When my memoir, The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community and Coming Home to the Body, was in its just-about final, final, final draft, a friend who had recently read it told me to cut the part where I kind of diss a family member. As soon as she suggested this, a chord stuck through the core of me. I knew she was right, and I also knew how much I didn't ever want to use my writing to counter negative family dynamics in this way, and more to the point, how I wasn't…

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We all know the oft-repeated bad news: the publishing world, which was always going to hell in a handbasket, is now rushing down the mountain on steroids. Translation: there's little opportunity or money to be had when it comes to getting big publishers to promote their writers, send them on tour, and pick up the tab. I remember a friend of mine, who has written nine bestsellers, telling me that in the good old days, she actually had a credit card from her publisher that she could use to…

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As I plan for my Adironack-chair-on-the-porch portion of promoting my novel, The Divorce Girl, I'm excited about the possibilities of being two places at once without leaving home. Yes, I will actually go many places and do readings, talks or signings, but it's likely I will reach more…

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When I began my first novel, The Divorce Girl, I knew I was both basing this on my own life and fictionalizing it to get closer to the emotional resonance of what I had lived as a teenager. Fiction is like that: through the backdoor of imagination,…

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Poetry works best when it helps us see and hear the world anew. Through concise use of vivid languages and sensory images, we can bring our poetry alive, opening it up to new dimensions. "Language can do what it can't say," William Stafford said, and nothing is more true of powerful poetry. By tilting how we usually…

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It's April in Kansas, and this year, with spring ahead of itself and yet compressed into ecstatic blooming all at once, the green is electric, the flowers are vivid, and I've even seen the return of the winged beauties: butterflies and lightning bugs. To celebrate and explore being a writer in this season in our…

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How many years have I been writing The Divorce Girl? On paper since Forest was a creeping critter (now he's a giant), and in my head for about 37 years, give or take a few months. It's the fictionalized version of the outrageous story I lived in my teens: a household divided in the middle of New Jersey, the 70s and an ethnic hodge-podge of eccentric characters. Basically, I took the outline of my own story, inserted all new characters, and saw what could happen.

 

How…

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After an open arm's length of Holocaust books, a pile that would tower over my cat of Holocaust movies, dozens of hours of interviews, and over 700 pages of transcripts from those interviews -- not to mention four years of work -- the Holocaust book is done......mostly, kind of, pretty much. I add those qualifiers because when writing any book, there's never a solid completely-done place to arrive until after the book is in print, and even then, there's usually little tweaks in the second… Continue

“I wait for you your whole life, not something you made up, but air against air, light against light draped over

your shoulders like a sweater of no weight.” -Imaginary Friend When I was a child, I didn’t have any human friends. It wasn’t that I didn’t want friends; I just didn’t understand how to get them. Hard-wired for interior sound from the get-go and growing up in a tumultuous home, I found imaginary friends for each day of the week. Monday was an…

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Come visit my blog about the upcoming event, which grew out of a joke about having a poet laureate slumber party that will bring together poet laureates from four states: http://carynmirriamgoldberg.wordpress.com/. Please join us if you're local to Lawrence, Kansas, or traveling through, and please also share comments!

For the past few years, I've been immersed in writing true stories, first in my memoir, The Sky Begins at Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community and Coming Home to the Body (Ice Cube Press, 2009), and lately, in Needle in the Bone: The Uncommon Survival of a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance fighter. Particularly in writing… Continue

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Ten years ago, I had a four-year-old instead of a household of teens, all the original appliances we bought with our house, and my father, step-father and father-in-law were still alive. I didn’t know the new decade would bring a cancer diagnosis, a writing project about the Holocaust, an ability to fill out a FAFSA form in a flash,… Continue