Ann S. Epstein writes novels, short stories, memoir, essays, and poems. Please use the links or site menu to go to the HOME PAGE; learn about her NOVELS, SHORT STORIES, MEMOIR, ESSAYS, and POEMS; find interesting facts in BEHIND THE STORY; read REFLECTIONS on writing; check NEWS for updates on publications and related events; see REVIEWS; learn about her END-OF-LIFE DOULA credentials and services; and CONTACT US to send webmail.
More of my microfiction has been published at 50 Give or Take. This online publication from Vine Leaves Press emails a story of 50 words or less to each subscriber’s inbox every day. All are welcome to read, subscribe, and submit. FREE. Check out these stories of mine:
Hit SEND November 25, 2020
Test Results December 22, 2020
Fido’s Lament February 13, 2021
Window Seat March 17, 2021
“I’ll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel” (Haruki Murakami, After Dark). United States Postal Service (USPS) reports that two-thirds of survey respondents say exchanging snail mail letters during the pandemic lifts their spirits. Although electronic communication is faster, the slowness of letter writing makes it more reflective and purposeful. USPS is of course promoting its paid services, but their snail mail advice is nevertheless valid. As a writer, I compose email letters as slowly and thoughtfully as my snail mail letters in pre-internet days. Perhaps more so, because I can revise email letters before hitting “Send,” just as I revise manuscripts before I click “Submit.” Long-form letter writing is an art worth preserving, a form of epistolary literature. Read more of my thoughts about writing at REFLECTIONS.
“I’ve been watching the Apple TV series ‘Dickinson.’ Emily Dickinson spent so much of her life writing poetry in isolation, and as a young poetess quarantining I connect with it” (Amanda Gorman, The New York Times). Writers self-isolate by choice. We don’t need a pandemic-imposed quarantine to sit alone, reflect, and (re)arrange words. Gorman’s talents will continue to bloom after the pandemic withers. For me, while COVID-19 has limited in-person connections during the hours I don’t write, most of my day is otherwise unchanged. As before, I spend the time with myself, writing. Read more of my thoughts about writing at REFLECTIONS.
Fiction writers are plagued by the “sagging middle” when a story’s momentum wanes midway. A Google search on craft articles yields about 82 million hits for writing beginnings, 18 million hits for endings, 5 million for middles, and fewer than one million specifically for sagging middles. The hard-to-heal malady can be paralyzing; some writers give up. Thankfully, I’ve never faced this problem with a manuscript, but it’s how I feel midway through the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beginning, I was actively engaged adapting my daily life. When vaccines soon emerged, I was optimistic that the ending was foreseeable too. But as the pandemic drags on and people await vaccinations in a high demand-low supply world, I’m treading in a pool of inertia. A time will arrive when the manuscript of normalcy is retrieved from the drawer, but until then, I and others like me will dwell in the sagging middle. Read more of my thoughts about writing at REFLECTIONS.
Today, March 08, 2021, is International Women’s Day. Here are quotes from three novels with independent and courageous female characters:
From A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve.: “Years of farm work had made her limbs and torso as sturdy as a tree trunk. He started at the bottom and climbed to the top. ” The novel is a fictional biography of Meinhardt Raabe, who played the Munchkin Coroner in the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Meinhardt wants the respect given normal people. The women he meets, including Rosie the Riveter, want to be treated with the same respect as men. The book cries out for justice in the face of discrimination. Order at Amazon.
From On the Shore: “I was sorry I’d told Mama about my dream to be a scientist, and hoped she hadn’t spilled the beans to Papa.” An emotionally charged tale of an immigrant Jewish family in turmoil when their children rebel during WWI, including their young daughter who rejects a traditional woman’s role. Order at Amazon.
From Tazia and Gemma: “Most of the women are paid six dollars a week, men up to two dollars more.” The heartfelt and suspenseful story of two courageous women. An unwed Italian immigrant survives the 1911 Triangle Waist Co. fire in NYC and flees westward in search of freedom. Her daughter seeks her father fifty years later and instead discovers her mother’s brave fight for justice. Order at Amazon.
For more information about each book, see NOVELS.
Asked about the difficulty of writing during the pandemic, David Lynch replied “If you have a habit pattern, the more conscious part of your mind can concentrate on your work … and the rest sort of takes care of itself in the background” (“David Lynch’s Industrious Pandemic” by Howard Fishman, The New Yorker, 02/21/2021). This observation was followed by a typical Lynchian example of a man who, hacked nearly to death during the night, gets up and proceeds with his morning routine until he finally bleeds out in the foyer after carrying in the newspaper. Minus the penchant for hemic anecdotes, my “pattern” is like Lynch’s. Being in the habit of writing every day, the pandemic is a backdrop to my daily routine. Asked if there are days when he might feel resistance to enacting his rituals, Lynch says he would write anyway out of “a sense of responsibility.” He was referring to the readers of his daily “weather report,” but I would say the responsibility is also to ourselves as writers. Having been given the gift of work I find satisfying, I feel an obligation to carry on. Writing doesn’t make the pandemic disappear, but it allows purposeful activity to coexist with it. More thoughts about writing in REFLECTIONS.
My Amazon and Goodreads review of Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill (Rating 3) – Reader Interest as Unsustainable as the Planet. Weather, a novel by Jenny Offill, is as satisfying as twee appetizers without a main course. In other words, not at all nourishing. Lizzie is a happily married woman with a well-adjusted young son and a brother who struggles with addiction, although not in crisis mode. Having dropped out of graduate school, she works in a university library and assists a former professor obsessed with climate change. Nothing changes for Lizzie. She has momentary twinges of fear about how to prepare for ecological disaster, but her life remains inert. The existential dread isn’t even very dreadful. Perhaps that’s the book’s message, that we fret yet do nothing. But as packaged in a somewhat random assortment of social-media length blurbs, the readers’ interest is no more sustainable than the planet. This quippy style seems to be a trend in recent fiction. It’s no longer experimental, and in the case of Weather, not even very imaginative. As an author myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), who prefers books with well developed characters and engaging narratives, I worry that writers and readers like me are doomed to extinction.
“You might think writers, longing to be permitted to sit with their own minds, would welcome the grand rupture brought by the coronavirus and its forced isolation. But, in fact, this extended isolation has been no romantic reprieve” (Writer Lydia Sviatoslavsky). Actually, I don’t mind. Perhaps that’s because I had no problem creating and valuing solitude in pre-pandemic days. Zoom is a surprisingly satisfying social link. While I miss hugs, a lot, up-close screen interactions offer an intimacy that sitting across a table doesn’t. Besides, as a writer, I always have my characters for company. For more thoughts about writing, see REFLECTIONS.
My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands (Rating 5) – Family, Fanaticism, and Flight. Having myself written stories and novels centered on WWII (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was eager to read The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands. The author’s grandfather, a Jew, narrowly escaped death during the Holocaust. My own curiosity took a deeply personal turn when I read in the Introduction that Otto Wachter, the book’s subject, was the SS Officer who ordered the extermination of the entire Jewish population of the Polish city of Lemberg, the birthplace of Sands’s grandfather. My maternal grandparents, who came to America in the early 1900s, were also from Lemberg (then called Lvov in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; known as Lviv under Russian control). My grandmother’s sister (my great aunt) along with her husband, children, and grandchildren were among those Wachter sent to their deaths. So Sands’s quest became mine. The Ratline is actually three stories in one. The first narrative is a family saga about the love between Otto and his wife Charlotte, who shared his virulent antisemitism and turned a blind eye to its extremism; and the loyal attempts of their fourth child Horst, who barely knew his father but feels duty-bound to defend and find good in the man. Horst insists in the face of irrefutable evidence that his father was a humane administrator of civilian life, who had nothing to do with the Nazi death camps. Second, the book is a Nazi atrocity story about a man whose name deserves to be as well known as more familiar ones, like Himmler. The extent to which Wachter, a fanatic anti-Semite, was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands is laid out in chilling detail, supported by documents and photos. While the Holocaust is the best known material in the book, it never ceases to horrify. Third, Sands tells a postwar story of Vatican and U.S. collaboration to aid the flight of Nazi war criminals to Argentina, or elsewhere, via the Ratline of the title. This tale was the most eye-opening for me. Driven by their shared animosity for Russia and communism, the Church and the CIA ignored Nazi atrocities in exchange for information on their Cold War enemy. Rare is the source interviewed by Sands who admits this assistance was motivated by hatred for the Jews as much as for the Reds. I doubt this disgrace will ever be fully acknowledged or held to account, but Sands has written a remarkable book that will sear its record into readers’ minds and hearts. Deftly integrating storytelling and facts, The Ratline is a valuable and unique addition to Holocaust literature.
“Counterintuitive as it seems, the greatest gift we writers can offer the planet now is our contemplative practice. Our capacity to be deeply moved is what moves others. The pen is our sword but the strength to wield it comes from our willingness to listen, be changed, and bear witness” (Writer Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew). One benefit of the pandemic, for everyone, is slowing down. Staying in place forces us to stay with our thoughts. Writers should not be too quick to dash off their reactions to this strange time. Living with discomfort brings its own kind of comfort. For more thoughts about writing, see REFLECTIONS.
