latest by jen
New on District Lit (2015)
My latest column is up on District Lit today. It’s not about real estate, nor about ghosts, but about the lies I tell myself about the idea of home. Check it out.
New Poem Up at Silver Birch Press
I’m excited to share with you my new prose poem, “Repeat,” is up at Silver Birch Press, a selection for their When I Hear That Song series. Check it out!
Book Review: The Ambassador
For all my love of time travel and exploration of whether or not we could or should alter the past, I’m surprised I don’t read more fiction in the category of alternative history. Perhaps I will now, after reading The Ambassador (The Toby Press), a novel by the late Ambassador Yehuda Avner and award-winning novelist Matt Rees. Set mostly in the late 1930s with World War II as its backdrop, The Ambassador imagines the impacts on Europe’s Jews had …
Almost Book Review: Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey
It’s an almost book review for two reasons: 1. I haven’t finished the book. Of course, I am certain many reviewers — ones who get paid for their reviews, even — don’t always finish the book they are slated to review. In my case, the early review is reasonable since Madness, Rack, and Honey is a collection of essays (in fact, most were graduate lectures given by Ruefle) and is suitable for reading at multiple sittings. After all, the lectures …
Book Review: Dear Luke, We Need to Talk
Book Details Title: Dear Luke, We Need to Talk, Darth: And Other Pop Culture Correspondences Author: John Moe Publisher: Three Rivers Press Review It was in one of my favorite online magazines, Fast CoCreate (a Fast Company publication) that I first heard about John Moe’s anthology of satiric correspondences which fictionally “exposed” the behind-the-scenes letters and diary entries of some of pop culture’s most famous characters and relationships, including the title characters’, Darth Vader and his son, Luke. …
I wrote a letter to a friend
I wrote a letter to a friend today and inside that letter — which was not a letter but something like a letter sent by electronic mail — I composed my feelings into something like feelings. And it’s a pattern, my tendency to compose somethings like. It’s not a pattern but something like a pattern, something I do again and again, with or without noticing, with or without intention. Mine is not a compulsion, but …
Gem in the Galilee
My dad and my husband have this routine: My dad, an archaeology enthusiast, always keeps his eyes peeled for the undiscovered artifact when he visits Israel. My husband always ribs him, “They’ve already found everything there is to find, Paul.” I take my dad’s side on this one and whenever archaeologists make a big discovery in our area in the Lower Galilee, I’ll usually send the article to my husband and my dad with the subject line: “So there’s …
Their stubborness, their bodies
Yesterday wasn’t the first day I was reminded that we accidentally on purpose train our daughters to give up rights to their bodies. Even though the more mindful of us will have conversations with our young ones about ownership of their “private parts,” about “stranger danger”, about saying “No,” there is one place many of us do not let our daughters (or our male children) say when and how someone gets to touch them: At …
Color of
“War is what happens when language fails.” — Margaret Atwood * * * * * This is the color of my voice these days … Almost Silent. Imagine it there in a box of 64 crayons. In my mind’s eye, Almost Silent is wrapped in Ecru But its waxy innards are sea green. Almost Silent, when taken to paper, magically scribbles in a shade of blue known only to the indigenous people of an island …
Review: How to Survive a Sharknado
Book Details Title: How to Survive a Sharknado (and Other Unnatural Disasters) Author: Andrew Shaffer (with contributions by Fin Shepard & April Wexler) Publisher: Three Rivers Press, July 2014 Review In 1999, when Chronicle Books published the first in what would eventually be the popular Worst-Case Scenario book series, I was an early adopter. I can’t say for certain where I purchased my now worn copy (it’s still in my personal library after six moves, including …
Sexy Quiet
What if I made the choice and the choice was Quiet? It’s true sometimes Noise tricks me into believing he is life. What with all the heart racing and the jumping out of bed. Gentle she, Quiet, though sometimes tiresome allows me the freedom to kiss my children goodbye and think like that again only when the front door crashes open. Unassuming Quiet permits me to write and eat ice cream. I desire Quiet. Noise, though …
What the world needs now
I spent the morning with my father-in-law in a cafe in Kfar Tavor. He was generous enough to be an interview subject for me in regards to a creative writing project I’m preparing for a class called “Art, Atrocity, and Truth.” My father-in-law is a child of the Holocaust. He is, in a way, art born of atrocity. His story is fascinating, as are the stories of so many whose parents survived the Holocaust, either in camps …
Putting out fires at almost 40
Honesty bursts forth from me in fits, in starts. This is 40. This may not be 40 for you. I realize, for you, this may be 43. Or 38. or 67. I don’t know if it’s temporal, situational, or hormonal, this shift. It certainly resembles the week leading up to my period with its moodiness, its gentle swaying between certainty and confusion. There are moments, for instance, when I can’t speak anything but the absolute …
If it was a place
If it was a place — cognitive dissonance, it would be here, Israel. Where in one swift shift I move from embarrassment (I forgot about swimming lessons) to fear of war. Shame I forgot about it; murder and them (those who can’t forget except in dreams which aren’t real) and yelled at my son for telling me he was bored on the second day after school ended. If it was a place — cognitive dissonance, it would be …
How to be a happy fool
The Buddha never said this, but it’s the noise of parenthood that propels me to appreciate the quiet. This is probably the greatest lesson I’ve learned so far in the 11 and a half years I’ve been mothering. This is also why I wouldn’t use time travel to go back and change being a parent because these little butterflies that look almost nothing like me have had an active and passive role in shaping me; …
Totally awesome redefined
I’m a girl who grew up in the totally awesome eighties, so it’s taken time for me to integrate the word awesome into my system with an emphasis on awe. But as I am awakening more to the magic in my life and in the world around me, I’m finding it necessary to rethink, “awesome.” I processed this realization as I watched a trailer of an upcoming film in which astronauts describe what many of them say …
A date with Haifa
Yesterday I took my husband to the ER for symptoms he has been suffering for over a week. Fortunately he was released at the end of a very long day and evening with a diagnosis of pneumonia. Serious, but not as serious as we thought, and treatable with antibiotics. And so … relief. We both hate the hospital. I suppose most people do. Worse than the fear of germs for me, though, is the overwhelm …
The New 40
“40 is the new 30,” said a friend of mine the other day. That would totally and completely suck, I just realized. Yes, my hair was blonder. Yes, my breasts were firmer. Yes, I had ten years ahead of me still ‘ til 40. But … wow. 30. 2004. Mom of one very restless baby. Up to my eyeballs in change … not bad change but the kind that causes upheaval that equals frequent upset. …
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