Field Notes
Some very quick things:
- Crafting Story from Your Family’s Past! Gather up those documents, letters, and photographs and reveal the stories that lay within. In this four-session course through JewishGen (Jewish genealogy), I’ll guide you through a series of timed prompts to bring your family’s history onto the page. Click here for more information: Tuition to JewishGen is $150. Starts April 16, 11 am Eastern – 1 pm Eastern via Zoom Ends: May 7.
- Holocaust Writing: When I was a fiction fellow in Prague in 2011, our group visited sites of Jewish heritage, including the infamous ghetto/camp of Terezin, known in German as Theresienstadt. I found myself needing to express my feelings through writing. In fact, I wrote poetry and the resulting poems become some of my first to be published. I am not a descendant of Holocaust survivors, but I’m still enormously impacted by the destruction and that’s why I pursued a doctorate in it. My creative writing explores prewar discrimination and the aftermath of trauma and despair. Often in my workshops I have participants who are descendants of Holocaust survivors and survivors of other genocides and marginalizations. This workshop is for you. We will write to timed prompts in this 2.5 hour session on April 2 from 9:00 to 11:30 am ET and honor those who were forced to endure terrible things. Click here to learn more and to register.
- Memoir or fiction? I’ve been writing about my junior year abroad as a Jew in West Germany as memoir. But I wonder whether I should fictionalize the narrative, particularly to fill in gaps since I have no journal or diary of the time I spent there, only photographs. Or maybe this becomes a future novel in verse? Interested in any thoughts–just comment below.
- New webinar to commemorate Yom Hashoah, featuring Dr. Natalia Aleksiun
Have a good week!
The Whole Megillah 