Category: Writing

All The Best

2/24/2021

We had moved from the city to Westchester two years earlier, and my editing job at the Big Apple Parents’ Paper had gone remote. I was occasionally contributing freelance articles – there was one about Lyme disease, I recall – and also writing for a local publication called The Pet Gazette (a round-up of doggie daycares, another of animal trainers). Sofie was 11, Ariel 8. I had just started seeing a therapist named Allison.

During one session I was bemoaning the banal subjects I wrote about and the small-time caliber of the publications. Would I ever be published in something more reputable, I asked? To which Allison replied: “Have you ever taken a writing class?”

Upon arriving home, I picked up the mail and found a catalogue from the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts. I flipped to the literary section and found a memoir class starting the next week. Allison’s words in my mind, I signed up. The teacher? One Joan Potter.

Before we moved, I had spent a two-year stint as the Parents’ Paper’s editor-in-chief, during which time I wrote a monthly column. I wrote about raising Sofie and Ariel; I told stories that were funny, or scary, or ridiculous – but always they were heartfelt. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing memoir.

The first piece I wrote in Joan’s class was about spending weekends at my grandparents’ apartment as a child. I described opening the drawer in the night table between my grandparents’ twin beds and finding tangles of multicolored ribbons. I wrote it in third person. “Why are you calling yourself ‘she?’” Joan asked.

I rewrote it using “I,” and then I wrote a piece about weather, and another about eating potato chips in the back seat of my parents’ car, my father fuming as we sat in traffic on the way to Cape Cod. The stories flowed from me, and they felt good. Although looking back at them now, I see they needed work. But I loved the class, and I loved sharing my stories with others.

I thrive on encouragement, and Joan was encouraging. “You should take my class at the Hudson Valley Writers Center,” she said one day. “The writers there are great.”

So I did, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Now, more than two decades later – from classes, to our writing group, to “Still Here Thinking Of You,” all interspersed with regular sushi lunches – here we are. Thank you, Joan, and Happy Birthday!

~Susan Hodara

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Socially Distanced

5/25/2020

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It was raining and dank when we scheduled Zoom cocktails with a friend for Saturday at 6. But then came the weekend weather report and, with it, an email: “It’s supposed to be beautiful,” it read. “Would you consider coming over to my backyard to have socially-distanced cocktails?”

After a momentary consultation with my husband, Paul, I declined. “We’re just not ready,” I wrote. But while the decision was quick, its aftereffects have lingered.

When our self-isolation began, followed days later by the official lockdown, part of me was excited. Part of me loved that suddenly everything was called off. No longer did I have to arrange activities, buy tickets, make reservations, schedule appointments or head to the gym. I went into my calendar and gleefully hit delete, delete, delete – no excuses needed.

Of course, before long, my calendar filled with Zoom this and Zoom that, and I have been grateful for every single one of those classes and visits and lunches and cocktails. They have been my connection – to my work, to my friends, to my family, to the world beyond my house.

And yes, I complain: too much screen time, not enough human contact. I miss being in the room with people, observing the subtleties and depths that can only be sensed in person.

The reason I said no to backyard cocktails wasn’t only my now-ingrained pandemic caution. It was a reluctance to give up some of what comes with an enforced lockdown. And acknowledging this reluctance has been fraught.

Here are a few of my conflicts:

• Maybe I won’t ever go back to the gym. I’ve been exercising daily, and, truth is, going swimming is a big production.

• When I teach on Zoom, it doesn’t matter what the weather is. It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing from the waist down. And all of my students show up, and show up on time.

• I like not having to drive anywhere. And I like knowing that if I did, there’d be no traffic.

• I relish the challenge of rationing food and supplies. You can’t argue with it economically and ecologically. And it suits my compulsive tendencies.

• And there’s something about those Zoom cocktails – the no-fuss, BYOB, no clean-up, hour-is-just-about-all-anyone-can-take – that I loathe to give up.

Epilogue: We had our cocktails, and at the end, our friend said, “I hope that next time, we can do this in person.”

“I hope so, too,” I said.

But do I?

~ Susan Hodara

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Two Perspectives on Goodbye

7/15/2019

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To Kiss or Not To Kiss

“Bye. See you next week.”

“Yup, bye bye.”

My friend Joan and I are parting after an hour-and-a-half long lunch in a local sushi restaurant. We’ve had many such lunches over the years, our conversations running from what to watch on Netflix, to the angst of family crises.

Joan and I know a lot about each other’s lives – and not just from our lunches. We met nearly two decades ago when I signed up for a weekly memoir workshop she was teaching at a nearby arts center. It was the first writing class I’d taken since high school creative writing.

Joan was petite, her straight white hair cut short, with the front falling gracefully across her forehead. She often wore Oxford shirts and cardigans with jeans and delicate earrings. In class, each student read their writing aloud and the rest of us offered feedback. Joan’s suggestions always impressed me, and I wondered how she knew so intuitively just what each student’s piece needed.

The stories of my life poured easily from me, and I re-enrolled for the workshop again and again. I wrote about my childhood, my old boyfriends, my daughters, my husband, Paul – my persistent goal to find the precise phrases that captured the truths of my experiences. I never thought about what I was revealing of myself. I never felt judged.

I don’t remember when Joan and I began chatting after class, or when I learned that she lived in the same town as I, or when we first met for lunch. I do remember Paul and I bumping into Joan at the opening of a Mexican restaurant and realizing, when she met him, that she knew far more about him than he knew about her.

After a few years I stopped taking Joan’s class. Then she stopped teaching it, and I had the privilege of becoming her replacement. Meanwhile, she and I formed a weekly writing group with Lori and Vicki, who’d been in the workshop, and before long, the four of us decided to collaborate on a book about our mothers.

Through it all, Joan and I continued to get together and keep each other apprised of our lives – from weddings and separations, to illnesses and injuries, to lots of petty gossip. Many things changed over the long course of our friendship, including the restaurants we favored. But our lunches remained constant, and as I stared across whatever table we shared, so did Joan’s face, with its attentive eyes, wry smile and blush of lipstick, seemingly untouched by time.

I have friends whose cheeks I peck when we say hello or goodbye, but not Joan’s. We don’t kiss. We don’t hug. “Hi,” we say, and “Bye, see you soon.” Then we go our separate ways.

But today is different. In the instant of our parting, my feet already swiveling to go, is a tiny melee of overlapping instincts. A kiss goodbye? No, we don’t kiss. But why not?

“Wait,” I say, and swivel back toward her as she turns around. I think I say, “Let me give you a kiss goodbye.” And then I lean forward and touch my lips to her soft cheek.

There is a tinge of awkwardness, of embarrassment, but they dissolve as we both smile and head into the rest of our days.

~ Susan Hodara

* * *

Hugs or Kisses

People are hugging more and more lately. Really long, tight hugs, with sometimes a cheek kiss or two. I see this in movies and on television. But not in my real life.

There are a few demonstrative women friends who give me a quick hug when they run into me on the street or in the grocery store, but that doesn’t happen often. I used to sometimes encounter a man who engulfed me in creepily lengthy hugs while proclaiming, “You’re the best.” Another man I’ve known for years likes to greet me with a wet kiss; when I see him coming I’m careful to quickly turn my head so his smooch lands on my cheek.

Among my four grown children, two are huggers and two are not. The two seldom-huggers, a son and a daughter, seem to like me well enough and will sometimes grant me a quick kiss. The other daughter is a warm hugger and kisser. The second son is also physically affectionate, but he’s six-foot-six and I’m five-two, and our hugs, although I love them, can be awkward.

Three of my closest women friends are fellow writers. We’ve known one another for twenty years and meet every two weeks to read aloud and comment on our writings, much of which are memoir. Over the years we’ve shared many experiences – illnesses, both physical and mental; deaths – human and animal.

We truly care about one another, we listen carefully and offer words of support, but we’ve never enfolded the others in those weepy, consoling hugs I see on my television screen. When we meet, we smile and say, “Hi.” When departing, we say, “Bye, see you later, enjoy the weekend.” No touching.

Just recently, I met one of our group, Susan, for sushi at a local restaurant. We always have plenty to talk about – our kids’ problems, our health, and, of course, books and writing. We finished lunch, paid our check, and stood to leave. Susan was going out the front door and I had parked in back.

There was a moment before saying goodbye when we didn’t seem to know what to do with our hands. We leaned slightly forward in a possible lead-in to a hug or cheek kiss. Then we pulled away, laughed, and headed in our separate directions.

Why did this happen? What does it portend? What should I do next time we meet? I’m hoping we can forget about it and return to the good old days of a smile and a wave and “So long, see you next week.”

~ Joan Potter

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Annoyed

9/19/2016

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When you’re hovering between a nervous breakdown and suicide, being forced to chat with a bubbly woman can push you over the edge. I’m in my eye doctor’s waiting room for my yearly checkup. I didn’t sleep well last night and today I’m so depressed that I’d rather be here than in my apartment full of chores to be done and a grouchy husband to tend to.

I sit down and open my book. “Mrs. Potter, it’s so good to see you again,” chirps the receptionist, who seems unduly excited by my presence. “It’s been a while.” She takes a breath. “What are you reading?”

My head is pounding. “It’s just a book,” I say.

Her voice lowers a pitch. “Oh, I see.”

I had a choice. I could have said, “I’m reading Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.”

Then she would have squealed, “Oh, a comma queen. That sounds so interesting. What’s
it about?”

A response was something I couldn’t handle. I lowered my eyes to my book, feeling a twinge of guilt that quickly dissipated.

~ Joan Potter

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When Pinto Got Paroled

1/15/2016

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The last of the barred doors clanged shut behind me and soon I was standing in front of Sing Sing’s huge stone administration building, the prison’s main entrance. I was carrying a cardboard carton that held Pinto – a half-grown black-and-white cat – and his cellmate, Missy, an all-black little male named by prisoners confused about his gender.

As I turned to head for my car, I heard the voices of prisoners behind the bars on an upper level. “Goodbye, Pinto,” they called.

I was a freelancer for the New York Times, and also a volunteer in a Sing Sing writing workshop. The Times had assigned me an article about how inmates at two Westchester County prisons not far from my home – women at Bedford Hills and men at Sing Sing – were able to humanize their lives within the confines of a maximum security prison.

It was 1977, six years after the Attica rebellion, when prisons started opening their doors to reporters and volunteers. Restrictions had been loosened, and the media became more interested in what was happening inside the walls. The Bedford Hills women told me about how they altered their drab green uniforms to make them more stylish, how they rubbed Vaseline on red and blue magazine photographs and spread the colors on their lips and eyelids.

Some men at Sing Sing said they made paintings, kept fish tanks in their cells, and had pet cats. The cats had found their way into the prison yard through holes in the old stone walls, and eventually into the cell blocks, where prisoners lured them to their cells by offering tidbits of food. One prisoner mentioned he begged gefilte fish from the Jewish chaplain.

After I finished the article, the paper sent a photographer to Sing Sing, and when my story appeared it was accompanied by a picture of a young prisoner standing in front of the bars of his cell holding a small black-and-white cat. Coincidentally, this prisoner – the owner of two cats – was also in the writing workshop.

A few days later I received a letter from him saying he’d heard on the grapevine that a cat purge was in the works. “They say they will give the cats to the SPCA,” he wrote, “but we know they’ll put them in burlap bags and toss them into the Hudson.”

I got on the phone to the warden. “Are you getting rid of the cats because of my article?” I asked. He said no, the article had nothing to do with it. Cats had begun to overrun the cellblocks, creating a nuisance and unsanitary conditions. They had to go.

After more back-and-forth with the warden over the next few days, he finally said that I could take the prisoner’s two cats out of the prison after the next writing workshop.

Toward the end of the session, as the inmates and I sat in a circle of folding chairs discussing that week’s readings, the cat-owning prisoner left the room and came back carrying a medium-sized cardboard carton with the top closed. When the workshop ended he placed the box in my arms. The inmates filed down the corridor, back to their cells. I walked the other way, escorted by a guard. When we reached the locked bars at the end of the hallway the guard shouted, “On the gate, two cats, out on parole,” and the lock clicked open. One more gate and I was in the lobby and out the door.

I settled the box in my car’s passenger seat and drove the twenty minutes to my house, where I tipped the cats out of the carton and led them to their food, water, and litter box. Pinto was wearing a brown leather collar embossed with his name, which must have been created by his owner in the prison crafts shop. I went to bed, and in the morning the cats were nowhere to be seen. After my teenage sons had left for school and my husband went to work, I searched the house, and finally found the two crouched together behind the television set in the living room.

They gradually relaxed and we began letting them outdoors during the day. But a few months later, when my sons were returning from school, they discovered Missy’s body on the street in front of our house. He’d been hit by a car. From then on, when Pinto went outside he seemed more cautious; he spent his time relaxing under a rhododendron bush in front of the house, and we kept a close eye on him.

He grew into a solid, beautiful cat, loving, intelligent, and sweet-natured. But whenever a visiting man with a heavy tread walked into the house, Pinto cowered in fear, no doubt recalling the prison guards who had stomped around the cellblocks.

When Pinto was fifteen, my husband, Roy, and I retired from our jobs, sold our suburban home, and moved to a log cabin in the Adirondacks. We worried about letting our cat outdoors, fearing he would wander into the woods and disappear – captured by a coyote or becoming hopelessly lost as he tried to make his way back.

But he figured things out and seemed content with his rural existence. In summer, he sat under the pine trees and among the wildflowers, watching chipmunks and red squirrels speed past. On cold winter days he sprawled on the tile hearth in front of the woodstove. He was making a better adjustment than I was.

I often felt lonely and isolated, especially when summer ended and our downstate family and friends stopped visiting. I felt out of place in our small town, where the residents had lived for generations. Sometimes I cried with frustration, railing at my husband about our ill-conceived move.

Pinto was my comfort. When I sat at the kitchen table with my morning coffee, he hopped onto my lap and stayed there until it was time for me to start my day. In the evening, as I lay on the couch reading or watching TV, he curled up on my stomach. In bed, he stretched his warm body next to mine and purred me to sleep.

Two years after our move, Pinto developed a malignant tumor on his side. His vets, Diane and David, removed it and he recovered, but before long another tumor appeared, this time inoperable. He gradually became thinner and weaker. When we let him outdoors, he seemed bewildered. One day he wandered in the wrong direction, and I discovered him crouched on a fallen tree.

From then on when I let him out I followed him as he moved slowly across the grass, stopping now and then to rest in a sunny spot. Then I’d pick him up and carry him back into the house. In the evening I’d carry him to the couch, sit down, and gently lower him onto a soft blanket I’d folded on my lap. Soon even that made him uncomfortable; he chose to spend his days lying on a towel behind the open bathroom door.

Roy and I could see that he was suffering, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to choose to end his life. Some mornings as we watched him trudge into the kitchen for a few bites of breakfast, one of us would say, “He seems to look better today,” and the other would agree. But of course we were fooling ourselves.

The vets would only lay out our options, leaving us with the final decision. But one day David said,” Pinto has been kind and loving to you for eighteen years. Now you can do something kind for him.”

The next day, David and Diane helped Pinto die. Afterward, I wrapped his body in a soft cloth, placed it in a box, and buried it at the top of a small rise that overlooked the cabin. I collected smooth, grey stones from the woods and built a cairn to mark the grave. When our young granddaughters came to visit, they painted bright flowers on the stones, and on the biggest one they printed in brilliant red letters: PINTO.

A few years later we sold our log cabin and moved back to the suburbs. We left behind the chipmunks that ate sunflower seeds from our hands and the hummingbirds that darted past our faces on the way to their feeders. And we left Pinto’s decorated grave.
On trips to the Adirondacks to visit friends, I could never bring myself to return to our cabin to see if the new owners had preserved the grave or had dismantled the colorful stones and tossed them into the woods.

~Joan Potter
Memoir reprinted from Celebrating Animal Rescue,
  Splattered Ink Press, available on Amazon

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My Guys

8/31/2014

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When our book was published I gave a copy to my husband, even though I have rarely seen him read anything other than the sports section of the newspaper. I also gave a copy to each of my sons, despite some hesitation on my part.

In our book I reveal things about myself that may seem shocking. Being molested by an uncle as a child. Drug use in my teens and early twenties. Depression. Anxiety. I had wondered if it was a good idea to open myself up like that, knowing family and friends, and yes, my children, would be able to read it. But I knew I had to write my story.

At the time, a little over a year ago, Billy was about to turn twenty-two and Steven was nineteen. All three of my guys were happy for me, and I think proud. Did I expect any of them to actually read it? I hoped they would. But, it is a book about mothers and daughters, written by four women. For a moment I regretted not having a daughter to read my story. Would a man, especially a young man, be interested?

My husband read my section of the book. He said he cried while reading about my struggle with postpartum depression and the chapter about my mother’s death. He told me he thought I was brave to write some of the things I did. I said he should read the other three sections, and he said he would, but he hasn’t so far.

Billy claimed to have too much to do, and yes, he is very busy, with school and work and friends. Though I do notice he has plenty of time to read the Game of Thrones books.

Steven started with my section and then read the whole book. This was not unexpected; Steven is a sensitive and generous person. I knew he wanted to read it for me. Yet I was surprised at how interested he was in the stories. He would knock on my door, book in hand, and ask if I had time to talk. Of course, I’d say. We had many discussions that grew out of his reading. He was seeing me not just as his mother, but as someone’s child, as a teenager, as a young adult unsure of what she wanted from her life, or how to proceed once she found out.

As we talked I realized how much my son needed me to write this book. That revelation was bittersweet.

~Vicki Addesso

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Elusive Memory

7/24/2014

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Memories are elusive. Sometimes they come in broken pieces, like dreams; sometimes they’re confusing and you find yourself surprised that they happened.

One of the greatest challenges of writing memoir is the choppiness of memory. You might have a strong image of your mother cooking breakfast, but you can’t connect it with a particular event. You might remember that you had measles, but you can’t recall the details of the experience.

People often ask if it’s okay to make things up to fill in the gaps. The answer is no. One of the most basic and important tenets of memoir is that it’s the truth – your truth. It’s the truth of what you carry with you from your past. The minute you veer away from that – add a straw hat or make up a location or throw in a line of dialogue that you don’t really recall – you are breaking your pact with your reader, and with yourself. Memoir comes from your life. If you want to embellish, call it fiction.

There are ways to work with the slippery realities of memory. Often my starting point is a clear but isolated image – like a tiny movie that begins and ends abruptly. I believe it’s there for a reason; it holds some significance. So I describe the image: my mother is here, my brothers are there, the weather is warm, the wind is blowing through the window, I have a sore throat.

I’ve found that through the process of writing, more memories emerge. When we decided to write our book, one of my biggest fears was that I didn’t remember enough. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fill my section with stories. But by sitting down and starting with the few distinct memories I had, other moments resurfaced, details unfolded, and new truths were revealed. It was like finding buried treasure, and I was finally able to tell the story I wanted to tell.

~Susan Hodara

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Just Write

6/2/2014

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Whenever we do readings, many audience members are anxious to tell us how much they identify with our experiences, and to share stories of their own mothers. In response, the four of us have been offering mother memoir workshops. After we’ve read from our book and talked a bit about memoir, the participants write about their own mothers. It might be for fifteen minutes, or even just five, the scratching of pens and the clicking of keyboards the only sounds in the room. Then one by one they read aloud what they’ve written.

Images of mothers materialize, this one in a wide-brimmed hat, that one sunning herself at the beach. Daughters idolize their mothers, or hate them, or can’t wait for them to come home from work. They watch their mothers reading magazines, preparing food, applying lipstick, and zipping up a fancy dress. One women wept as she read about her mother being beaten by her father and calling to her for help. In her story, she was a little girl; now her long gray hair was piled onto her head, but the memory still burned.

I am always inspired by the power of the details and the depth of emotion that emerge so quickly, so spontaneously. These snippets of memories culled in just minutes demolish the excuse of not having enough time or of not being in the right frame of mind. They are testimony to the long-running wisdom behind the craft: just write.

~Susan Hodara

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Solo

11/17/2013

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I have a close friend who, in a span of seven years, lost her father and grandmother to cancer, her brother to lymphoma, and then her husband to a car accident over an icy bridge that should've been marked. Shortly before her husband’s death, she discovered she was pregnant. She and her husband already had a toddler, and she had a daughter by a previous marriage. Here my friend was, in mourning, and knee deep in motherhood, dealing with it alone.

Over the years, when my sons were testing my limits, I sometimes thought of her. When a difficult decision had to be made, I sometimes thought of her. When my husband offered to pick up the boys from a friend’s house so I could make dinner or I was simply tired, I sometimes thought of her.

At her daughter's wedding this past summer, after the ceremony, my friend was sitting alone in the front row, her curly blond hair framing her profile, the sun setting. My husband and I were seated behind her, and I was thinking of how far she’d carried her children. Then I noticed an ever so slight trembling, and I drifted over to hug her hard. Yes, we were celebrating her daughter’s joy over having found love, but I was also celebrating all that I valued in her, even the quiet tears. I thought: Look at what you’ve done. You’ve raised three bright children who are personable and caring. Later I told her these same thoughts, realizing that I could only imagine the challenges and sacrifices that she, or any single mother, had to face.

During the process of writing our collaborative memoir about mothers and daughters, I explored a mother’s role, my own as well as my co-authors’, and I followed the sweeping impact, the indelible fingerprint she leaves on her child’s spirit. For many reasons, I’m lucky to know my friend, but when it comes to motherhood, she has shown me another side of the story, a narrative suffused with an inimitable resilience and fire.

~ Lori Toppel

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In the Eye of the Beholder

10/8/2013

4 Comments

“I have a problem with any memoir about a person who is no longer alive to defend themselves or tell their side of the story,” wrote a family member who was displeased with my section of our book.

“First of all,” I wrote in a reply to the e-mail, “if people could only write memoirs about those who are still alive, there wouldn’t be many memoirs.”

But the comment led me to review each of my stories to assure myself that they were fair. I had written about my impressions of my mother when I was a child, my memories of times she had supported and helped me, her independent spirit, and events of her life as she had related them. In only one story was I critical of her actions.

Knowing my mother – who was proud of my writing career – I think she would pretty much agree with what I wrote about her. Perhaps her memories would be a little different, but not so much that she would need to defend herself. Even in the story that criticized her, I believe she might say, “Maybe you’re right, Joan. Maybe I should have acted differently.”

In my e-mail to the family member, I pointed out that all but one of my stories were positive, thus implying that they did not require a defense. The family member has not yet responded.

~Joan Potter

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All The Best

Socially Distanced

Two Perspectives on Goodbye

Annoyed

When Pinto Got Paroled

My Guys

Elusive Memory

Just Write

Solo

In the Eye of the Beholder

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