News and Views (Current)

© KJ Hannah Greenberg, 2010

August 2010

 

August is usually a watershed month for me. On the one hand, it often parallels Elul, the month during which G-d is near and Judgment, too, is near. On the other hand, August is also my “back-to-school” span. I’ve been a teacher for decades and comprehend the end of summer as equivalent to the beginning of my next bout of instruction. On the third, not-yet-existential, hand, August is regularly a time for me to ruminate. Annually, by the time the new Jewish calendar kicks in and school is underway, I’ve been graced with some vacation, i.e. with some reflection time. Consequently, I usually begin my New Year with a new slant. Last, August precedes my birthday month. By G-d’s Grace, this year, I’ll be fifty.

 

Spiritually, I am appropriately anxious in August. I feel daunted by my review of my year and by my task of having to mend any breaks I’ve triggered with other folks. I feel intimidated by my having to amend my less-than-gleaming personality traits, too. Whereas these processes are necessarily ongoing throughout my calendar, August highlights their urgency. Suddenly, yet one more parenting publication seems trivial relative to making phone calls and visits to fix communication with family and with friends. All at once, an additional speculative fiction posting seems unimportant relative to my responsibility to use words to further dear causes.

 

Pragmatically, too, my Augusts witness change. Although I’m not a new educator, every new semester brings its own rhetorical situations and resulting challenges. Over the decades, the students I’ve tried to empower to write, to think, and to think about writing have been in high school, in college, or in graduate school. They were in gender-segregated classes or in mixed classes. They were honors students, “typical” students, or students requiring certain enhancements. Some were proficient in local culture; others lacked rudimentary interpersonal skills. Some loved dialogical instruction; others hated it and begged me to return them to rote learning.

 

While I know I will be teaching a set of boys and a set of girls, both at secondary education institutions, I don’t yet know how they will react, respectively, to my plans for such activities as collectively writing The Halibut, a satire on The Hobbit, or as creating a school newsletter. I believe they will buck at and then come to appreciate writing and reading as organic processes, rather than as page counts or as lists of words and of mechanics. During August, though, I can only imagine their responses to my approaches and can only pretend how our negotiated classroom interactions will play out.

 

Per this year’s gleanings from vacation-based meditations, I came to understand, blessedly, that it’s no longer novel or important, as “importance” is measured by adjudicating powers, for me to get published in academic venues or in commercial ones. Both while I waited for a server to bring steamed vegetables to my table and when I navigated festival traffic in Jerusalem, I deliberated that I no longer need to write: for tenure, to gain traction with popular publications’ editors, or to prove my worth to any other sort of external agency. I realized, as well, that were I to remain without professional goals, I would work without focus. Thus, I need to recalibrate. The nature of my future writing will change accordingly.

 

Last, I’m getting older. My physical workouts shore me up, but I neither build muscle mass nor shed adipose tissue at the same rate at which I did twenty or thirty years ago.  Either I need to make different sorts of efforts in the gym or I need to accept that my current results will vary from those of my youth. Analogously, my poetry and prose are more fluid than they were when I was a young woman, concurrent with my sensitivity to twaddle having increased. Work of mine that was published even a month or two ago suddenly looks problematic to me. It’s likely that in the coming year I will intentionally create fewer and, I hope, better, pieces.

 

I’m at a threshold. My soul is more blotched than suits me. I’m not teaching in a higher education classroom. I’ve grasped that my former professional ambitions no longer serve me. I’m accepting that I’m aging.

 

Over time, the impact of these evolutions will emerge in my writing. Whereas items already in the pipe will be published over the next year or so, in the form in which the publishers accepted them, and whereas items already written, but not yet fully situated, too, will go public, in the form in which they were presented to publishers, eventually newer sorts of work will materialize. These latter pieces will evidence the defining moments that took place during this particular month of August.

 

 

July 2010

It's hot. The clime in which I find myself pushes me to regard pages as potential fortifications for the piquant as well as for the blistering. I think I've written more feminist words, for example, in the most recent span than I have in the most recent decade. I've also begun to make minor rhetorical gestures toward defending my land and my people. I've taken new actions toward reinforcing my role as a parent of teenagers, too.

Interestingly, I have not suddenly grown political; I've long appreciated and protected the freedoms in my life. However, until recently, my focus has been on intergenerational communication, on midlife passages and on gelatinous beasts. It's not typical for me to distribute my ideas about searing universals.

Nonetheless, I'm finding myself, this summer, embracing stances concerned with nation and with gender. I'm shouting about the essence of feminism and similarly making loud sounds concerning human rights, all the while trying to simeltaneously bring to the fore the fact that morality is a relative commodity which is often controlled by monied or otherwise "powerful" persons. Consider that the globe's influential countries might not kowtow to the Arab world if the Arab world lacked the world's majority of oil fields. Consider that we are not truly promoting women as performers as long as the most popular female chanticleers have to garb themselves in bits and pieces of clothing. Consider, as well, that our teenagers don't need to act civil all of the time; regressive behavior is part of their growth.

I'm looking at these and related ideas while seeking an agent and while trying to bring additional books to press. Sure, I'm still writing literary criticism for Tangent, still loving contributing regularly to sites like Vox Poetica and Scribblers on the Roof and still oozing with gratitude for being able to serve on Bewildering Stories' editorial crew. However, I am concurrently beginning to appreciate the value of publishing at venues like Fallopian Falafel, like The Externalist, like Danse Macabre Belles-Lettres, and at other places where uncomfortable questions and awkward answers are read.

Professional accomplishment is nice, is desirably and is economically necessary, but it is not quintessential. More exactly, musing about the exactitudes of literature, at best, is of limited relevance to life. Exploring fiery topics, on the other hand, exposes important ideas, and can make readers uncomfortable enough to take notice or to evoke social change.

I'd settle for an uneasy audience or ten. Pass the chili peppers and give me an extra helping of the cider vinegar! It's going to remain a hot summer.

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Check out;

"A Response to a Potential Olah: Foo-Foo Ain't Worth Squat When it Comes to Kavanah." Poetry Super Highway. 

"Death of a Young Boy from the ‘Hood: Stratified Healthcare's Disgrace in Serving the General Public." Sparked.

 "The Pleasantness of Teenagers: Two Perspectives." The Jerusalem Post.

"Book Publishing as a Seemingly Random Creative Act." Fallopian Falafel. 13:19-22.

"Augmentation." The Scrambler. 

"Steamed Fish with Eyes," Freedom Fiction Journal.

"Why Moms Flee Quickly." Kindred.

"Not Judging Part II: The Benefits of Nursing (Toddlers)." The Mother Magazine. 38-39.