Ellen Meeropol

I know. I know. This topic is likely to make you roll your eyes, unless you’re one of the 8.9% of writers who are – like me – obsessed with it. Another 35% believe that art is for art’s sake alone: spectacular sunsets, striking metaphors, startling insights about the human condition, but don’t step too close to the line. Over that line lurk propaganda, didacticism, partisanship, the literary equivalents of activist judges. The other 56.1% don’t care and have already clicked away. (Disclosure: these statistics are made-up.)

Seriously though, you can’t live in my family without believing in the power of literature to effect change. My father-in-law Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan) wrote the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit,” often quoted as the most important protest song of the 20th century.  Read More 

A couple of months ago I started a new novel. One of the first scenes I imagined took place in a grocery store, much like the chain store where I shop when I’m too lazy to drive to the food coop. In the scene, an older woman with early dementia is doing her weekly shopping with the help of her teenage granddaughter. The older woman is furious when the bagger, texting on his cell phone rather than paying attention to her veggies, smushes the lettuce. She throws a large onion at him and is hauled off to the manager’s office.

Today, in that market, there was no bagger, just me and the cashier.  Read More 

I’ve been home two days now from the AWP annual conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs). For me, the conference started slow this year. The panels I attended on Thursday and Friday weren’t very useful and I didn’t feel inspired. I started to wonder if the panels were just an excuse for writers to get together with far-flung writer friends. I loved hanging out with Janice and Jean and Rosellen and Carol and Marie and Margaret and Jeanne, and with folks from Red Hen Press and Stonecoast MFA. I bought and started reading fellow Red Hen author Michael Quadland’s brand new novel, Offspring. (It’s a wonderful read; check it out). But the chaos and noise of 10,000 writers was overwhelming. And not in a good way.

Saturday, day three, didn’t start well either. First of all, I didn’t sleep well Friday night – insomnia and bad dreams chased me into dawn. And several of my friends had to leave early. So I was looking forward to my political fiction panel with Rosellen Brown and Tracy Daughterty (assigned the last slot of the three day conference) but not much else.

My attitude changed in the ladies’ bathroom at 8:30 a.m., when the woman drying her hands at the sink said hello and we began a conversation. Turns out she is Edith Pearlman, whose recent story collection Binocular Vision, I’ve read twice, and loved. We were both en route to her panel – Women of a Certain Age. The panel was totally delightful, inspiring even, as five elegant and eloquent women writers opened their hearts. I was not the only person in the audience with tears in my eyes and a catch in my throat. This was because the panelists embraced the audience as sisters rather than passive listeners, and because of the truth of their observations and the beauty of their prose. The panelists, all with long and successful careers, also embraced those in the audience who are – like me – literary late bloomers, and welcomed us into their literary sisterhood.

Enjoying the brisk air and occasional snowflakes on Michigan Avenue afterwards, I realized that it took a while, but I finally hit my AWP stride. Once again I felt a profound gratitude to be part of a community of people for whom words are magic and books still live.  Read More 

My new website is up (thank you, Authors Guild) and I’ve been thinking about transformation. About reinvention. On our fast-walk last weekend, Robby and I saw a large house being built in the backyard of a much smaller, older home. We guessed that once the new house was finished, the residents would move in and demolish the old. That’s what happened at the children’s hospital where I worked for 24 years. A spiffy new building was constructed behind the old-fashioned, two-winged brick structure with open wards for boys and girls. Then, in with the new and out with the old. It was a fascinating process to watch.

The building wasn’t the only transformation I experienced in those buildings; I kept reinventing myself as well. I was an RN for seven years before, armed with a new Masters degree, I began working as a Clinical Nurse Specialist. About seven years later I went back to school for a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner certification. This reincarnation lasted a bit longer – ten years after earning that degree and working in that role, I left patient care entirely, to write fiction. My husband likes to joke that I’ve got the seven-year-itch, but luckily relationships are spared.

Of course, writing fiction is about constant transformation. We transform fragments – crumbs of acquaintances, flecks of personal history, slivers of the news, flashes of image, morsels of emotion – into full-bodied and multi-layered narratives. This usually takes many tries to re-envision those pieces into something whole.

Sometimes we tear down the old brick buildings. But sometimes we coexist with the plaster dust and torn up walls, with the layers of truth and imagination, memory and longing. Read More