way of sitting with this pain with you. Because it’s a Greek tragedy, but the gods aren’t coming.

That’s why I’m so glad to be reading at Otto’s Shrunken Head this Sunday. I’m dying to tell some of the America poems I’ve been writing, among others. Sunday Dec 14 at 3pm at Otto’s Shrunken Head, 538 East 14th (just West of Ave. B). I’ll be reading with Nicole Caruso Garcia who I’m excited to hear.

If you show up, please come over and say hi!

I don’t quite look like my picture here but you get the idea.

For one thing, my hair is long and kind of honey colored.

Anywho, I just wanted to tout out this reading, which, if I’m honest, I think you should come to. Why? Gets you out of the house. I admit it’s going to be freezing out, but Otto’s Shrunken Head is a nice warm tiki bar and lounge and always a great place for poetry. Also why? Because I intend to bring it, as it were.

love,

Jennifer

Hey Darling Readers I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and that you are settling into the freight train that is December.

I’ve got two kids in college right now and the end of the semester is coming up fast on them. I feel the crunch vicariously.

I’ve been under the weather these last few days, sleeping all day for a few days and yesterday in a state of half-health I sat in a chair and binged Maya Rudolph’s Loot, which I’d written off for some reason and never gave a chance. Found it perfect for a sick binge. I guess I get turned off shows that look lovingly and lavishly on money — Your Friends and Neighbors for example was too dully delighted by shiny things, I wandered off though I love me some John Hamm. Loot definitely licks the boot of lux too much for my taste, but yes, its cast turned out to be a convivial crew with whom to convalesce.

Winter is here. Mary even said it snowed up state by her. Here last night it went below freezing for the first time and it’s going to stay chilly. We’re in a cold snap. You can almost hear it. Winter can be lustrous even as the world pops off its axis and the biggest schmucks in the room, a gilded fucker in control of national health diseasing it with his anti science campaign, for instance, are running the show. What gilded fuckery goes on here!

How do we not howl at these happenings? I was trained as a historian and one thing that made an impression on me was how often history found a way to fuck with everyone. You grow up strong like ox in chic Pompeii, never knowing that a day would come to run. What’s got us? A world grotesque with bulb-faced scammers, skimming billions, hating humans. A world against which we ought to revolt but like Pompeii-ers never quite get the memo.

What was I talking about? Oh, yes, the weather. Brisk out there. Frosty in the urban tundra. I mean, I was trained as a historian of science, especially the biological sciences, and their relationship to culture. Watching RFK jr. fight against vaccination is so bizarre you could write a dissertation on the desertion of common sense it represents.

Oh hey, one of my stories got accepted, at StoryQuarterly! It will be out in May. It’s called, “Green Is Dead,” and it’s part of this book in short stories that I seem to have written centering on the kind-of-sudden death of my long-time therapist. I was writing stories and grieving and I imagined other people also having just lost this same therapist, who I call Green. These people became very real for me and they show up in each other’s stories.

It’s a great structure because my imaginary people were all seeing a therapist so perhaps more than the general public, they present with a problem, and that’s story gold baby.

Art is the way to some freedom in this mad, mad, world; the face of some grace. Make something, say something, let rage be inspiration. How are you doing?

I know it’s winter, and I know it’s late. My word, the century is more than a quarter over! And you and I just sitting here, reaching out to each other in type, and for no good reason. Just because we’re human, and trying to remain so.

***

Okay Cars and cartoons, cartons and cantinas, dolls and guys, it is, as always, for you that I crack wise. Stay warm, stay brave, stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again. You’re beautiful.

love,

Jennifer

I’m writing today to say that it’s not fair, the news we have to cope with. I wish you much better enemies. This craven fiend is the stuff of nightmares.

It’s too disgusting. Look at where we are on the circles of hell and then realize we have three more years. Nearly unbearable.

It’s depressing. The public discourse could be about anything, right now, but it’s the lowest of the low.

What do we do? Well, for one thing, call it out, notice it, say it’s name: We’re depressed for historical reasons. Most generations get fucked by history one way or another and boy howdy is it our turn.

I’ve tried suppressing my horror but my subconscious isn’t to be trifled with, and it revolted. Nightmares in some outfit of resistance, being fired upon and searching franticly for something that is never found.

Maybe we don’t want to admit to historical depression, because it seems to be a sentence for three more years of this feeling, but we have to remember that London was once under the Blitz. I wish I could hide from the news in a train tunnel. Or when really disgraceful news comes out a siren could blare and we all get under our desks.

Because for me this is only bearable in historical perspective.

You know, my brain goes to the timeline idea a lot, that is, I think to myself, this timeline sucks, I wish I were in one where just a few more people on my side voted and we never get a second Trump show. But I don’t actually believe in timelines. This is the world. It has to be accepted.

Some people a hundred years ago had to deal with World War One and the Great Depression. Those timelines were also unbearable. Ours is vile. Ours is putrid.

The starving of the innocent, the fucking of the innocent, the icing of the innocent, the rampage of a psycho. If you haven’t been going to the demonstrations, go next time. There is a sharp futility in some ways but in historical perspective, they matter.

Otherwise, treat yourself like you might be in shock. These are not normal times. This is not just a trigger for PTSD, it is trauma. Treat yourself with care.

What else do I have for you? Well I keep writing stories and sometimes they are strong and sometimes I don’t know what to do to make them stand up on their own. Sometimes they’re too neat for me and I can’t figure out how to rough them up.

Also, with nonfiction I always wrote long, but my short stories are on the short short side. Are they long poems? I like reading short short stories. A few pages. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of my attention span contracting like everyone else’s because I still read novels all the time. I just like them.

I like tv series to be 8 episodes. Even if I love it, I prefer it to end while it all still makes sense. Best would be 6-8 episodes a season, but a bunch of seasons.

One of my favorite authors writing now is Claire Keegan. I’d already read it, but I just listened to her “Small things Like These” on audible and it floored me again.

Will you read the Booker winner, or the finalists? I might, I mean, I sometimes do.

***

Okay dogs and dogmas, princes and principalities, rocks and Rockettes, I am, as always, profoundly delighted that you stopped by. Hang tight and we’ll get through it together. Be creative if you can. Stay strong and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

If there’s a list of things you do to subjugate a people, I’m sure ‘destroy all or part of a sacred building’ is on there somewhere. What that Fool did to the White House makes my right arm hurt. That’s taking it too personally, sure, but I can’t be alone in feeling black and blue about it. It’s hard to feel time pass when it keeps getting worse.

No one ever says Time is what we catch of it, but in reality the past is what we remember and what we have immortalized in art. Mostly forgotten but caught sometimes. Think of all the temporally fluid things that Shakespeare caught in art. Today, of course, we have photographs, which catch so much, but leave on the table four senses and inner thought.

Since we last spoke I’ve done lots of exciting things, like when I was walking in Prospect Park with my friend Amy, we both though we saw beautiful oval stones, small boulders really, white as city snow. When we got closer we saw someone walk up close and then the stones opened up their wide, white wings, and stuck their heads up on fantastic long necks, and gave aggressive squawks. Young swans. Big but still mottled with the ashy fuzz of their cygnet-hood. Their snow white parents were there too as white boulders and they too arose majestically and squawked their heads off.

We also saw a small turtle pile in the pond, lots of trees turning fire colors against a deep blue sky, and an ice skating rink where we saw Moliere a couple of months ago, in the summer. We saw almost as many dogs as people. What a treat they were, this canine parade that would trot by us whenever we’d sit down. It was warm in the sun all day, but when the scattered clouds covered it, and the wind blew, it was frigid. It’s November, I guess it’s no wonder it’s getting a bit cold out.

We’re coming up on a year of the terrible Fool and his gang of imbeciles, and it was shockingly bad but at least we only have three more…jeez I can’t even say it. And should I be talking in parables? Is such visible hate still safe? Down here in the grass roots I should be fine, I think. Right? But this is some crazy time to be alive.

What else? Jessie, our youngest, was in a shadow cast for the Rocky Horror Picture Show at Hunter College and we went on opening night. Jess was a Transylvanian, which meant lots of dancing and leading the audience in the funny call outs. Shadow casts usually line up in front of the audience and under the screen. This was a different idea. They acted out the movie as you would a play, not lined up, and in front of a screen mounted at their level, so the film was always partially obscured. It was a different kind of experience and hugely fun.

Long before we knew each other, my husband John and I were both into Rocky Horror and went to see it over and over. And over. I did it mostly when I was in High School. The Uniondale Mini Theater showed it on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons and the afternoon audience was highly teenaged. Me and my crowd used to go because we loved it but also because we all smoked cigarettes and pot and you could buy the latter while on line for the doors to open. And then we were allowed to smoke both inside the theater. It was a warm place to hang out in the winter and a cool place in the summer’s heat. We went on Sundays for years. Sitting at Jessie’s show the other day, I still knew every word and beat of the movie.

And I don’t think I told you that we all four went to Operation Mincemeat a great new musical on Broadway. Its one truly catchy tune, “Sail On, Boys” is still playing in my head. It was sailors exuberantly singing about their unified fate, “If it’s down, it’s down together / and if it’s up, it’s up as one.” With the music it was so compelling, I almost joined the Navy on the way home.

Returning to the opening theme here, I can’t believe he took bulldozers to the White House and everybody let him. Some of us have proprioception that extends to the buildings and landmarks of our lives and chopping at one hurts. There should be a czar of architectural proprioception.

These tiny peeps I make against the massive institution that the Fool has become, well, I know they’re not much, but they’re something. A shared song? A record that no, it wasn’t okay even though we couldn’t often think of how to even express that.

Every shared song matters. If it’s down, it’s down together, and if it’s up, it’s up as one.

***

Okay chicks and chickadees, Bobs and bobcats, freaks and molls, guys and dolls, I hope you are well and warm on this white sky day, here on the edge of time.

How’s your autumn going? Get any trick or treaters? We got a giant bowl of candy and one single trick or treating family, with a darling princess and a raccoon too young to climb the stairs. We ate all the excess chocolate so fast it was a Halloween miracle.

Love,

Jennifer

Like the wave at stadium events, sometimes someone tries to start it, and nothing happens, but then sometimes it ripples a behavior through a crowd. My kids and I are pretty good citizens of the chant. If we hear it we will thrum.

When I get too tired to really chant, I’m still good for the hey hey, ho ho.

Anyway here we are again in late October. Jess noticed that we dress up our houses all scary for Halloween, and we used to dress up scary too, but now you can be anything, meanwhile the houses have to stay scary.

I said Yeah you can’t dress your house up like a sexy nurse. Then we laughed and laughed.

When we told John he said we should start dressing houses up in costumes, as yes sexy nurse, but also, as other houses. We laughed and laughed.

And me still writing these short stories I’ve been telling you about—who’d have guessed. I’ve always believed that you can try to control what you write about, or what shape it takes, but it’s foolhardy to believe you’ll always be successful at it. This is where the muse is chasing me lately. In any case, at some point, if you’re a writer, you might become interested in what people can do in the genre over the fence.

I’ve been reading more short stories in journals since I’ve been writing them and I find them more fanciful than I was expecting. In one I rather liked a woman turned into a cat. In another a woman kept returning to a movie theater that got colder and colder each time, until there was ice everywhere and civilization broke down and they huddled around fires made from breaking down the room.

My own first stories were not fanciful, though they were a little odd, but recently I wrote something sort of sci-fi. I’d tell you the plot but the poor thing is all plot, to sum it up would be to publish it. I kid. But yeah a Black Mirror sort of thing. Slid into the literary anyway, I think.

Okay, okay, I’ll tell you this much, it’s about a near future in which one can purchase control over one’s emotions. I’ve seen such a thing portrayed in various ways and always enjoyed it. Maybe it was a Dr. Who where there was a market with caravans hawking mood potions. I wanted to go to there. Mine is different of course, but the same vein. This has not been a main subject of my writing, but it has been a pretty central matter in my real life. When I was a drinker, that’s what I drank for. Now I’m just a thinker and that’s what I thank for.

Coffee can be a mood bumper, one can pretend it can do all sorts of things. But of course there are speed limits to that. Chocolate too can change things, especially while one is still eating it.

On sad note, the great poet Hal Sirowitz has passed away, from Parkinsons. I hadn’t talked to him in years, but I thought of him a lot. He was a friend of mine. My husband John and I even went to his and the wonderful Minter’s wedding in New Orleans. That was before we had kids and Max is 21 so, it was quite a while ago. I’ll always hold Hal in my heart.

On the demolition of America what can we do but cry. We’re living under a government that actively despises science and the arts. The lunatic RFK is in charge of the nation’s health. It felt good to demonstrate and it felt great to see in the media how tremendous the crowds were. Is there a whiff of futility to it? Only when you think about it.

In the first part of the twentieth century, a demonstration like this meant ideology and the threat of revolution. It worked and we got a social security net. In the second half of the twentieth century it meant that the will of the people had spoken, and to varying degrees the government cared. Now, to whom are we speaking and what is our credo? We are speaking to the deaf and our credo is for fucks sake put it all back the way it was.

Or are we really speaking to history, and to other countries, and even to each other, state to state? Let’s stay with that. We the people are demonstrating to history that we hate this administration. We are shouting to all the far flung countries of the Earth that this lunatic is not our boy. We are under duress. Please wait for us to be back in power we will make it up to you. We are shouting, hey New Jersey, hey Florida, hey Montana, are you feeling what we’re feeling over here?

Show me what democracy looks like / this is what democracy looks like.

***

Okay scamps and scammers, I lay this missive humbly at your feet. May we find hope in each other and somehow or another keep showing up. Stay groovy and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

Most people get kicked around by history at one point or another. Sometimes it’s a flood, or a plague, or your neighbors go insane. Sometimes you make plans and the river rises. It’s not the exception, it’s the rule. You reach for the stick and get the trick.

I hope civilization can hold its breath for three more years. I’m too old to wish time away, but I’m old enough that time does go by pretty fast.

The attack on science is so odious, I writhe with rant, I rave with rage. Science is so slow and puttering, knowledge so gentle with its gifts, when all conditions are best, that to go and stomp on it is obscene.

Some people think the arc of history bends towards knowledge. They love justice, but they live for the advancement of our understanding of where we are and what is going on here. Big fields of question being cosmology, disease, how the hell does the brain work, quantum mechanics, and genetics. And real progress is so slow, even with all cylinders firing.

To have that clown Kennedy representing what we think of thinking is beyond appalling.

Meanwhile the attack on justice is just as worse. It turns out, the arc of justice is a wiggly line. Hope too declines, as well as rises.

Let’s change the subject.

Most people seem to have a best opening word for Wordle, but I mostly try something new every time. It makes for happy surprises.

Ok I Tried.

That’s my writing advice too. Write what you can. Don’t torture yourself with what you ought to be writing. The angel squeezes you and you sing. There is no other song.

I suppose the song I can’t help singing is hope. I have more empathy for people who lived through horrible times now. Some of them I thought should have been somehow more courageous, but now I know it takes courage just to keep going in such eras.

It’s not easy to sing hope right now but big picture, Still I Rise, you know? Do we owe each other hope? Not quite, but almost. We owe each other what hope we can conjure.

They’re building a little wall in front of my building and at least they’re doing it in Spanish so I can mostly tune out the talking but the clanging and clinking of building this little brick wall is a symphony of noise.

Clink. Clank.

Maybe we owe it to each other to try to say one true thing.

Maybe we owe it to each other to rage about the despicable government.

Maybe we owe it to each other to keep trying to get “likes” even as an ill wall of water swamps the humanities and STEM staggers in from its latest beating. “Here I am,” we may utter in a round, gutted, yet still full of sound.

Look, we found out that forests need forest fires. That sometimes we try to clean things up, like get rid of the wolves in the valley, or the algae in the lake and the whole ecosystem collapses. You put the wolves back, it cuts down on the deer, which lets the plants grow, which lets other animals thrive. You take out the algae and the lake looks great but now the small fish that lived on it die off and the fish that ate them starve.

This evil era we’re in right now has certainly made me more appreciative of NPR, PBS, and all the assumptions I used to have about human beings having some shared values and goals.

Clink Clank.

I guess I challenge you to get some writing done, or other art, because we live in a time that needs it. And that needs you to believe in it. Let the angel squeeze you and don’t worry if what you do speaks directly to the times we live in, because to make art in this sandstorm of hate is to make hope out of imaginary golden rope. And how else is it ever made?

Clink. Clank. Tap, tap, tap. Each brick tight in its place.

I happen to believe in free will. But our situations determine a lot. Our situations tend to work against our art. Free will is so feeble against our situations, and yet it exists, and can be exerted. Mostly, our efforts are countered, but you’re never going to score on a shot you don’t take, is something I heard on a survival show I’m presently binging. All we have is that we are in this together, and that time flies. All I can do is make this tiny noise. How are you holding up in these crazy times?

Ok Lords and Ladies, that’s what the angel has spared me. Stay strong and stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

From the beginnings of my study of French History, I’ve been fascinated by what starts a revolution. In Paris, the streets were narrow and made of cobblestone, so when there was a riot or revolution people pried up the cobblestones and built a wall against the royal troops. They also used whatever else was around, like on the Les Mis logo. Their cry of war was, “To the barricades!”

In the 1870s Paris was redesigned with bulldozers and wide streets largely to stop this sort of thing.

One part that fascinates me is how do things go from seething to revolt? The image I have in mind is that lone man of action, prying up a cobblestone and realizing that he’s alone. Not gonna happen today.

I stand amazed at how horrible things have gotten under this regime. It hasn’t been a year and our world is in shambles. I sit stunned that no law nor hero has prevented these appalling decrees and actions. Over and over it’s What just happened?! How could it have? I’d thought there were built-in barricades.

Can a whole country disassociate?

What are the other choices?

Who knew simple shame was previously keeping the world together. I could also call it honor. But to not sound more upbeat than I am, I’ll note that the Right used to be limited from a rampage through the government, limited by some sense of what is done and what is not done. And here comes this dumb outsider who doesn’t care.

My word I despise him.

For the sake of all our blood pressures, we’ll switch questions. Here’s one: If a band can write one head-to-toe hit song, why can’t it do it again? Or even, why can’t it always do it?

Here’s something I thought: Rocky Horror is the dark sexiest that theater nerds get and the theater nerdiest that dark sexy people get.

I wrote all that last week. I’ve been sick all week! Just feeling better now.

I’ve been finding it hard to write because I’m too upset about the news to even try to write about it, and I know I could just write about other things, but it turns out I’m just not made that way.

The news abuses us. The news is rude. I can hardly believe it all.

And that awful man and the awful thing that happened to him. To think we live in a land where they’ll shoot a guy in the neck.

I think we’re in shock and we should treat for shock.

I just looked up treatments for shock (to see how far I could extend this metaphor) and one thing is we’re supposed to lie down with our legs elevated. Couldn’t hurt.

As I’ve told you, I’ve been writing fiction lately. I love thinking about people who got in trouble for copying real life people—often friends of theirs— in their fiction. It shows how hard it is to make things up. Or how tempting real stories are.

I make up everything except the weirdest thing in the story. That I derive from my life. Because otherwise I’d be like, could that really happen?

Another thing about fiction is, I don’t feel like I’m choosing to do it, so much as that it is happening to me.

Now that has me doing something I haven’t done in a long time, just sending a piece out to a journal with a hope and three dollars. Back when I did it it was all free.

How do I feel about sending out these short stories? Well I’m opening myself up for rejection and the harder I try to land something, the more rejection I’ll likely be in for.

Why does it cost so much to try? I didn’t mean the fee when I wrote the prior sentence but that too. Whatever the reasoning for it, the fee means that when that rejection comes in, you get to know that you paid for it.

But forget the fee and take the question as I first intended it. Why does it cost so much to try? It can be especially hard to steel oneself against rejection when the writing is particularly personal. Though putting aside user’s manuals, isn’t it all personal?

I can talk about why the risk is worth taking, and why mostly people don’t take it, or not often. But more to the point is sometimes you can get yourself to try and sometimes you can’t.

Yesterday I went to Yankee Stadium and watched a “banana ball” game. I was told the Savannah Bananas were like the Harlem Globetrotters for baseball, and yes, sort of. Banana ball has deeply adjusted baseball so it goes faster and has to end after two hours. Also both teams are horsing around like nobody’s business. All sorts of trick plays. Dancing. Sudden singalongs. Was it my idea? Friends, it wasn’t even my idea to leave the house, but I had previously agreed when the tickets were purchased. It’s a day outside with the family, snacks, gotta be pretty fun I’d figured. And it was fun. The Savannah Bananas lost which felt like a loss for all of us, but we soldiered on back to the train station for the long ride back to Brooklyn.

Then we watched the Emmys. I like the outfits and to see the stars. I loved The Pitt and was glad it did well. I was surprised The Studio did so well, it was okay, but it’s what we might call an anxious comedy. Anxious music playing over a bunch of people going nuts with worry over some dumb situation. I don’t dislike all frantic comedy, but this is more anxious. But whatever. You can’t fight city hall. Or can you?

And we’re back to the barricades. I kid, but as soon as my brain goes back to politics the whole situation floods into consciousness and it’s nearly unbearable. If I have nothing to say to that, at least I’m here trying to say that I can’t think what to say. At least we can give witness to the difficulty of giving witness to such a moment.

***

Okay you funky monkeys, that’s a wrap for the moment. Stay strong and I shall return to encourage us again.

Love,

Jennifer

I have been taken out for lunch by agents, and lo! they didn’t want the book idea I was hawking, but with wine they did pass to me some secrets of the trade.

In what way will I teach this class on nonfiction? It won’t look like any book on nonfiction because it wouldn’t be the best use of the brief time we have. So I just started to make a list of things I know about a publishing career in nonfiction that come from my own experience and observation. Things I don’t hear other people saying.

Some are easy to articulate, like, if you want to write about some historical person/author, check to see if there is an upcoming anniversary of their birth, major action or publication, or death. If so, you aim for that publication date and pitch your book around it. If no, maybe reconsider.

Some will take a bit more time to articulate, like, it’s not just the subject you have to sell, it’s the structure and it has to make sense. Biographies have an innate structure, everything else has to prove where it should begin and end.

CRAFT SEMINAR: CRAFTING NONFICTION: FROM IDEA THROUGH PUBLICATION

with Jennifer Michael Hecht

2 Sessions: Sundays, August 10 + 17
1:00-2:30pm ET

Oh and I’m offering to read a short piece by participants, and give some notes.

The class will think about what makes nonfiction work, and how much the tools of fiction are helpful and appropriate to nonfiction.

I’m also happy to talk about any of my books, or answer any other questions.

All are welcome!

I’ve been writing fiction. The voice is, how shall I say, spare-ish. For example, in my fiction I’d never say “how shall I say” or make up words like “spare-ish.” I don’t know why this is the voice, but it is. It surprises me because my nonfiction has a lot of liberty taking. But when the angel comes and squeezes you, you write down what you have to say, and explain later.

Sad to lose Ozzy. I listened to him some, had at least one album. Then like the rest of America I met him again on his family’s reality show. That show was a revelation for me. He couldn’t stop her from getting more and more small dogs and they shit on the floor. Every day. They were rich like Rockefeller but I wouldn’t have traded their life for mine, with its beautiful shitless floors. “Sharon!,” he’d scream, again, having stepped barefoot in shit. Oh the heartbreak of that “Sharon!” And on top of that, their neighbors had a tennis court, which, when they weren’t using it themselves they let friends use it, so it was a constant thwack, pause, thwack, all the days and nights of their Richie Rich lives.

I haven’t watched too much reality tv since then. I’ve seen like, half an episode of the Kardashians. Never seen any Real Housewives. These things sound sort of fun when people talk about them, but I’ve never tried them. I’ve mentioned here, to you, that I’ve fallen into a Naked and Afraid marathon and there is some fun in just watching people interact. But there I like the survival game too.

In fact I also loved the Alone series, where all the survivors are on their own. Also on Naked and Afraid when a partner leaves, the person left becomes a bit more fascinating to me. Having to find a way to eat, drink, stay warm, and safe, all by oneself, strikes almost everyone as daunting. People daunt. In Alone they call the first moments and their realization of aloneness, drop shock.

And who on Earth doesn’t have a touch of drop shock?

At my house we just finished watching the Billy Joel documentary, And So It Goes. There was a lot to enjoy there. I just want to speak to the way Joel wants to be rock and roll, but isn’t. He’s such good pop rock that the distinction doesn’t matter, except that he keeps mentioning it.

It makes me think of other artists of one sort, masters of that sort, who always fought against it and wanted to be seen as another sort.

Joel also consistently fought against being seen as the American Elton John, and he didn’t like it because none of us want to be seen as a version of someone else, but also, I’d say, because Elton John is not exactly what we mean when we say rock music.

***

I’m really excited about this two-session class I’m teaching on nonfiction, from idea through publication. It’s next Sunday and the Sunday after. It will be fun.

I’ve got five nonfiction books, with four different publishers. A variety of success from heartbreaking, to significant, to bestseller. Academic, popular, creative nonfiction, memoir, journalism, books of ideas, history books.

So if you have a nonfiction book idea, or something you’re trying to finish, I’ll give you a nice leap forward.

If you don’t have a project but want to know more about it all, I’ve got a lot to share.

All are welcome!

CRAFT SEMINAR: CRAFTING NONFICTION: FROM IDEA THROUGH PUBLICATION

with Jennifer Michael Hecht

2 Sessions: Sundays, August 10 + 17
1:00-2:30pm ET

Come join us!

My nonfiction books are

Doubt: A History, with HarperOne, 2003, Bestseller.

The End of the Soul, Columbia University Press, 2003, won an important prize.

The Happiness Myth, HarperOne, one of my best books but it fizzled. Ouch.

Stay, Yale University Press, not quite a bestseller but made a significant impact.

The Wonder Paradox, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023, doing fine.

I’ve published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, Politico, Vox, and many other journals.

So I have tons to say and look forward to telling it.

I’m inviting everyone in the class to send me a short piece of writing which I’ll give notes on by the second class session.

***

I keep thinking about Billy Joel wanting to be a rock and roll star and John Keats who wrote a bunch of the most exquisite poems in English but he thought that to be a great poet you had to work in the long form like Milton, and he tried and did great, you know, but not like the amazing one or two pagers that he turned in.

It’s a reminder that it’s probably best to want to be whatever it turns out you actually are.

***

The fiction I’m writing right now is a bit dark and makes me happy. It’s keeping me busy. I will write more here again when the fiction muse lets go of me. She’s a mauler.

***

Alright loves and loaves and fishes, my doves, and dudes, and whomsoever does the dishes, I am humbled, as always, in your midst. Take care, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer

Hey Chat, hope you’re out of the sun.

I’m reading poetry in the great outdoors this Sunday and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s at the Gowanus canal. 165 2nd Street Brooklyn. I’m reading with three other poets, Genevieve Fernworthy, billy cancel, and Amy Holman. Sunday July 20 at 1:30.

Come get some poetry and fresh air. Fresh-ish. If you do show up, please come over and say Hi!

I’ve been busy. Writing. Grieving an old friend. Writing about grieving an old friend.

It’s not that I felt down, but more that I was falling down. Alice towards Wonderland. Down, down, down.

Then I left town. My whole little family drove upstate and visited a friend I’ve known since I was sixteen, and her family. We all took in a couple of silly but highly entertaining shows. First, Weird Al Yankovich at Woodstock. It was fun to be back at Woodstock. An almost eerie feeling. And Weird Al kept us laughing and singing and even a little dancing. Oh and the opening band was just as good! Puddle’s Pity Party! IYKYK. Second: Regional theater production of Young Frankenstein the musical. Hilarious. High spirited.

We also saw so many deer. It was a little magical how many deer we saw, including a buck who came to eat clover right outside my friend’s window as we ate our own meal. Driving we saw one after another, bucks, does, fawns. We also watched a big ol’ turkey and her brood, single file, cross the street in front of us.

I’m teaching a class next month August 10 and 17, zoom, on Nonfiction, everything from the idea, through the writing, and publication. It will be fun.

CRAFT SEMINAR: CRAFTING NONFICTION: FROM IDEA THROUGH PUBLICATION

with Jennifer Michael Hecht

2 Sessions: Sundays, August 10 + 17
1:00-2:30pm ET

$200

I hope you can join us, either at the poetry reading this Sunday, or next month’s Nonfiction class.

Stay in the shade. Glory in the AC. Get a little writing in.

***

Ok lads, laddies, ladies, and lords, remember, if you don’t feel like going to the beach, you don’t have to. Stay freaky and I will return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer