I don’t ever publish unfinished writing. First drafts, maybe — because I can be impulsive that way — but not anything unfinished. However, the opportunity to contribute work to the 2026 Jewish Writers’ Circle Anthology published by Ritualwell this month — titled My Heart Is Astir with Gracious Words — was an opportunity I didn’t want to say No to.
It was a gift to be a co-facilitator along with Darcy Grabenstein of the South Jersey Jewish Writers’ Circle, and to witness what was born of that monthly gathering. Friends I had no idea had literary works inside them ended up creating gorgeous poems and starts to memoirs that moved me deeply and/or made me curious to hear more.Â
It took me many months to finally get to a moment in which an idea that had been gestating in me for a long time could finally start to emerge as language. It was only in our final gathering of the year that I had words I felt worthy of an actual story-to-be to share. 1163 words.
A beginning.Â
I am still not sure of what; a short story? A novel? A screenplay?
It’s fiction, but to be honest, I experience it to be a new kind of fiction. A kind of speculative hybrid memoir-fiction that is a merging of the known and the unknown. It is a dream of a possible future that I am sharing as fiction because how could it be real if it hasn’t happened yet.
That’s all I’ll share for now, and that the word limit for the Anthology was 500 words so what you’ll find in it is the kernel of a seed of a future hybrid-memoir-speculative-fiction short story or novel or screenplay.
It feels exciting to share it with you even if it’s only just the beginning of who knows what.
In general, this seems to be the phase I am in: the beginning of who knows what.
The baby who’s crowning.
Read Every Time I Remember, I Forget along with 38 other short pieces — some them fully formed, others kernels, like mine — here.
