Yikes, I’ve Been Studied! I had no idea I was “mak(ing) clear how well popular culture can entertain nostalgia, trivialize history, and relieve, without really working through, the traumas of the past.” Turns out that’s what Laurence Roth, a professor of...

Where do you get your ideas? I’ve heard authors say that their least-favorite question is “Where do you get your ideas?” Not me. For one thing, I am not one of those writers who keeps a file box (or the electronic equivalent) bulging with ideas, so that...

Thou Shalt Afflict Thy Protagonist George Cruikshank engraving It happened again yesterday. A friend in my writers group kept taking her protagonist into situations that made everyone squirm … but then backed off. For instance … The character is an...

The Wisdom of the Burnout Sisters We all know the stereotype of a book club, that it’s a bunch of women who, under the pretense of meeting to discuss books, just socialize and drink. That hasn’t been my experience at all. People in book groups I’ve visited have been...

The Urge for Going: Is it in Americans’ DNA? My grandmother’s family, the Antons, shortly after they came to Milwaukee from Ukraine. My grandma is the baby. I visited a book group recently, and one of the members, Cheryl, brought up an idea I’ve been thinking about...

Stories Everywhere: Crying Men & A Seal Birth “We are narrative beings,” said Margaret Atwood, an author I revere, at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival last spring. Along with food, shelter, and sex, one of our most basic needs is to hear and create...

Reading with Reverence - A Subversive Act In honor of my birthday today, I want to share a wonderful, healing gift that I received. I recently met a very wise woman, Lori Thornley, who told me about the respectful, holy way in which she approaches a new book—a...

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner: A Dance Review Rabbi Lawrence Kushner doesn’t bill himself as a dancer, and I didn’t go to see him Sunday in my role as a dance critic. But the rabbi’s got moves! Rabbi Kushner was giving a talk in San Diego titled “Jewish Spirituality:...

If Not Hillel, Who? Rabbi Hillel? Really? According to a number of sources that you figure had decent fact-checkers—like O Magazine and Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird—Rabbi Hillel wrote the following bit of Zen: “I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep...

Pioneer Jews My nominee for one of the most intriguing book titles ever is “Pioneer Jews.” It is not an oxymoron! As this deeply researched, terrifically readable history by Harriet and Fred Rochlin makes clear, Jewish immigrants to America in the 19th...

Opening the Door to Self-Compassion Wherever you go, there you are. Where I have gone is a cottage in Ashland, Oregon. My husband and I are doing a month-long stay here, seeing plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and spending most of our time giving ourselves a...

Now Read This! “The Knife-Sharpener’s Bell” by Rhea Tregebov Everyone’s a critic. Especially me. I write dance criticism. And, as a novelist and writing teacher, I’ve made an art of picking apart the most heartfelt, lovingly crafted prose. All of which...

Literary L.A. - and no, that is not an oxymoron! The Sunday L.A. Times carried an article by Hector Tobar that made this Southern California writer put down her cup of green tea and look for a barricade to storm. Tobar wrote about a New York Daily News blogger’s...

Djewess Unchained: ProsenPeople blogs Book launch at Warwick’s 1/29 I’ve been blogging up a storm, writing four posts for last week’s stint as guest blogger for The ProsenPeople, a project of the Jewish Book Council and the Jewish Daily Forward. You can link to them...

Blog Tour Goes to Cafe Bassam and Nia Class Thank you to J. Dylan Yates, who invited me to follow her on this blog tour. Dylan’s first novel came out just a week ago! Called “The Belief in Angels,” it’s about a young woman growing up in her parents’...

Did you get to choose your book cover? Well, sort of… “It’s an uneasy embrace,” my editor kept saying when I voiced reservations about the first cover Random House proposed for “The Tin Horse.” Granted, I said, the photograph of two...

5 Remedies for Pre-Release Jitters 1.  Go to a Day of Mindfulness at Deer Park Monastery. Do an hour-long walking meditation. Sing sweet, cheery songs with hand gestures led by beaming Buddhist monks and nuns. 2.  Feel absurdly comforted by reading, in Roberto...

7 Rules to Write By - Rule #3 (continued): Your Red Teacher’s Pencil In the last 7 Rules post - on Rule #3, choosing the right critique group for you - I talked about the etiquette for giving and receiving critiques. Before moving on to Rule #4 (about revising), I...

7 Rules To Write By - #2: Do the Work My last blog was about Rule #1: Go toward what scares you. The second of my 7 Rules to Write By has to do with the Muse.  Some people wait for the Muse to show up. Albert Brooks, for instance, in the film The Muse. He’s a film...

7 Rules to Write By - Links to All 7! For everyone who’s making a New Year’s resolution to finally start - or finish - that novel … here, in one place, are all 7 of my rules to write by, with links to the blog for each one. I’m using a pic from when I found the...

7 Rules to Write By - #3: Choose the Right Critique Group for You Recently my friend “Alice” told me about a writing workshop she’d joined. She was the only person who was writing memoir; everyone else was doing fiction. And she found the critiques of her...

7 Rules To Write By - #1: Go toward what scares you Hi, writers. This blog post is for you-or really, for anyone who takes the risk of following their artistic vision and putting it out into the world. I recently gave a talk at the Southern California Writers...