Once upon a time, I enjoyed a romance with a man I’ll call Arthur. Arthur was married, but he and his wife, “Guenevere,” had been living like roommates for years. She’d recently told him she had no interest in ever being physically intimate with him again.

Shortly after meeting, Arthur and I fell wildly in love. Before consummating our passion, I insisted he talk to Guenevere. I knew firsthand the devastation of betrayal—I refused to be part of any deception. He spoke to her, and she bestowed her blessing.

Arthur and I had an astounding amount in common. Perhaps too much. In addition to having the same taste in books, movies, and music, we were both stubborn, impractical, and highly emotional. Within a year, our passion had burned itself out in a spectacular conflagration of shouting and tears. After we recovered, a beautiful friendship rose from the ashes.

Several months later, I told Arthur I wanted to write the story of our romance to submit to a popular column about Modern Love.

Arthur was enthusiastic. He adored the idea of our passion becoming immortalized. I told him I’d run the piece by him before submitting. If he objected to anything, I’d consider changing it. No promises, but I’d try to honor his preferences. He said he was sure he’d love every word.

I worked on the story for months. Landing something in that column was a long-held dream. This was my first attempt—I wanted to get it right. I ran the story by several trusted readers and went through countless rounds of revision. When I’d finally managed to slash my original tome down to the required word count, I sent it to Arthur.

A half hour later, he texted.

“Sweetie, you can’t publish this. It would destroy things with Guenevere.”

Huh? He and Guenevere were now living separately and headed for divorce.

“She wants her privacy.”

“Your names aren’t in it.”

“She thinks people will recognize us. Besides, I look like a fool.”

Excuse me? That last part made no sense. Everyone who’d read my draft had fallen in love with the charming, handsome, endearingly goofy man I’d described. I believed I’d told our story faithfully and affectionately.

Arthur, however, had seen himself as a dragon-slaying rescuer of maidens. He felt he came across in the story as a feckless layabout, more in need of rescue than the resourceful damsel telling the tale.

I asked him to tell me which lines bothered him so I could revise them.

“ALL OF IT!” he wrote.

This was getting too intense for text. I called.

It turned out that immediately after reading my story, he’d phoned Guenevere—his closest friend besides me—to complain about how ridiculous I’d made him sound. When she’d learned of the story’s existence, Guenevere had completely freaked out. She wanted it gone.

“She’s barely in it!” I protested. “And everything I say about her is glowing.”

“Her family didn’t know we were separated then.”

“So? They know now.”

Apparently, Guenevere was an extremely private person who didn’t want anything about her life published anywhere, ever. Since Arthur had known about the story before I started writing it, I wondered why the hell he hadn’t mentioned this sooner.

We argued a while but made no headway. I hung up furious. He was distraught.

“Guenevere wants to talk to you tomorrow,” he texted later that night.

“Fine.”

“I’ll let you two work it out,” he wrote. “I don’t care anymore what you say about me. I just want the women I love to be happy.”

I stewed on this throughout a mostly sleepless night. I’d put an insane amount of work into the piece. Acceptance was a longshot, but I wanted to take my shot. I hoped I could ease Guenevere’s concerns by offering to omit more identifying details.

When Guenevere and I spoke, she explained that leaving out further details wouldn’t help. Her parents knew my name and that I was a friend of Arthur’s. Given the timeline and a few key elements—the very elements that made the story interesting—she was convinced that if they saw it, they’d recognize him.

What difference did it make, I wondered, since she and Arthur were no longer together?

I’d always liked the sound of Guenevere’s voice, which was smooth and melodious. Now, however, it rose in panic. “Because it’s my private life!” she cried.

Her parents were old-fashioned, she said, with increasing agitation. They would never understand how she could tolerate Arthur’s being involved with someone else while they still shared a home.

“Do your parents even read that column?” I asked.

“Sometimes!” she shrieked. And that’s when she said it, screamed it, really: That this was her worst nightmare. It was not my story to tell. “I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation,” she wailed.

“People have these conversations all the time,” I said, a hardness rising in me. “Anyone who writes about their life has to deal with the question of where their story ends and other people’s begins. It can be very hard to know where to draw the line.”

“You draw the line when you hurt someone!”

I told her I’d think about it and hung up, shaking.

For the next week, I vacillated, stymied. I wanted desperately to submit the piece. But as angry as I was with Arthur for not mentioning this potential roadblock earlier, I didn’t want to hurt him or Guenevere.

I reached out to friends and colleagues for advice. Though opinions varied, I was pleasantly surprised to find more people in Camp Submit-Your-Story than Camp Kill-It.

An artist friend summed up Camp Submit’s position thusly: “I just believe that having the right to tell our own stories should have primacy,” she said. “I don’t think anyone should be able to squash our self-expression. You’re not doing a hit piece. There’s no vindictiveness in it. You’re telling your own true story, and it happens to touch on someone else’s life. To my mind, in this situation, your rights outweigh theirs.”

William Faulkner famously said, “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art…If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate,” he went on to say. “Ode to a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.”

Remind me never to leave that guy alone with my mom. (Never mind, he’s dead.)

On the opposite shore from Faulkner sat the memory of my late stepfather Erich, a renowned statistician and a highly principled man. Many years before, I’d discussed with him a piece I was considering writing about one of my college professors—a brilliant and polarizing character. I’d wondered aloud whether the piece I wanted to write might hurt my former teacher’s feelings.

“If there’s a chance it could hurt him, don’t write it,” said Erich. “Nothing is more important than that.”

Somewhere between publishing whatever the hell you want—consequences be damned—and relegating your masterpiece to oblivion so as not to ruffle anyone’s feathers lies a vast river of nuanced approaches. These include examining your motives, changing identifying details, re-classifying your work as fiction, and allowing the passage of time. Figuring out what to do involves deep reflection on the relationships involved, the potential for harm, and how much the piece in question means to you. There is no short-cut. Serious soul-searching is required.

I now teach memoir-writing workshops. In every group, the problem of how to write about friends and family arises. Mostly, people bring up legal issues. These certainly exist, I tell them, but to my mind, the ethical ones are thornier.

As I agonized over what to do with my story, I found myself questioning my entire moral code. The question seemed not so much What do you want to do? as Who do you want to be? I’d always considered kindness my highest value. Now I wasn’t so sure.

I went to see my therapist.

“I feel like there’s this warrior inside me,” I told her. “She’s this Amazon, standing on a mountaintop, holding a spear, her silver hair streaming out behind her. She’s roaring into the wind. She wants her voice heard, and she doesn’t give a flying fuck who gets hurt along the way.”

“Kindness is a complex concept,” said my therapist. “Particularly for women. Often it’s meant putting others’ interests ahead of your own. Maybe you’re coming into a different moment in your life, where you have other priorities.”

I wanted this to be true. But every time I came close to submitting the piece, I heard Guenevere’s voice in my head, crying, “This is my worst nightmare!”

Reader, I couldn’t do it. I told Arthur and Guenevere I would not submit the piece to that column. I also told Arthur I needed a break from our friendship.

Several months passed. Then one day I got a message from Arthur, saying that what I’d written had made him sad, but it would make him a lot sadder if our friendship ended.

I missed him too, but there were things I needed to communicate to get past the experience. I wrote him a letter detailing everything about it that still rankled: That he’d let me work on the piece for months without mentioning Guenevere’s feelings about privacy. That he’d shared the story with her without speaking to me first. That her fears about her parents’ opinions had stood in the way of my ambitions for my work.

Then I told him that, if we were to be friends again, there was something he needed to know: I would tell our story one day. I would keep my word not to submit it to that column, and I would do everything I could to disguise his and Guenevere’s identities, but I would find a way to tell it. And next time, I would not show it to him in advance.

He wrote back, “I hear and respect your raging roaring presence. I think you should write your stories always. This is your calling. Wherever you decide to send it—even there—I won’t stand in your way. Do what you think is best. I just ask that you respect my privacy. I trust you.”

Those three words, “I trust you,” changed everything. It was as if a fairy godmother had waved her wand, and my inner Amazon transformed into a pussycat. I began to feel tenderly towards Arthur again.

“Maybe your warrior was a protector,” said my therapist. “Once the threat was removed and no one was trying to prevent you from speaking, she was deactivated.”

Years passed. Arthur and I remained friends. Then one day, not so long ago, I told him I was writing a piece about what happened when I tried to tell our story.

“There won’t be a single detail in it that could possibly identify you,” I assured him.

“Great!” he said. “I can’t wait to read it.”

“You can read it when it comes out.”

Where do you stand on the rights of the artist to expression vs. the right to privacy of those they come in contact with? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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Photos and text ©Tanya Shaffer, 2026. All rights reserved. Photo of Tanya in red coat by Robert Chester, @rchesterphotography. Woman warrior image created in Canva.

Longing to tell your own stories? My writing workshops help you get those haunting images out of your head and onto the page. I also offer private coaching and editing. Reach out!

Eight years ago, I published the first piece in the blog/essay series that would become this Substack on my website. I’d recently relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan after almost 30 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a child of the Midwest, I experienced the freshness of being in a new place, combined with the nostalgia of returning to a familiar landscape. It felt like a fertile time to begin these chronicles.

Since then, I’ve published sixty-two more pieces, on topics ranging from relationships to creativity to spirituality to family history to travel. During this time, my children grew into adolescence and young adulthood and my marriage came apart. Some of you have been with me from the start; others have joined along the way. However you got here, I appreciate you.

In honor of this eight-year anniversary, I’m sharing the first piece in the series, Landscape of the Heart. As I approach another transition—my younger son will graduate high school next month—it feels meaningful to revisit the moment when living in Ann Arbor was new and strange. Since then, I’ve come to love this community deeply, though I still keep a foot in the Bay Area and visit often. In some ways, I’ve replicated the situation of my upbringing as the daughter of geographically split parents, forever straddling two lives.

Wherever you are, I hope this gives rise to reflections on the outer landscapes that shape your inner life. I invite you to share your own thoughts and stories in the comments.

Warmly,

Tanya

I was born and raised in Kansas, and though I haven’t lived there in more than thirty years, its wide, rippling fields are within me still. That’s the thing about where you’re from. Even if, like me, you’re born to Jews and immigrants, who are no more of that place than an olive tree or an arctic fox, you are of that place simply by growing up there. Somehow the soil of the place, the shape of it, takes root inside you and never lets go. So when I stood on the outdoor stage at my high school graduation so many years ago, feeling a tender nostalgia for the place I believed I was about to leave behind forever, I didn't quite have it right. You don’t leave a place, not really. The place comes with you. Which may be why I’ve always been drawn to open spaces – meadows, oceans, lakes, even very large rooms which give you the feeling that you can stretch out your arms and spin and spin without ever hitting a wall. They feel like home.

Last weekend my boys and I walked through a field. The earth was hard and rutted. By a small creek, we met a man out walking with two kids who were still in their pajamas. The man told me that in the summer that field grows corn. This made me want to buy the house we’d driven out there to look at, a house that was bigger than we need, but still affordable. Because if we lived there, a five minute walk from that field, I could pass it daily walking my dogs and watch the corn move through its life cycle, from the dry field of today to the moist, freshly turned earth of next month; to the pale green shoots poking through; to the towering glory you can lose yourself in; to the desiccated, decapitated stalks; to the field again laid bare.

You see, after more than half a lifetime in California, seven months ago I moved back to the Midwest—to Michigan this time. I moved here so that my older son, who is on the autism spectrum, could attend a wonderful school for kids who learn differently. The speed of it all gave the move a dreamlike, “is-this-really-happening” quality—we made the decision in mid-July, packed up the Odyssey with boys, dogs, and a modest assortment of belongings, and drove across the country, arriving in Ann Arbor August 31.

And here’s the thing: Though I once vowed I’d never live in the Midwest again, it’s good to be back. I didn’t hate where I grew up, not at all. In many ways, I loved it. It’s just that I felt a sense of otherness there, perhaps because my father was an immigrant with a funny accent, as old as other people’s grandfathers, and Jewish, and a Holocaust refugee, and a socialist; or perhaps because, from an early age, I lived a split life, ripped along the seams of my parents’ divorce — Lawrence, Kansas, with my dad during the school year and Berkeley, California, with my mom during summer and winter breaks. And of course, once the San Francisco Bay Area had located itself within me, well, there was no dislodging that place either.

“Time isn’t linear,” said my friend Jenny on New Year’s Eve. We were back in the Bay Area for the holidays, gathered with friends in the empty living room of our El Cerrito house. Her words comforted me as I confronted the ache of saying goodbye to a neighborhood I loved more than any I’d ever inhabited. Time isn’t linear. The ten years I spent in that house with its view of San Francisco from the far right corner of the balcony, the art wall my children and their friends covered with layer upon layer of magic marker and paint, and the giant yard overhung by a sprawling California walnut tree are not gone. They live on in a sunny corner of my heart, along with the deep and dear friendships I formed during my time there.

A couple of months ago, I ordered a necklace on Etsy. It has three states on it, shaped from delicate, gold-plated wire: Kansas, Michigan, California. I wear it every day. I put Michigan in the center because I live here now, and it’s important to me to be where I am. I spent too much of my childhood feeling divided; I don’t want a repeat. The necklace, for me, is about making my peace with all the places that live within me – not just these three states, but every place I’ve spent substantial time in and grown to love — Berlin, London, Accra, Dharamsala, Kauai — the list goes on.

And yes, there are still moments when I ache for the Bay, that vast silver-gray-blue creature whose heart beat alongside mine for thirty years, its ever-changing moods coloring my waking hours. But there are other moments — more frequent, really — when I’m grateful to be exactly where I am, back in a land of dramatic seasonal shifts. That’s right, gratitude, even as the snow continues into April: for the naked tree limbs’ intricate filigree; for the cold slap of awakening when I open the door; for the slush castles at the side of the road, how they glimmer in the pale dawn, each crystal illuminated; for the blue-white frost on the car window with its asterisks and polygons, spidery darts shooting off in every direction, intersecting to form new and unexpected shapes.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll even buy that house by the corn field.

Epilogue, 2026: I did not buy the house in the field. I bought a house with woods in the backyard and this magical room where I sit to write and hold writing workshops, both in-person and online. What a gift.

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I can’t wait to share my new piece with you. First, though, I want to announce a new writing workshop:

Tiny Gems, a Short-Form Memoir Workshop, starts April 28. This intimate, beginner-friendly online workshop is designed to help you locate the core of your story and shape it into a dramatically compelling and emotionally resonant piece of writing. Learn more and register here.

I also have one space available in my in-person Off-Leash Writing Workshop (in Ann Arbor, Michigan) starting April 14. Learn more and register here.

And now, reed on … I mean, read on!

On Becoming a Reed

Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Be your note.
I’ll show you how it’s enough.

- Rumi, “Each Note,” Translated by Coleman Barks

I was raised to be exceptional, a standout, a star. Now all I want is to be a reed.

In February of 2024, I entered Kath Weider’s studio for the first time to attend her Vocal Improv Lab.

I’ve sung all my life. I was three years old when I got up onstage for the first time to duet with an adult on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I was six when I joined a choir, eight when I performed in my first musical. I’ve sung for audiences large and small. Singing has brought me tremendous joy, yet there was always an element of performance to it. Something about listening to the sound of my own voice, and finding it either wanting or good. Even when there was no one around, there was an imaginary audience, an imaginary stage.

When I sing with my friends in Vocal Improv Lab, it isn’t about me. It’s about us, and it’s about something larger than us. Rumi called it God. I might call it the Life Force.

In vocal improvisation, you use your voice to create something out of nothing. It involves melody, harmony, and rhythm. It can also involve words. There are many forms you can use to do this as a group, but my favorite is simply an open jam. One person begins, usually with a short repeating pattern, and the rest of the group joins in, one by one, adding their voices to the mix. Each person finds their place within the creation, whether by strengthening an existing line; adding a harmony, counterpoint, or rhythmic element; or layering a free-form solo over the top.

Our group of eight improvisers has been working together for two and a half years now. During that time, we’ve gotten to know each other as friends and as singers. Our voices themselves have become friends. We walk into a room and start jamming before saying hello. Sometimes our jam grows to a roaring crescendo then falls to a gorgeous softness before ending by unspoken mutual agreement. At other times, silliness enters the circle and we break up laughing in the middle of a song. In every case, we are nourished by our collective sound.

To participate in vocal improv, I needed to check my ego at the door. By ego, I don’t just mean the inflated self-esteem we call egotism. I mean the attachment to a fixed idea of myself that must be protected.

If I’m attached to ego, I run the dual risk of pushing my voice too far forward or holding it too far back. I might sing loudly and overbalance my part or sing softly and never step into a solo. In either case, ego is calling the shots, whether by showing off in hopes of garnering praise or staying hidden out of fear of losing others’ regard.

Unlearning a lifetime’s attachment to ego is not an easy task. But when I’m able to manage it, even for a short while, the rewards are profound. I’ve never experienced anything more exhilarating than losing myself in the sound of a group and allowing the music to carry us. When this occurs, I am transported. I am transformed.

In poem after poem, Rumi described humans as hollow reeds through which God blows. In vocal improv, I seek to embody this notion. To allow the music of the Life Force to move through me without my interference, so that when a melody comes, I don’t block it. I step forward and allow my voice to embody the melody until it reaches its natural end. When it’s finished, I step back and allow the voices of others to rise, while I take on a supporting role or drop for a while into noble silence.

As Rumi tells it, ever since we individual reeds were cut from our reed-bed, our song has been a plaintive one: Anyone pulled from a source / longs to go back. The song itself is, body flowing out of spirit / spirit up from body…hurt and salve combining.

Rumi was not alone in acknowledging the fundamental pain of existence. C.S. Lewis named it too when he wrote that literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

When I blend my voice with the voices of others, I feel the world’s yearning moving through me and around me as sound. My longing is not separate from the planet’s longing, just as my voice is not separate from this music, but a part of it. And as Rumi stated, the act of embodying it is both hurt and salve.

Like C.S. Lewis, Rumi acknowledges that being a reed-flute is a privilege as well as a burden.

Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.

Aren’t we lucky, he seems to ask, to be animated by divine breath?

Andean panpipes are made from collections of anywhere from seven to twenty-three hollow tubes, each playing a different note. The more tubes, the wider the range of music the instrument can create. If you take a single tube out of the middle, a crucial note will be lost.

In vocal improv, as a small but essential piece of a whole, you must learn when to solo, when to support, and when to remain silent. This depends on a kind of full-body listening. Occupying your space within the circle of song, you must attune your physical being to the vibrations rippling through the group. Aligned harmonies create a satisfying pulse. Dissonance manifests as a delicious agitation, causing hairs all along your skin to bristle up. Sliding in and out of dissonance is a form of play, a teasing around the edges of what the form can hold.

We live in chaotic times. You may wonder what you, a single reed, can do in the face of the great buffeting winds of history that are blowing our planet apart. Perhaps you fear that you have nothing to add to the great, cacophonous roar.

But wait. Stop. Stand very, very still. Set aside ego’s fear and disappointment and engage in the kind of listening that demands all your focus, all your love. Do you hear the essential song? Listen until you sense an opening, a space that only you can fill. Then step forward and fill it.

Claim your solo.

Sing.

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This piece is in some ways the culmination of my series You’re Gonna Be a Star Someday, about my life as a performer. If you enjoyed it, I invite you to check out the first three pieces in that series: The Triumphant Team, Where I Have to Go, and My Fairy God-Juggler and Beyond. (You may notice a big time gap between the third piece and this one. I may yet go back and pick up the in-between parts in later installments!)

If you’d like to learn more about vocal improv and other group singing events in Southeastern Michigan, check out Tatianah Thunberg’s newsletter, The Power of Singing.

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Dual Citizen

THE LETTER

A few weeks ago, I received a package in the mail from the Austrian consulate. Along with a certificate confirming my new citizenship, it contained a letter from Beate Meinl-Reisinger, Federal Minister of the Republic of Austria.

“Dear Fellow Austrian,” the letter began. It went on to describe the recent law allowing citizenship for descendants of victims of the National Socialist regime. As an Austrian citizen, Ms. Meinl-Reisinger wrote, I’m entitled to vote in elections. I’m entitled to the protection of the Austrian government wherever in the world I go.

She expressed gratitude to me for placing my trust in Austria and assured me of the country’s commitment to honor the rights of all its people. The last paragraph read:

It fills me with great pride and joy to welcome you into the worldwide community of Austrian citizens. I hope that this step will strengthen your links to your ancestral home, links that were unjustifiably broken during the darkest hours of our history.

Tears rose. It had been eighty-seven years since my dad fled Vienna.

“I wonder what my dad would think of this,” I wrote to my friend Elena.

“Ask him and listen,” she wrote back.

HOW IT STARTED

My journey to this moment began in mid-September, 2020. It was the height of the Covid epidemic, about a month and a half before the 2020 elections.

One morning, I awoke in my bed and reached for my phone.

“Hey Siri,” I asked, “Can children of Holocaust survivors get Austrian citizenship?”

A headline popped up: “Austria Will Grant Citizenship to Direct Descendants of Austrians Who Survived the Holocaust.”

I’d been thinking of looking into this for at least five years. Unbeknownst to me, the small Jewish community in Vienna, where my father was born, had been working tirelessly throughout that time—and for half a century prior—to pass a law making citizenship possible for people like my children and me.

The date on the article was September 2, 2020. The law had been in effect for less than two weeks.

Goosebumps rose all over my body.

“We could do it,” I thought. “We could leave.”

THAT MOMENT, THEN

As November 3, 2020, approached, I was one of many people threatening to leave the country if the Orange Tick—as my family and I like to call him—was re-elected. Yet even as I spoke of fleeing across the border to Canada, I knew it was just talk. Learning that we could get European citizenship made that possibility a lot more real.

Not that I planned to move to Austria. My feelings about that country remain ambivalent. My Vati (pronounced FAH-tee, German for daddy) always shook his head during the scene in The Sound of Music in which an auditorium full of people sing along to a patriotic Austrian song and grumble about the Third Reich. (We’re big musical theatre fans in my family. They often provide touchpoints for me in navigating the world.)

“The Austrians welcomed the Nazis with open arms,” he told me. “They threw parades for them.” Objectors like the von Trapps were few and far between.

Things are different now, of course, but the far right is on the rise again there, as it is in too many places.

So, no … A move to Austria was not something I’d ever dreamed of. But Austrian citizenship, should we obtain it, would give us the right to live and work anywhere in the European Union. Given the batshit crazy direction the U.S. was headed, having that option felt like a gift.

A fascist government had decimated the community my father grew up in and driven him from the land of his birth. That the same country he’d fled could one day provide refuge to his family against burgeoning fascism in his adopted home seemed darkly ironic. Yet there it was.

JOIN ME?

I mentioned to my older brothers Len and Ron the idea of applying for Austrian citizenship, wondering whether they’d like to do it with me. They expressed vague interest, but no urgency.

“I could do it later if I wanted, right?” said Len.

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but it takes about six months, I think. If we ever need to leave in a hurry, I want to be ready.” The ever-present idea that one might need to leave in a hurry is one of the legacies of being a survivor’s child.

At my wasband’s suggestion (a wasband is a husband from whom one is amicably separated), I contacted a lawyer in Austria. He sent me a list of documents I’d need to gather for the application.

That’s where the story grinds to a halt.

OBSTACLE

I’m intimidated by paperwork under the best of circumstances, and this list felt particularly daunting. It included things like my father’s birth certificate, which I had no clue how to obtain. Of course, the whole point of hiring an Austrian lawyer was for them to research such things for you. Yet even gathering things like my own birth certificate and criminal background check overwhelmed me. I therefore invoked the time-honored mantra, “I’ll do this tomorrow,” and set it aside.

Fortunately, the Red-Yellow Bloodsucker did not win in 2020. And although I still periodically murmured that I needed to get going on that citizenship application, it slid down my list of priorities into the zone of “when I have some time,” alongside the cardboard boxes that have remained stacked in the basement since moving into my house in 2018.

FORWARD MOTION

In 2024, the Citrus Sociopath again won the White House. While I sat petrified with shock and horror, my brothers got serious about getting that second passport. Without benefit of lawyer or detective, my brother Ron managed to locate my dad’s birth certificate and an original citizenship document from 1930. My brother Len then set his methodical mind to gathering the other materials and soon submitted his application. Several months later, it was approved.

I was gobsmacked. Here I was the one who’d come up with this idea in the first place. Now my brother was an Austrian citizen, and I was still back at square one.

“So, why haven’t you done it?” Len asked when I pointed this out.

I explained that whenever I looked at the list of documents—which, looking back now, I have to say is not actually very long—something within me froze. For no logical reason, I felt incapable of proceeding.

Then Len did a kind, older brotherly thing. He created a detailed list of every step he’d taken to obtain the documents and submit them. He agreed to be an accountability buddy for me and my brother Ron, answering questions as they arose and cheering us on as we completed the process for ourselves and our offspring.

APPROVED

In January, 2025, I began the process in earnest. In December, citizenship was approved for me and my two sons.

When I learned of the approval via email, I felt … I didn’t know what. This had been so long in the making. And while I’d known we would almost certainly succeed, as my brother had, I’d somehow never fully believed it. Now that it was a certainty, I felt numb.

I opened ChatGPT and asked what I should feel upon learning that I’d obtained citizenship in the country my father had fled. It informed me there was no particular feeling I should have. Complicated feelings were perfectly natural. It suggested some things I might be feeling, including a sense of restoration but not repair, gratitude tangled with anger or grief, and a complicated relationship to “belonging.”

Although I generally hate AI, I found these words helpful. Allow me my contradictions, okay? You have them too.

Yet although those words spoke to some of what was going on within me—restoration but not repair, gratitude tangled with grief—the numbness persisted.

Then two things happened: ICE agents murdered Renee Good, and I received the Austrian government’s welcome letter in the mail.

BACKGROUND

My Vati, Hans Georg Schaffer, was born in Vienna, Austria, on August 28, 1919. He lived there until 1938, when the Anschluss—the German annexation of Austria—took place. He was eighteen years old when cheering throngs lined the streets of Vienna as the Nazi army marched in.

In the early days following the Anschluss, Jews were not only permitted to leave the country but encouraged to do so. They could bring just one small suitcase and the equivalent of about ten dollars in cash. In transferring monetary assets to other countries via the banks, they were allowed to keep just eight percent. The Nazi government confiscated the rest, as well as any property left behind. The intention behind this policy—besides enriching Nazi coffers—was for the departing Jews to create an economic burden on the neighboring countries, making those nations friendlier to the Nazi cause.

Many Jews chose to stay, assuming it would pass. We humans tend not to believe that the very worst will happen to us. My dad’s mother, however, was prescient. She got herself and my Vati out. His father, stepmother (who was not Jewish, but Italian) and grandmother escaped as well. His beloved uncle and other more distant relatives died in the camps. Today, I have only one living family member that I know of on my father’s side, aside from my brothers and our children.

My dad spent time in Italy and Cuba before finally making it to New York in late 1940. When he arrived in this country, he Americanized his name, changing it from Hans Georg Schaffer to Harry George Shaffer, little knowing he’d be condemning his children to a lifetime of saying, “Shaffer, no c.”

The U.S. entered the war shortly after my dad’s arrival, and he joined the army.

“What unit do you think I was in?” he liked to ask people. “Take a guess.”

“I don’t know,” they’d say, perplexed.

“Intelligence, of course!” he’d crow. He’d laugh then, explaining that it wasn’t superior intellect but German-language skills that determined his placement. He worked within the U.S., translating intercepted communications. He was about to be shipped overseas when a jeep he was riding in flipped over, leaving him with multiple broken bones. After months in the hospital, he was honorably discharged.

He attended New York University under the GI bill. He eventually earned a PhD there in economics, leading to a career in academia.

This country was good to him. Very good.

AMERICAN

My Vati loved his new country. That doesn’t mean he thought it was perfect. He was a socialist and an activist. He attended rallies and marches and gave fiery speeches against the Vietnam War. Passionately committed to the Civil Rights Movement, he was one of the leaders of the push to integrate the swimming pool in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. During the fifty-two years he taught at the University of Kansas, he acted as faculty sponsor for countless student civil rights and peace groups. He wrote letters to the editor of the Lawrence Journal-World throughout his entire life. He believed civic engagement was a responsibility of citizenship in his new nation. He took it very seriously.

My dad was enthusiastic about the promise of America. He adored the songs of George M. Cohan. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he’d march around our living room as the vinyl spun, chanting “You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high-flying flag, and forever in peace may you wave!”

He believed, with all his heart, that Lawrence, Kansas, was the best place on earth that a person could live.

Throughout the 2008 election cycle, my Vati was terribly fearful that Obama would be assassinated. Having lived through the killing of the Kennedys; MLK, Jr.; and Malcolm X, he feared there were elements in this country that would not allow a Black man to become president.

Watching Obama take the oath of office was a profoundly thrilling moment for a man who’d placed racial justice at the center of his adult life.

My Vati died in 2009. I miss him every day. Yet when the Tangerine Monstrosity was elected in 2016, I couldn’t help thinking, “At least my Vati did not have to see this.” That thought comes to me often these days.

PRIDE

Throughout my life, I’ve often felt conflicted about the land of my birth. Thanks to my father’s activism, I was aware from an early age of racial and economic inequality within this country and of American imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere. Still, I wouldn’t be his daughter if I hadn’t also inherited a sense of gratitude towards this country and hope for its potential.

I don’t think I ever felt greater pride in the American experiment than when I first heard the soundtrack of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.

By writing a musical about the “founding fathers” of the American Revolution in a contemporary urban style and casting it almost entirely with people of color, Miranda and his artistic collaborators created a new American mythology, in which Black and Brown children could take ownership of the American legend and make it their own. It felt like an invitation to reimagine our folklore and co-create a multicultural future.

Lines like “Immigrants—we get the job done” bow to the importance of immigration in creating this nation. But my favorite line, “History has its eyes on you,” pins us to the spot. What will you make of this moment? it asks. When future generations look back on you, what will they see?

It moves me more than I can say. I wish my dad could have seen it.

DUALITY

I first encountered the soundtrack to Hamilton in 2015. In 2016, the Apricot Horror was elected president. Whereas Hamilton had suffused me with pride, the election of a petty, vindictive, hate-filled megalomaniac to the highest office in the land filled me with shame.

I was even more appalled eight years later, when this individual—now a 34-time convicted felon—was elected a second time. And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Gentle Reader, that this second term has been far worse than the first.

Yet despite all this, I love this country. Because this country is much more than fearful hate-mongers and ruthless ICE agents. It’s the countless people resisting, standing up for their neighbors, following those agents through the bitter cold, risking their own safety to document atrocities.

I know so many people like that, brave people who work, every day of their lives, for justice and equality. Through direct activism, through the arts, through simple acts of kindness and community care. This, too, is America.

When this thought comes to me, I see my Vati nodding. I see his warm, broad smile.

“It’s true,” he says. “Don’t forget.”

THIS MOMENT, NOW

I have never witnessed a darker moment in this country than the one we’re living in now. In my lifetime, I’ve seen nothing to rival the men in full riot gear patrolling the streets of an American city, dragging people from their homes, cars, and places of work, throwing them in jail, deporting them without due process, murdering them with impunity.

How long will this continue? How many will die? How much further will this president go in trying to impose his will on a shell-shocked world?

Most importantly, how can we stop it?

RESPONSIBILITY

There’s a key difference between my father’s situation and my own. He had to leave Austria to survive. My children and I, on the other hand, are relatively safe here—at least for now.

I ask myself where my responsibility lies. As a person of relative privilege, shouldn’t I stay here and use my voice and what power I have to fight for those most at risk?

Like my Vati, I attend protests and donate money to humanitarian and political organizations. In my writing and my workshops, I try to tell the truth as I understand it and to create spaces for others to do the same.

Yet if I were to leave this country, I could continue to do most of these things from afar.

My boys are still relatively young—seventeen and twenty-two. One of them is autistic and benefits from services this administration is slashing to bits.

Should I persuade them to accompany me and start a new life in a country with nationalized health care, free education, better social services, and far less gun violence? A country that is not run by a narcissistic tyrant who put a vaccine-denier in charge of its department of public health?

Yet my life is here. Brothers, mom, friends, dogs. Language. Community. Home.

At what point does the balance shift? When does leaving become the right choice?

“What should we do?” I ask my Vati.

For now, he just shakes his head and shrugs.

EPILOGUE

The law granting Austrian citizenship to descendants of survivors passed in 2020, eighty-two years after the Anschluss.

As I re-read the letter I received from the Austrian government, I’m moved by what I perceive as the words beneath the words. We wronged your family. We destroyed a community. We are sorry. We cannot erase history, but we can do this.

Will a moment come in which descendants of those being wrongfully detained and deported receive a letter from the U.S. government expressing regret and attempting to make amends? And what of all the others this country has wronged, including Native Americans and the descendants of slaves? Will a time come when they finally receive restitution for what can never be truly repaired?

As remote as such a moment seems from where we sit now, I’d like to believe that, as Eliza sings at the end of Hamilton, “It’s only a matter of time.”

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If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy The Exuberant Professor (an introduction to my irrepressible dad), The Night I Made My Father Cry, On Forgiveness, and You’re Gonna Be a Star Someday.

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FREE-RANGE CATS OF THE GRECIAN ISLES

(Note: This is not the promised Part 2 of My Greek Island Dream. That will come soon. This is an Off-Leash Chronicles Holiday Photo Special!)

You know me as a dog person. I call my workshops Off-Leash Writing and this newsletter the Off-Leash Chronicles. In Greece, however, the cats are the real gods and goddesses. Some honor them by leaving food offerings. Others ignore them at their peril. I pay them humble homage here by sharing them with you.

Happy holidays, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this photographic tribute to the cats of Greece.

Wishing you all the very best. May 2026 bring a more just and peaceful world.

With love,

Tanya

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Write with me in 2026! Next session of Off-Leash Writing Workshops starts the week of January 12.

MY GREEK ISLAND DREAM

Part 1: Athens to Amorgos

When people ask me why I want to visit a particular place, I never know how to answer. I might say, “There’s so much history there!” or, “It looks so beautiful,” or, “I’m a fan of such-and-such writer from that region.” While not false, these aren’t the whole story.

In truth, I don’t know why particular places call me. I just know I feel drawn. That’s why I spent the better part of a year in West Africa almost thirty years ago, and it’s why I traveled to Greece last month.

I’d been hearing the Grecian siren song for years. In 2018, I’d started researching avenues for leading a retreat there. So when I finally developed a plan for a women’s writing retreat on the island of Amorgos, I made sure to allow myself extra time to explore.

ATHENS

I arrived in the morning to pouring rain.

After a ten-hour flight, an hour-long subway ride and a bit of urban trudging, I hauled my suitcase up the narrow stairs of the Hotel Tempi, where I’d booked a room. The man at the desk looked up in surprise.

“Not ready yet,” he said brusquely, though not unkindly. “Come back one hour.”

I stowed my suitcase and wandered the narrow, cobbled alleys of the heavily-touristed Monastiraki district in the rain, gazing blearily at store after store of colorful tchotchkes, puzzling over the ubiquitous penis-shaped bottle openers (who buys these?!), and gasping in wonder every time I rounded a corner and came face to face with crumbling columns, thousands of years old. Sometimes the ancient structures were fenced off. At other times you looked down and they were beneath your feet, covered in plexiglass, so you were literally walking on top of them.

I noticed, as well, a ubiquity of cats. They were everywhere! Surprisingly, they didn’t look scraggly and starved, but rather well-loved. I soon discovered sites where people collected donations and put food out for them. I later learned that the locals count on these cats to keep the mouse and rat populations at bay.

I eventually hauled my soggy self back to the hotel and asked my laconic front-desk pal, “Has it been an hour yet?”

He gave a half-shrug, half-nod. “Okay.”

I paid €100 cash for my three-night stay. He told me the shared bathroom was down the hall from my fourth-floor room.

“No private bathroom?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You buy cheap room.”

I asked if I could upgrade.

“No. Full.”

I hiked up the four steep flights of stairs. The room was tiny but clean. A single bed, a desk, a sink and an armoire. Just enough space to squeeze by my suitcase and lie down on the bed.

I smiled that, on the eve of my fifty-ninth birthday, I was traveling in much the same manner I had in my wild, untethered youth. But what did I need, really, besides a roof, a shower, and a place to sleep? How lucky I was to encounter this city for the first time, with its fascinating juxtapositions of old and new. How lucky that my legs could still carry me up these stairs without undue strain. That my heart still thrilled to adventure.

I immediately fell asleep. For two hours, I slept like an unexcavated tomb, until the alarm I’d set to avoid sabotaging my nighttime rest went off. I slapped blindly at it until it went quiet. I fell back to sleep.

At 2 a.m. I awoke with a raging headache. I immediately understood the cause and the remedy. Coffee. The last time I’d had it was nearly forty-eight hours earlier, before leaving the U.S.

I figured if there was a place outside New York City where I could walk out the door at two in the morning and find coffee, this was it.

After some initial disappointments—“Coffee?” “No, Coffee finished. Drinks.”—I located an all-night café. I sat at a rickety metal table outside, sipping cappuccino in the mild October night. I took out my notebook and wrote for a while.

A man approached, speaking Greek. I shook my head apologetically, and he switched to English.

He asked if I was a writer. I said I was and that I’d just arrived in Greece to lead a writing retreat. We began chatting. Soon his friends from a nearby table got involved, and Voila! I had three new pals.

I remembered then what I love about solo wandering. It’s fun to travel with others, but more often than not, you and your companions form a closed unit. But no matter your age, a solo traveler with a willing spirit is open to the world.

My co-leader for the Amorgos retreat was novelist Kelly Dwyer—an Oberlin classmate of mine and a fun, brilliant, creative badass. Jonas Saul of Imagine Greece Retreats, our in-country retreat partner, had generously offered a two-day walking tour of Athens to anyone who wanted to arrive a few days before the retreat’s official start. Consequently, I spent the next couple of days kicking around Athens with Jonas, Kelly and most of our retreat participants.

The Acropolis

Perched high on a rocky outcrop overlooking Athens, the Acropolis contains several majestic buildings. Its crowning jewel, however, is the Temple of the Athena, known as the Parthenon. Visible from all over the city, it boasts spectacular views stretching all the way to the sea.

Athens is one of the oldest named cities in the world, with over 5000 years of continuous habitation. According to legend, it was originally called Aktiki, meaning “beach” or “coast,” after its King, Aktaio. A later king named Kekrops—a cross between a human and a snake—changed the city’s name to Kekropia.

When the gods began taking Greek cities under their patronage and naming them after themselves, a fierce conflict developed between Poseidon, god of the sea, and Athena, goddess of wisdom, over who would be Kekropia’s patron.

To avoid further violence, Zeus decreed they should each present the city with a gift and allow the inhabitants to vote on which gift they preferred. Poseidon struck the earth with his might trident, and a spring poured forth, symbolizing his dominion over the seas. When the citizens tasted the water, however, it was salty as an ocean, not fit for drinking.

Athena then knelt and planted an olive seed, which immediately grew into a beautiful tree. As well as providing food, oil and wood, the tree represented wisdom, peace and prosperity.

To this day, the olive branch remains a symbol of the city of Athens.

Our day at the Acropolis was sunny and warm. Walking its ancient steps, approaching those iconic columns, familiar from countless photographs, is an awe-inspiring experience, even when shared with hordes of other travelers. Next to the Parthenon, on the south slope, is the Theatre of Dionysus, built around the 6^th century BCE. Although theatre as ritual has existed from time immemorial across all known cultures, the Theatre of Dionysus is the world’s oldest known permanent dedicated performance space. Although it fell into decay during the Byzantine era, it was restored in the 19^th century and is in use again today for concerts and other performances.

As a lifelong theatre person—first an actor and later playwright and producer—it gave me a deep personal thrill to stand on that spot and imagine the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides being performed there for the first time. I imagined thousands of ancient Greeks in their tunics and cloaks, laughing at the comedies, weeping and howling at the tragedies, then going home to their olive oil-rich meals. Could they possibly have imagined we’d be reading those plays thousands of years later? Certainly they could not have imagined me sitting at this computer writing about them.

The next night at dinner with our group, in honor of my birthday, my co-host Kelly gave me an olive branch necklace as a memento of our time in Athens. All in all, not a bad way to kick off another year on earth.

AMORGOS

My twenty-something traveler self never would have predicted she’d one day lead writing retreats. Although I’ve written since childhood, it wasn’t until my fifties that I felt ready to teach. When I finally did, I discovered I loved it. I began dreaming of combining my newfound love of teaching with my eternal passion for travel.

Kelly and I had chosen our in-country partners at Imagine Greece Retreats because of their warmth, professionalism and copious experience hosting writing retreats. What we did not realize was how remote their home island of Amorgos was.

It turned out to be a seven-and-a-half-hour ferry ride from Athens. As someone who once spent four wretched hours puking my guts out in a small boat cruising Kauai’s Nā Pali Coast, all I can say is, Thank the gods and goddesses for Dramamine. Once that little white pill kicked in, I dozed in my gently rocking seat throughout the entire ride.

Before leading retreats, my only comparable experience had been producing theatre. Though I loved it in many ways, every time I produced a show, I encountered at least a few moments so stressful I wanted to commit hari-kari.

Leading my first retreat—in Hawaii in 2024—I braced myself for similar stress. To my relief and delight, it never came. Sure, there were hiccups—humans are, after all, human. But the emphasis on process rather than product changes things. Theatre artists strive to create an exceptional experience for the audience; retreat participants are focused primarily on their own growth, connection and transformation. And while both groups are doing deep creative work, retreatants are also vacationing in a stunningly beautiful place.

Our most spectacular excursion on Amorgos was to the Hozoviotissa Monastery. Built in 1018, it hangs on a cliff almost 1000 feet above the sea. The views were staggering in their breadth and beauty. On the way up the stairs we encountered a friendly monk who looked to be in his seventies. He’d lived there since he was a young man, praying, gardening, and maintaining the grounds. We had no common language, but his warmth and gentleness were palpable. Aside from the bulky watch on his wrist, he could have stepped straight out of another century.

We toured the inside, where they fed us delectable Turkish Delight. I’d read about this confection in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but never tried it before. The delicate rosewater morsel melted away on my tongue, and I understood why the character of young Edmund had gotten hooked.

With the help of Kelly, Jonas and Rania (Jonas’ wife and partner in Imagine Greece Retreats), the grace of the Muses, and a fabulously open-hearted group of women, the week on Amorgos was everything I’d hoped it would be. Each day was packed with creativity and discovery, yet somehow the week flew by. And suddenly there we were, hugging each other tightly and promising to keep in touch as we headed off in separate directions. Some headed home. Others, like me, continued their journeys. And just like that, what had been a dream and a scheme became a cherished memory, and I was a solo traveler once again.

I hope you enjoyed the first installment of My Greek Island Dream. Stay tuned for Part 2, Santorini and Crete, coming soon to the Off-Leash Chronicles!

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If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy Japan Journals 1: Tokyo, Japan Journals 2: A Night in Asakusa, and Japan Journals 3: Of Cats and Capybaras.

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About a year and a half ago, I decided not to date anymore. I didn’t know what I wanted. Consequently, whenever I went out with someone and they got interested, I decided I wasn’t. I believe any wounds I inflicted during this period were minor. After all, how attached could someone get after one or two outings? Still, I felt bad.

I’ve now been separated from my wasband for six years. During that time, I’ve had one long-distance relationship that lasted about a year, mostly during the pandemic. My wasband too had had only one relatively short-lived relationship since our split. That is, until this summer, when he began seeing someone in Australia.

He certainly had permission—we’re separated, after all, with no plans to reignite our coupledom. The heart, however, is an irrational beast, and his new relationship unsettled me. So, like any other mature adult, I said, Fine. If he can do it, so can I, and I began browsing the dating apps.

As I perused profiles, I noticed a preponderance of certain words and phrases, both in people’s self-descriptions and in the descriptions of their desired matches. Easygoing, fun, loves to laugh, positive, upbeat, and, most notably, NO DRAMA. This last appears frequently, sometimes with a bonus adverb for emphasis: ABSOLUTELY NO DRAMA.

Well, who doesn’t like to laugh? But don’t we live in a world where we also have cause for a fair bit of crying? Are these people looking to engage with a fellow human or to watch a sitcom? And what about this NO DRAMA thing? Clearly these are not theatre folk.

Actually, I should amend that. Clearly these are not theatre men. I browsed women’s profiles too, since I’ve been known to slide that way on occasion. I saw a lot fewer NO DRAMAs on that side of the street.

According to etymonline.com, the ancient Greek word δρᾶμα (drâma) derived from the verb δράω (dráō), meaning to do or act. Within Greek culture, drâma referred to a communal event involving storytelling and performance. By the 1500s, the word had migrated into English with the same meaning. By the 1700s it had come to mean a sequence of events or actions leading up to a climax. (From this I can only conclude that any contemporary man who proclaims NO DRAMA in his profile can’t be bothered to carry out the necessary sequence of actions to bring his partner to a climax.)

In the 1970s, the term Drama Queen emerged, meaning, a person who habitually responds to situations in a melodramatic way. (Note the female nature of the archetype: It’s not called Drama King. The Drama Queen is an over-the-top emotional woman or feminine-presenting person.)

Contemporary definitions of drama also include a state, situation, or series of events involving interesting or intense conflict of forces (Merriam Webster).

So when someone writes NO DRAMA in their profile, I can only presume they would like a relationship free of conflict or intense displays of emotion.

In our contemporary American landscape, intense displays of emotion are much more often associated with females than males. So while these NO DRAMA men claim to want relationships with females, it seems they want relationships with females who behave like traditional males. Chicks who can hang, as Amy Schumer once put it. They don’t want relationships with females who display the inconvenient characteristic of reacting emotionally to life’s curveballs.

After analyzing an admittedly unscientific sampling of profiles, I’ve drawn an inner portrait of a certain type of male (Not all men, okay? Not all men), who’s in search of a perpetually smiling, laughing woman who likes to attend ball games, travel, drink a beer, eat a burger, and have the kind of sex which does not require a tiresome sequence of superfluous actions to get to a climax.

Honestly, wouldn’t a blow-up doll work better?

Okay, Tanya, why the snark? It’s not like these dudes have rejected you. You haven’t given them the chance! And besides, you do smile and laugh a lot.

Well, yes, but I also cry a lot.

And I care a lot. About the world. About the nightmare unfolding in this country. About what I’m trying to do while I’m here. I have opinions, and I hope anyone I date does too. If being “easygoing” means remaining blithely unconcerned about anything beyond your chips and beer, then, to paraphrase Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing: I am not for him…and he is not for me.

As a playwright and former actor, it’s hard not to take this NO DRAMA thing personally. I mean, the drama of humans interacting—with each other and with society—is the basis of my life’s work. And I love drama! The drama of engaging with another person, looking them in the eyes, and trying to figure out who they are. I don’t want it to be all laughter and chocolate, although I relish both those things. More than anything else, I want it to be real.

Does that mean I like to fight? Oh, hell no. I hate to fight. I seek peace in all my relationships. And if you fight dirty, meaning you say things that are mean and personal and can never be unsaid or forgotten, I will not remain in relationship with you. I never want to participate in the kind of unnecessary fireworks that leave scorched earth in their wake.

Still, humans sometimes come into conflict. We get worked up and say stupid things. It’s okay. As long as we find our way back to center as soon as we’re able. As long as we make the effort to listen and learn and incorporate what we’ve learned about each other so we can do better next time. Drama is okay, because drama leads to resolution and resolution leads to denouement. And denouement leads to makeup sex, and we all know that’s the best kind. (Kidding. Sort of.)

So what’s behind this NO DRAMA dictum, really? In his 1923 classic, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote:

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,
and weep, but not all of your tears.

If it is, in fact, our old friend fear that’s guiding these men’s hands as they type the words NO DRAMA, I get it. I too have spent years trying to avoid crying all my tears, afraid that if I open that tap, the flow will never stop. It’s taken decades of spiritual practice and a significant amount of therapy to understand that when I shut the door on sorrow—both the world’s and my own—it only burrows deeper into me. At this point in my life, I’m trying not to shut anything out. Instead, I seek to embrace whatever’s here with all the compassion I can muster.

In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company, the character of Bobby spends his time hanging out with various married friends, who cook for him, confide in him, and worry over him. When he’s not with them, he’s moving between three semi-casual love interests, enjoying their company but fearful of getting in too deep.

Finally, on the eve of his 35^th birthday, after one of his women friends calls him out on his detachment, he sings:

Somebody hold me too close
Somebody hurt me too deep
Somebody sit in my chair and ruin my sleep
And make me aware of being alive
Being alive

If I were looking for a relationship, that’s what I’d be looking for. The whole human catastrophe—the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows.

But … Am I really ready to go there, all over again? The outside world is so tumultuous right now. Do I need the extra drama? Maybe I should take down my profile and give it some more thought.

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Today’s whimsical tale of a plucky, diminutive notebook wandering the island of Kauai amidst tsunami warnings and peacocks is told through both photos and words.

Before we dive into that saga, however, I want to remind you that fall writing workshops start in just a few days! If you have no interest in writing workshops, you can scroll right down to the story.

If you want to come radically unstuck and get lots of words on the page within an inspiring, supportive environment, Off-Leash Writing Workshops are the place for you! These groups involve no homework and no critique—just in-the-moment creative exploration. I have a few spots in the Tuesday Online Off-Leash Writing Workshop and the Wednesday in-person group. You do not have to call yourself a writer to benefit from this liberating practice.

On the other hand, the Intensive Memoir & Fiction Workshop, which is usually full, has one spot available for someone who thrives on feedback and regular deadlines to move their projects forward.

I also have one spot left in the regular Memoir & Fiction Workshop, which has a more relaxed pace of deadlines and includes some in-class writing and instruction as well as constructive, supportive feedback on your work.

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And now, without further ado …

A Tale of a Traveling Notebook

Once there was a notebook, modest in size. Made entirely of paper, with no wire to bind her, she fit easily inside a small backpack purse. Her person, Tanya, brought her along wherever she went.

The notebook’s front and back covers were decorated with bright splashes of color. Red, yellow and orange on the front, blue, purple and green on the back. The colors overlay drawings of flowers—great cheerful blossoms peeked out here and there from beneath the vibrant hues.

Oh, that notebook was beautiful. At least Tanya thought so. And for the little notebook, that was enough.

The notebook always traveled with a pen. Sometimes more than one, if we’re being honest. She was partial to a pen that was gold on the bottom half, with tiny white beads encased in plastic on the top half. But when that pen ran out of ink, it didn’t bother her too much. She wasn’t attached. It was true that pen had been pretty, but any pen would do, as long as it had enough ink to cover her pages in delicious swirls.

This notebook loved to travel. You can just imagine her joy when she got to accompany Tanya and her 21-year-old son Daniel to the island of Kauai. The little notebook was enraptured by the lush green foliage, the patterned shadows of palms, the steady music of waves and birds, and the intoxicating fragrance of plumeria and other tropical blooms.

On the first morning in Kauai, Tanya got up early and crossed the narrow road that separated their rented condo from the ocean. Tanya plopped down in a grassy patch to watch the sunrise over the sea. She removed the notebook from her backpack purse, took out the notebook’s favorite gold and white pen, and wrote as the sun crested the clouds, bathing them both in golden light.

In moments like this, the notebook felt whole. As the pen moved across her pages, she sensed she was fulfilling her sacred purpose, the very thing she was made to do.

One day, less than a week into their stay in Kauai, the notebook was sitting on a lounge chair by a fancy hotel pool in the community of Princeville on the Western side of Kauai, when sirens began to sound. An announcement came over the hotel speakers, informing guests of a tsunami alert.

Tanya and her son were in the hotel pool at this time. This was not, strictly speaking, permitted. They had come to the hotel for a meal, which was permitted—they paid for it, after all—and then, well, snuck into the pool, for lack of a better word.

Needless to say, the notebook, Tanya and Daniel were all alarmed by this news. Tanya and Daniel exited the pool and attempted to gather more information by speaking to guests and staff members and googling around on their phones. It was around 3:30pm, and they learned that the tsunami was predicted to reach their shores at 7:17.

Soon the pool was closed, and guests on the lower levels were asked to vacate their rooms and ascend to the ninth floor lobby. Since Tanya and Daniel didn’t have a room, this part wasn’t a problem for them. They learned, however, that their condo further south was in a section of the island that was being evacuated.

The word going around was that the hotel was as good a place as any to wait out the crisis. Although quite near the ocean, it was on a hill, and had been recently retrofitted. Everything above the ninth floor was deemed safe.

It was around 4pm at this point. Tanya, Daniel and the notebook joined the hotel guests in the lobby and cafe areas to literally wait out the storm. All in all, not a bad place to be.

The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully, aside from periodic announcements and worried texts from friends and family on the mainland. Some anxious guests grilled the local staff, who appeared thoroughly unruffled, about whether staying at the hotel was truly safe.

At 7pm, as the moment of truth approached, guests gathered on the hotel balcony to watch the waves.

7:05. 7:10. 7:15 … 7:17. And … crickets.

What happened next reminded the noteboook of a time when Tanya and a friend of hers had eaten a pile of psychedelic mushrooms she’d been saving for a while, and nothing happened. The notebook remembered that day, because Tanya had filled her with intentions for what she thought would be a powerful journey. When nothing happened, Tanya and her friend had laughed and laughed.

Now, from inside Tanya’s backpack purse, the notebook could hear people saying, “Wait, I think I see something! Oh yeah! See that pattern in the waves? Those rocks weren’t exposed before, were they? The water is definitely pulling back. That means it’ll be rising. It is rising … I think … Isn’t it?”

“I want to see a tsunami!” said a kid of about eight.

No you don’t, kid, thought the notebook, but she understood the feeling.

And then, in the midst of all this, the assembled guests spotted something.

“Is that person fishing?!” someone said.

But no, it became clear. The person was not fishing. Right then and there, at the very moment the tsunami was supposed to hit … someone was paddleboarding.

“What a maniac!” someone cried out.

“Darwin Awards!” shouted someone else.

“Do you think they didn’t hear about it?”

“How could they not hear about it? The sirens have been going for hours.”

The notebook, ensconced in the backpack, was baffled. Why would a person do such a thing? Did they have a death wish? She didn’t know. But some tiny part of her envied this person their freedom, their wildness. Their courage. She could only accompany Tanya on the adventures Tanya chose to bring her on. What would she do if she had agency? Would she be cautious, like the people on this balcony, or reckless, like that paddleboarding fool?

An hour or so later, the hotel guests on the lower levels were free to return to their rooms. The area in which Tanya and Daniel’s condo was located, however, had not yet been cleared for return. They hung out in the lobby until they were the only ones left. They explained their situation to the staff: that they’d been eating at the hotel when the warning struck, and the roads were not yet cleared for their return. (They didn’t mention the pool.) The staff were kind and said they could stay as long as they liked.

Around midnight, Tanya, Daniel, and the notebook finally got the all-clear to return to their condo. The day’s adventures had left the notebook tired, but also strangely stirred up. She’d developed a taste for something she could not yet name.

The rest of the time in Kauai seemed to fly by. They visited a sculpture garden, where the notebook had fun posing with statues.

Kauai is known as the garden island. It is rich in gardens, including three National Tropical Botanical Gardens. Tanya, Daniel and the notebook visited every garden they could find. Tanya loved to photograph the notebook’s vivid colors amidst the island’s abundant flora.

There were beaches, bike rides, and a lighthouse; spectacular overlooks with heartstopping views.

The notebook’s pages became encrusted with sand. She waited patiently on the shore as Tanya and Daniel entered the waves, wishing she too could cool herself in the heavenly turquoise sea.

Once, at a restaurant, one of Kauai’s ubiquitous chickens hopped onto the table and took a bite of Daniel’s food. The server graciously replaced the meal and chased the chicken away, but it returned and returned. Tanya and Daniel laughed, and the notebook laughed with them, silently.

Oh, they had fun. But as the trip wound down, something niggled at the notebook. She had been photographed everywhere, but over the course of the trip, she had rarely been written in! She had become a kind of prop notebook, a model, prized more for her beauty than for her contents. Had she had hands, she could have counted on the fingers of one hand—okay, maybe two—the times that Tanya had actually written in her over the course of this trip. This made her sad.

Kauai was a dream, and like all dreams, it had to end. Tanya and Daniel flew to California, where Tanya helped Daniel move into his new apartment. After dropping him off, she picked up her other son, Elon, who was about to enter his senior year of high school. They began a road trip down the California coast, looking at colleges.

They stopped at UC Santa Cruz. Elon went off to wander the campus. Tanya sat down in a patch of grass and pulled the notebook from her backpack purse. She opened her up, and she wrote and wrote and wrote. It felt good to both of them, good and right. Tanya admitted to the notebook that she’d gotten carried away with the photographing. For a moment there, she’d forgotten what the core of her relationship with the notebook was built on. She’d neglected, for those moments, both the notebook’s purpose and her own.

On the way back to the car, Tanya left the zipper on her backpack purse open. The notebook hovered near the opening. They’d just had such a perfect time together, Tanya and herself. She felt close to Tanya. And yet … She remembered that crazy being on the paddleboard. In that moment, a feral longing took hold of her. She wanted what every being wants: to be free. And so, she slipped out of the purse and onto the ground. Tanya continued walking towards the car. Only later, many miles away, did Tanya notice she was gone.

Friends, it is I, Tanya, who has told you this tale. I don’t know what became of the little notebook after she departed from my presence. I hope that a student found her, reveled in her contents, and filled the remaining pages with stories and freshness of their own making. I hope that she continues to fulfill her purpose and to enjoy her moments on this precious, ever-changing earth.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this tale of the wandering notebook. If you’d like to craft your own tales, please check out my writing workshops, starting in a few days!

Dear Friends,

It’s been almost years since I posted a new episode of my podcast, Off-Leash Arts: Conversations on Creativity. I decided to bring the podcast out of hibernation to host an interview with the extraordinary author Jennifer Steil, whose books include the award-winning novels Exile Music and The Ambassador’s Wife, and the memoir The Woman Who Fell From the Sky.

Jennifer has led an extraordinarily adventurous life. In this conversation, we talk about how she came to spend a year editing a newspaper in Yemen and how the experience of being held hostage in Yemen when she was six months pregnant inspired her first novel, The Ambassador’s Wife. We also discuss the seeds of the idea that grew into her second novel, Exile Music, about Holocaust refugees living in Bolivia during the second World War. For the past couple of years, Jennifer has been battling ovarian cancer, which gave rise to her Substack, Liminal with Jennifer Steil, in which she writes about navigating the spaces between languages and cultures, sickness and health.

I so enjoyed having the opportunity to speak with this extraordinary writer and person.

I invite you to LISTEN TO OUR CONVERSATION HERE. You can also find it at all the usual podcast locations: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please feel free to subscribe in any of those places, as that sends more people our way!

With warmest wishes,

Tanya

Off-Leash Writing Workshops and Memoir & Fiction Workshops are paused for the summer. Stay tuned for new sessions starting in September!

FOURTH OF JULY

Last night my brother and I
sat on the railroad tracks
while fireworks bloomed overhead
like fabulous tropical flowers.

Tired of running towards the bay
to see the lights
and their reflections all at once,
we plopped, cross-legged,
to the packed earth,
while others hurried past us,
desperate for a better place.

"These fireworks are the best,"
my brother said,
and I remembered myself,
nine years old at Jayhawk Stadium
with my fifty-eight-year-old father,
both of us badgering
his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend:
"Aren't these the best
you've ever seen? Aren't they?"
until she turned to us,
weary, patient:
"Why, exactly, do they have to be
the best?"

But these were the best,
my brother and I decided.
Fireworks have come a long way.
Raucously, we called out names
to their exploding brilliance,
"Fountain! Halo! Anemone! Sperm!"
and held each other's hands
and laughed.

Meanwhile,
on a still lake,
you sat in a kayak
as the sun set,
observing your birthday alone.
While we crowed at displays
of human giddiness,
you cried on your meditation cushion,
mourning the mess
you've made of your life.

If only I could have taken you
to such luminous places,
my impossibly naïve self whispered,
you'd be beside me now,
laughing instead of crying,
loving instead of mourning,
looking to the future instead of the past.
If only I could have shown you
this glorious, meaningless light.

If only I were a better magician.

But of course that isn't the story.
Fireworks, to you, are more problem
than solution, and besides,
you can't take anyone anywhere
they’re not ready to go.
The past won't cave so simply
to a radiant present,
nor should it, you would say,
not for grown-ups,
not when it carries
such guilty, aching weight.

The kayak, the cabin, the meditation cushion
have no place in this glowing field
where I sit with my brother.
They are your story;
this is mine:
Thirty-two years on the weed-choked earth,
loving and beloved,
empty and full,
wishing only
that all of life could be just this,
so violently lovely,
so startlingly innocent,
too bright for wistful reflection,
too urgent for troubled thought.

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Today’s offering, My Fairy God-Juggler and Beyond, is the third part in a series called You’re Gonna Be a Star Someday, about how much my Vati (pronounced FAH-tee, German for Daddy) loved seeing me perform on the stage, and how we both believed I was destined for stardom. It follows Part 1 (The Triumphant Team) and Part 2 (Where I Have to Go), but it is also a self contained work that can be fully understood and enjoyed on its own.

I dearly wish that this multi-part story—itself a part of a larger memoir-in-progress about growing up with my remarkable Vati—will resonate with your own life experience in meaningful ways.

Warmly,

Tanya

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My Fairy God-Juggler and Beyond

Sometimes the right person shows up at precisely the right time.

As graduation from Oberlin College loomed, I entertained wildly varied notions of what to do next. All around me, people were applying to grad schools, jobs and internships. One friend was going off to teach English in China. Some theatre pals were heading to New York, LA, or Chicago to try their luck on the professional stage.

When I thought deeply about it, I realized that what excited me most at that moment was performing the cabaret-style show I’d developed with my songwriter-pianist friend Amanda Udis-Kessler. We’d been doing it semi-regularly at Oberlin’s Cat in the Cream Coffee House, with various titles. The show was a loose collection of poems, monologues, and songs, by myself, Amanda and others, about women’s body image and cultural expectations of what it meant to be female.

If I could keep doing this, I would, I thought, but how could I?

On a beautiful spring day shortly before graduation, I was walking barefoot across the big grassy field in front of the library, turning these questions over and over in my mind, when I spotted a man I’d seen juggling on the sidewalk earlier that day. He was lying back in the grass with his hands behind his head, gazing up at the clouds. He had an artsy, middle-aged hippie vibe and a gnome-like quality of mischief and wisdom. I said hi, and he invited me to sit and chat. He asked what was on my mind, and I poured out my predicament. I told him I’d love to travel around the country performing my show, but I had no clue how to make that happen.

“No problem,” he said cheerfully. “I can tell you how to do that.”

It turned out he was a professional street performer. The college had hired him that weekend to entertain the groups of alumni and prospective students who were roaming around.

We sat in the grass for the next hour, while he talked me through the basics of booking a tour.

“First, get some good photos taken,” he said. “Ask folks who’ve seen your work—preferably folks in the business—to give you quotes about how fabulous you are. Print up a brochure—printed, not photocopied, that’s important—and Voila! You’ve got booking materials.”

I must have looked stunned, because he looked me in the eye and said, “You are whoever you say you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that if you call someone up and tell them you’re a touring performer, that’s exactly who they’ll think you are. And they’ll be right to believe it, because that’s who you’ll be.”

Colleges, he told me, were always looking for interesting acts to fill their calendars.

“They’ve got money for it!” he enthused. “It helps to have an angle. What’s the show about?”

I described the show as best I could.

“Perfect!” he said. “You can connect with women’s centers, women’s studies departments, things like that.”

“Just remember,” he continued, “you can ask anybody anything.” To this day, I invoke those words whenever my courage threatens to fail me.

“Nice chatting with you,” he said. And then, as if in a children’s tale, my fairy god-juggler ambled off into the bright spring day. I never saw him again.

I came away from that hour determined to take my show on the road.

I went back to my shared off-campus house and called a woman named Judy in Oakland, California. Judy worked for my idol, the activist singer-songwriter Holly Near. I’d talked a lot with Judy earlier in the year when the Women’s Center produced a Holly Near concert on campus. Buoyed up by the words you can ask anybody anything, I asked Judy’s advice on booking a tour for myself. She promptly invited me to come to the San Francisco Bay Area and become a paid intern at Holly’s company, Redwood Records. I’d learn about every aspect of tour coordination and promotion.

The Bay Area was already my second home. My mom lived in Berkeley, and I’d spent summer and winter breaks visiting her there since I was nine. All three of my brothers were now living there too. I accepted the position on the spot. Finally, I had a plan. I was now two for two on connecting with the right person at the right time.

When I told Vati about my new position, he was ecstatic. He marveled that I’d gone from listening to Holly Near’s records to working for her. And I’d learn to book my show! I’d go on tour, fulfilling the dream of writing and acting both, just as he’d said I could. He promised that as soon as I was ready to take it on tour, he’d help set up a gig in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas.

In the expansive hours I spent driving Stacy, my red Buick station wagon, across the country from Ohio to California, a narrative structure for my show began to take shape in my mind. One of the poems I’d been performing was called Miss America Comes Across Her Daughter, by Pamela White Hadas. In this poem, a narrator, whom I always pictured as an aging pageant queen, coaches her daughter on how to walk, talk, smile, and behave. The poem begins:

There you are at the three-way mirror, the same
mirror I grew up in, checking left and right
profiles against each other…

As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that the daughter is not responding well to her mother’s direction—she’s inept, recalcitrant, or both. As the mother’s frustration builds, her tone becomes increasingly frustrated, even unhinged.

It struck me that this poem, divided into sections, was the perfect frame for the show. I’d intersperse scenes of the beleaguered mother with scenes of a variety of daughters, each resisting her mother’s instructions in her own way. As soon as I had the shape for the piece, a title popped into my mind as well: Miss America’s Daughters.

Amanda had initially planned to move to the Bay Area too so that we could continue working together, but ultimately decided to stay closer to her own family on the East Coast. We parted ways amicably, with mutual wishes for each other’s continued creative journeys.

In the Bay Area, I put up signs and soon connected with a young woman who went by the mononym LauraMichele. Within six months, we began performing around town.

I hadn’t previously sought permission from the various artists whose work I was using, but I did so now. The handwritten response from Pamela White Hadas, author of Miss America Comes Across Her Daughter, remains a cherished artifact.

As soon as I could swing it, I took the juggler’s advice and created a brochure, including quotes from my bosses at Redwood, who’d come out to support my early efforts.

Redwood was a flexible and supportive employer and allowed me to take time off for out-of-town gigs. For the next year and a half, I performed Miss America’s Daughters in all sorts of venues—colleges, cafés, school auditoriums—even, occasionally, an actual theatre.

It was a happy time for me. Creating, promoting and performing Miss America’s Daughters felt like a perfect alignment of my values and abilities. Some audiences were big, some tiny—I didn’t care. I was doing what I loved. Returning to Oberlin to perform, sponsored, of course, by the Women’s Center, was a highlight.

Vati made good on his promise to book me in Lawrence. He called contacts at the Journal World and the Daily Kansan and made sure I got plenty of press coverage. The house was packed with friends who’d known me since childhood. His smile could not have been brighter as we both reveled in the after-show accolades. I really did feel like a star that day.

But Vati had raised me to be an activist as well as a star. In the mid-80s, when I was in college, the hot-button issues on campus were apartheid in South Africa and CIA-sponsored wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. At Oberlin, in addition to working on women’s issues, I’d become deeply involved in the Central America solidarity movement. I continued this activism after graduating college in 1988.

In 1990, I traveled to Nicaragua, where I picked coffee, attended a peace march, and became an official election observer. When I returned to the Bay Area, I started work on a new performance based on my experiences there. I thought it would be another solo piece, but it quickly morphed into a multi-actor play called Brigadista. In 1991, I produced and acted in Brigadista in San Francisco, directed by Wilma Bonet. We followed it up with a 21-city tour for eight actors, a tech person, and a political organizer, who came along to network and strategize with Nicaragua solidarity groups around the country.

How did I have the nerve to coordinate a 21-city-tour cross-country tour for ten people at the age of twenty-four?

I’ll answer that by whisking you back in time to 1979, when I was in seventh grade. I saw a musical called The Apple Tree, by Jerome Bock and Sheldon Harnick, and loved it. The Apple Tree is divided into three acts, each of which tells a separate story. I particularly loved the second act, The Lady and the Tiger, in which a princess is caught with her low-status lover and must choose whether to send him to his death or into the arms of another woman. I desperately wanted to play the princess.

Since no one nearby was producing The Apple Tree and inviting me to audition, Vati, whose perennial attitude towards any challenge was, Why not?, suggested I produce it myself. My best friend Debbie and I decided to do it together. I’d play the princess, she’d play the female lead in Act 3, and we’d fill in the other roles with our friends and family.

With Vati’s guidance and supervision, Debbie and I went to the library to track down the address of the company who licensed the script. We sent a typed inquiry by mail and obtained the rights to produce the show at the lowest amateur rate. We then called around to local businesses soliciting donations to rent the Lawrence Arts Center for two performances. I still remember how surprised I was when the owner of Karpet King said yes to my stammering appeal and agreed to donate ten dollars. My first fundraising success! We posted xeroxed flyers around town and managed to half-fill the house for two performances. We even came out a few dollars ahead. I guess in that instance, as with so many others in my life, Vati was the right person at the right time to help me transform daydream into reality. (And you better believe he helped us get press for that one, too!)

I learned through that experience that any large project can be broken down into manageable steps. So when it came to taking ten people on a national tour, I approached it the same way. After all, how hard could it be?

With Miss America’s Daughters, I’d gotten used to booking tours for myself and a very chill musician named Ed Roseman, who’d replaced LauraMichele as my accompanist. The guiding principle was financial solvency. This involved securing as many gigs as possible, staying with community hosts, and taking the cheapest mode of transportation available. It never occurred to me that I should consider other factors when organizing travel for ten people, some considerably older than me.

I’d warned every actor who auditioned for Brigadista that community housing might mean crashing in sleeping bags on people’s floors. They all said that sounded like a lot of fun. I didn’t know yet then that actors will say anything to get the job.

The ten of us crammed into a borrowed van, with the set strapped to the roof, and traversed the country from California to Massachusetts, performing in twenty-one venues in two months. This sometimes meant unloading and erecting the set, running lighting and sound cues in the performance space, doing the show, taking down the set, hoisting it back onto the van, and driving onward towards our next destination, all within the course of a single day.

Our company of ten inspired creative souls putting on a show with a meaningful message soon devolved into nine exhausted, pissed-off individuals united in their hatred of the heinous fool who’d created this untenable schedule.

The low point of the tour came when a community group in Baltimore housed us in a soon-to-be homeless shelter: a cold cement-floored basement filled with cots in a sketchy neighborhood. Two actors decided they’d had it and left without notice. The political organizer stepped into one of the parts, and we discovered that, by reshuffling some roles and gender-flipping others, the piece could be done with seven actors instead of eight. Then another actor, upset that her role had not been sufficiently expanded in the reshuffling, decided to leave as well, though she, at least, had the courtesy to give a week’s notice. I cracked open the piggy bank and flew out another Bay Area actor to replace her, who learned her parts in record time (Thanks for saving our asses, Tessa Koning-Martinez. All these years later, you still have my gratitude.)

There were times during those two months I thought I’d implode from stress. Even the sight of Vati’s beaming face when we played in Lawrence was not enough to lift my spirits. Yet somehow, despite every obstacle, we made it. We never canceled a show. Audiences loved us and frequently rewarded us with standing ovations. I guess you could call that a win.

This stark encounter with everything I did not know about managing my fellow humans left me shellshocked and drained. The desire to leave the country burned within me. I longed, particularly, to explore the African continent. I pictured myself far, far away, walking down a dusty road, with only my backpack for company. The image brought a sweet sense of relief.

It took about two years to save up the requisite funds. In mid-1993 I took off and spent the better part of a year traveling and volunteering, first in Morocco, then Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, and other African nations.

The first part of that trip felt like an unwinding. I’d been doing a lot of striving over the past five years. Like any freelancer, I was always hustling, always in search of the next gig. I’d extended myself relentlessly, shoving past my inner resistance, making contacts, following up. It was worth it, I’d believed, to get to do what I loved. But the Brigadista tour had demoralized me to the point where, even a couple of years later, I was still finding my way back to myself.

Now, half a world away from anyone who knew me, my tightly knotted spirit began to loosen. Even Vati’s voice, ever present within me, assuring me I was destined for greatness, began to grow softer.

I remember a moment early in the trip, standing alone in a grove of trees, looking up through the tall, narrow trunks to the deep blue sky. I asked myself who I was without my striving. Who would I be, I wondered, if I was not constantly preoccupied with getting my voice out into the world? What would my life look like?

My Nicaragua travels had led me to write Brigadista. I’d assumed I’d write about this trip too. But I didn’t want the desire to write about the experience to interfere with the experience itself. In that moment among the trees, I promised myself that my only goal for this trip would be to experience it as fully as possible. To stay open and connect deeply with the people, places and cultures I visited. If I ended up writing about it, great. If I didn’t, that would be okay too. As long as I savored every moment, the trip would be a success.

I remembered my fairy god-juggler—the way he’d appeared right when I needed him to help illuminate my path, and how Holly Near’s assistant Judy had popped in almost immediately thereafter. I thought, too, of Vati, and all the different pieces of my life he’d helped me to navigate. Who would guide this leg of my journey?

I guessed I’d have to do it myself.

Stay tuned for You’re Gonna Be a Star Someday, Part 4, coming soon to a Substack near you!

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During my senior year of high school, I told everyone who would listen that I wanted to attend a large university in a big city with an excellent musical theatre program.

Then I chose a college with none of those characteristics.

We humans like to think we know why we do things. We don’t. The mechanisms by which we make decisions are a lot less logical than we’d like to believe. Countless studies have shown that we decide things first and make up reasons afterwards.

I don’t remember how I justified to myself applying to Oberlin when it was so different from what I’d said I wanted. I do remember that I visited a cousin of mine there, and it felt like home.

Don’t get me wrong: Oberlin College was a wildly creative place. We had solid theatre and dance programs and the chance to study voice at the world-class Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Many of my drama classmates went on to careers in theatre and film. But it was not a pipeline to the New York stage in the mode of, say, an NYU or a Carnegie Mellon. The Conservatory had a classical bent, and the dance department offered only modern and ballet. Neither the Theatre and Dance Program nor the Conservatory produced musicals, although there was an active student-led theatre organization that stepped in to fill the void.

Although my Vati (pronounced FAH-tee, German for Daddy) remained convinced I was destined for stardom, he supported my choice to attend Oberlin, just as he supported pretty much everything I did. He believed in a well-rounded education, regardless of future career. And as a life-long activist, he took great pride in Oberlin’s progressive history as both the first racially integrated and the first co-ed college in the US.

Though I was excited to go away to college, I worried about leaving Vati alone. It had been close to four decades since he’d lived on his own, with neither a spouse nor any of his four children for company. For the past nine years, it had been just him and me. He was an extremely giving person who enjoyed centering his life around someone he loved. What would he do when I was gone?

I needn’t have worried. The summer before I started college, he met a woman named Betty at New York’s Penn Station. It turned out they were both waiting for the train to Boston. They contrived to sit together, and before the end of the four-hour train ride, they’d started kissing. So while I packed to go to college in Ohio, Betty packed up her life in Newport Beach, California, to move in with my dad in Lawrence, Kansas. I was hugely relieved that Vati would not be alone.

The Oberlin student body was full of independent thinkers. Obies, as we called ourselves, were just as inclined to start organizations as to join them. Students taught courses and created their own majors. They took time off to travel. The message I got from my time there, perhaps more than any other, was that life is not a line, but a field. In other words: Try lots of things. Seek out varied experiences. Become a citizen of the planet. Don’t follow a predetermined path. Go out into the world and make something of your own.

The summer after my first year at Oberlin, I got my first professional acting job, at a summer stock company in Vermont called the Green Mountain Guild. About twenty other actors and I lived in a ski lodge in Killington, Vermont, with an enormous taxidermied moose head on the living room wall. Most of the actors were veterans of the New York theatre scene. At eighteen, I was the youngest in the company.

The alcoholic husband-and-wife team who ran the company was very tight-fisted. They kept a padlock on the refrigerator between meals. Our contract included room and board, and they defined that as three meals a day—not a crumb more. They policed us at mealtimes, commenting on our portion sizes and mumbling about not wanting to have to alter our costumes if we gained weight.

Despite this, they managed to attract exceptional actors. The Artistic Director was known to have an eye for talent—the young Meryl Streep had once been a part of the company. The people I worked with there were gifted, accomplished, cynical, and raucously funny. One of them—Siobhan Fallon Hogan—became a cast member on Saturday Night Live a few years later. Another—Lisa Kron—became a Broadway performer and Tony-Award-winning playwright. We called our dressing room the Killington Burn Center, thanks to the cutting one-liners my castmates tossed off with vicious speed. Most of them were five to ten years older than me, and I felt hopelessly young, naïve, and Midwestern in their presence. My face hurt from laughing, but when I was alone, I cried a lot, too.

That summer, I performed in three musicals— Sweet Charity, Evita, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—and one operetta, The Merry Widow. Vati and Betty came out to see me in my biggest role, as the hard-boiled taxi dancer Nickie Pignatelli in Sweet Charity, and again as a tango dancer and ensemble member in Evita. Naturally, he thought I was wonderful and should have played the lead in every show.

I’d already considered myself a feminist when I started college, but over the course of my first year at Oberlin, I’d become much more politicized. By the end of that year, I was highly sensitized to cultural manifestations of sexism, both subtle and overt.

It’s an oversimplification to say I played some version of a prostitute in every one of the four shows that summer, but that’s how I thought of it at the time. And though I truly enjoyed the performances, my politically awakened self couldn’t escape the sense that what I was putting forward in the world was not aligned with my deepest values. Was this really what I wanted to do with my life? By the time I returned to Oberlin for my sophomore year, doubts about my theatrical vocation had begun to creep in.

MY OTHER LOVE

Fortunately, acting was not my only passion. I’d been keeping a daily journal since I was eight years old—just as long as I’d been acting. When I was nine, I’d written in those pages, “I want to be an actress and a writer on the side.” Even then, my fantasy life included not only performance, but authorship.

Stuart Friebert, the brilliant, if somewhat draconian, head of the Oberlin Creative Writing Program, did not allow students to take the introductory course until their sophomore year. As soon as I returned from my summer in Vermont, I took it and loved it.

Throughout that year, I agonized over whether to stay a theatre major, as I’d originally declared, or switch to creative writing. The choice felt monumental, as though it would determine the course of my entire life. (I had not yet internalized the line versus field concept.)

For the first semester of my junior year, I was accepted into an intensive, conservatory-style acting program with the British American Drama Academy in London. I’d be immersed in the theatrical arts for three months, taking classes in voice, movement, scene study, Shakespeare, and stage combat. I’d live in a dorm in Regent’s Park, in the heart of London, with easy access to London’s bountiful theatre scene.

I decided the semester would serve as a kind of litmus test: Either I’d return mightily inspired toward my chosen path or burned out and over it.

Ah, London. When not in class, I wandered those streets for hours, soaking in the European rain (to quote Billy Joel). I bought chunky Cadbury chocolate bars with nuts and raisins at the tube station vending machines and gained ten pounds. I got a paid gig performing in a hilarious show called Hamlet, Improvised above a pub on weekend evenings. I sang in the tube stations with some of my classmates and picked up a few extra coins.

We had classes and guest lectures with some magnificent actors, including Brian Cox (Succession) and Dame Dorothy Tutin, who’d originated roles in several Harold Pinter plays.

One day, an American actress came and told us the story of how she landed the role she was currently performing in the West End. I no longer remember what the role was, but I believe it was the type of character role I loved—one of those snappy, rewarding parts that come onstage and steal the show in a scene or two. She was middle-aged and stocky, with dyed red hair. She told us how, every day for more than six months, she’d dropped off her headshot and resumé at the casting director’s office, with a note asking to be considered for this role. During that time, she’d also rehearsed the entire role at home every day, in case she was called in to read. Eventually it worked, and she got an audition.

She attended multiple callbacks over several months. Then came weeks of silence. Not a squeak. Finally, she learned they’d chosen someone else. She grieved.

A year later, she got the call. Someone had dropped out. The part was hers.

This was meant to be an inspirational tale. See? Persistence pays off. My inner response, though, was, Oh, hell no. Surely I had better use for my time on earth than dropping off a headshot at the same office and running lines I might never get to perform every day for six months.

Much as I loved my time in London, my doubts about my calling remained. When I returned to Oberlin for the second half of my junior year, I changed my major from theatre to creative writing.

I worried about how my Vati would react to the news, but when I told him I was quitting acting, he wasn’t upset. He just didn’t believe me.

“Take a break!” he said. “I’m sure you’ll come back to it.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said.

“But you love it! And you’re so good at it.”

“I love other things too. Like writing.”

“So do both!”

His certainty annoyed me, but I kept it to myself.

I didn’t audition for any productions that semester. That summer, I worked on an organic vegetable farm in Maine.

I tried to stay away from performing. Really, I did. But in my senior year, though still not auditioning, I started performing at political events. I was active in both feminist and Central American solidarity work, and I often sang at rallies. Then I started reciting poetry here and there. Next I created a two-hour feminist performance piece that incorporated music, poetry and prose—both my own writing and others’—and performed it at our campus coffeehouse, The Cat in the Cream. I don’t remember what I called the piece—I know it had a very long title—but it would later become my solo show, Miss America’s Daughters, the story of an aging beauty queen coaching her daughters on how to follow in her footsteps.

So there I was, performing again, but this time on my own terms. Saying what I wanted to say the way I wanted to say it. It felt as if I’d done it behind my own back, but I had to admit that Vati was right. I was back on stage, combining writing and performing, and it felt good.

It seemed I was learning by going where I had to go.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of You’re Gonna Be a Star Someday, coming soon to this very Substack!

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If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy You’re Gonna Be a Star Someday, Part 1: The Triumphant Team, about my childhood performing in Kansas; The Exuberant Professor, in which I introduce you to my beloved Vati; and Sunrise, Sunset: A Lyric Essay (about my parents’ divorce).

In other news:

• Are you longing to tell your story? Four-week summer sessions of Off-Leash Writing Workshops start in two weeks! Take a deep dive into your creative process within a warm circle of supportive peers. Learn more about the process or go straight here for dates and registration.

• Want to come write with me in Greece? We have four spaces left for Rejuvenate & Create: A Transformational Women’s Writing Retreat, October 5-11 on the island of Amorgos! Use code MAYMAGIC for €100 discount through end of day Friday, May 23. Learn more OR go straight here to grab your spot. A €200 deposit saves your place!

In my Off-Leash Writing Workshops, we often use poetry for inspiration. This piece was inspired by Why I Petted the Cat, by Lance Larsen, and the line, “Me trying to love all mammals equally” in particular.

Why I Pet My Dogs

Because I love them, and although I’m trying to love all beings equally, it’s hard when humans behave so badly.

Because the best place to find comfort amidst the madness taking place in the country and the world is in Hobie’s thick, soft fur; the wiry musculature of Professor Wiggles’ perpetually wagging body; and Wubkin’s warm, small heart beating fast and strong against my palm as I rub his chest and belly.

Because there’s an ache in my heart today and every day that only the petting of dogs can ease.

Because someone didn’t like my class, and although I’m trying to be a grownup and get past my hurt and defensiveness so I can find the lesson in this individual’s rather unkind remarks, I’m still sad and demoralized, since I continue to hold the (admittedly unreasonable) wish that every one of my students will love me, as I love every one of them.

Because my sons don’t always want to be hugged, but my dogs always want to be petted and scratched and loved.

Because my dogs remind me that there are other kinds of intelligence in this world besides our human kind, and those other intelligences are steeped in wisdom of a sort that we, with our egos and distortions, cannot begin to understand.

Because the rain is tapping its gentle melody on the roof and the green leaves are popping outside the window and I love this world and ache for it at the same time.

Because some days I feel ready to give up entirely and be done, although of course I wouldn’t, couldn’t do that to my children. Still, some days I feel ready to be done, I do, and on those days, a warm Wubkin on my lap, or the lick of Hobie’s velvet tongue on my cheek, or Wiggles gazing searchingly into my eyes as though I alone hold the key to some essential mystery, makes me feel that I still belong here on this earth.

Because my dogs make sense to me when nothing else does.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy Your Inner Dog.

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• Looking for inspiration and a nurturing community for your writing? Join me and a warm circle of creative peers for four-week summer sessions of Off-Leash Writing Workshops, beginning in June. These short ‘n sweet sessions are a great way to get to know the practice or to stay connected to your creativity over the summer months. Register here.

• Speaking of inspiration and community, we’ve got TWO SPOTS LEFT on Rejuvenate and Create: A Transformational Women’s Writing Retreat on the island of Amorgos, Greece, led by me and the magnificent writer Kelly Dwyer, October 5-11. Learn more about our retreat or go straight here to register!

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You’re Gonna Be a Star Someday

Part 1: The Triumphant Team

My Vati (pronounced FAH-tee, German for Daddy) believed that when I grew up, I’d be a star. As a child, I believed it too.

My Vati loved to show off his kids. From an early age, my brother Lennie sang and played piano and violin. I sang and played piano and danced. When guests came over, we performed for them. Everyone clapped and praised us.

My parents separated when I was seven. After that, I spent the school years with my Vati in Lawrence, Kansas, and summers with my mom in Berkeley, California. My two oldest brothers, Bernie and Ronnie, were already out of the house by then. A year after my parents’ separation, my brother Lennie moved to Berkeley to live with my Mom. From then on, it was Vati and me. A Daring Duo. A Triumphant Team.

The song my Vati most loved to hear me sing when I was growing up was Helen Reddy’s Keep On Singin’, about a single dad raising his talented daughter. There aren’t many songs that pay tribute to the father-daughter bond the way that one does. I have countless memories of Vati asking me to sing it, both for him and for others. He was virtually tone deaf, but he’d tap his feet enthusiastically and mouth the words as I sang, in the character of the father addressing his daughter, Keep on singin’, don’t stop singin’, you’re gonna be a star someday. You’re gonna make a lot of people happy when they come to hear you play…

I sang Keep on Singin’ at my first audition, when I was eight. The show was Oklahoma! The University of Kansas had an excellent theatre program, and every summer they put on a big musical and invited the community in my hometown of Lawrence to audition.

I knew nothing about auditioning. I had no headshot or resumé. There was a form where we listed our experience and conflicts. I had only my school choir and ballet lessons to list. I had lots of experience performing in my living room, though, and I was not afraid.

The audition was held in Murphy Hall, a thousand-seat theatre that was the mainstage for university productions. I’d seen my brother Len perform there in the opera La Bohème a few years earlier. I was excited to get up on that big, wide stage.

I didn’t bring sheet music. I climbed the steps to the stage, then walked up to the pianist and asked if he knew Keep on Singin’. He did not.

I strode to center stage and said, “He doesn’t know this.”

This garnered a friendly laugh from the auditors.

I sang the whole song a cappella—all three verses and choruses. No one stopped me. Vati sat in the audience. He told me on the way home that he’d watched the auditors’ faces, and he could tell they were smitten.

We rejoiced when I was cast in the chorus—the only role available to a child.

During rehearsals, I memorized the entire show. I’d stand backstage, mouthing the words of every scene. The adult actors smiled at me, shaking their heads in amazement. They all told me how smart I was, how talented. I became very close with the other kids in the cast. We pretended we were a family. A grad student in the theater department who played Curly was our dad.

From the beginning, I was drawn to the character roles. I much preferred the plucky, flirty character of Ado Annie to the sweet, slightly insipid Laurie whose romantic story is at the center of the show. I fantasized that the actress playing Ado Annie, who happened to be my beloved school music teacher, would get sick during dress rehearsals. Not deathly ill, just sick enough to knock her out of the performances. The director would put his head in his hands, crying, What are we going to do? We’ll have to cancel the show!

At that point in my fantasy, one of the actors would say, Wait a minute! Tanya knows all the lines!

Great idea! The director would say.

He’d put me in, and the crowd would adore me. They’d hoot and whistle as I strutted the stage, singing, I’m just a girl who cain’t say no. When I took my bow during curtain call, they’d jump to their feet. Vati would be right there in the front row, clapping ecstatically, his eyes shining with pride. The whole cast would thank me for saving the day. It never once occurred to me that they wouldn’t cast an eight-year-old child opposite adult actors, even if the role had not involved copious amounts of kissing.

The roles kept coming. I played a gingerbread child in the KU Music Department’s opera of Hansel and Gretel. A few months later, my elementary school announced auditions for a production of Oliver!

I told Vati I wanted to play the Artful Dodger. Though he was usually 100% supportive of my ambitions, he cautioned me not to get my hopes up, since the part was written for a boy. I got the part, and it became one of my Vati’s favorite stories to tell when boasting of my theatrical accomplishments.

“She was nine years old,” he would crow to whichever friend or family member he was currently regaling. “I told her, ‘Tanya, that’s a boy’s role!’ She said, ‘I’m going to get it anyway.’ And she did!”

What did I love about it, exactly? Was it all the attention and adulation that came my way? The thrill of being privy to a grown-up world? The deep sense of camaraderie among the cast? Yes, yes and yes. Add to that the sheer fun of singing and dancing, the pleasure of spending so much time with music and stories I came to love, and the potent magic of creating a world onstage and inviting the audience in. Plus, it made my Vati so happy! It’s no wonder I kept going.

Years later, as an adult pursuing a career in theatre, I’d spend a lot of energy interrogating my motives for continuing to act. I’d ask myself whether it was art or ego that kept me plugging away in that insecure, underpaid, highly competitive industry. Art, I felt, was a worthy motivation. Ego was not.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As a child, I never lost a part. I had good pitch, a strong voice, and boatloads of confidence. I was emotionally elastic and unafraid to go big. On top of that, I was an excellent cold reader.

Since I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, not New York or Los Angeles, opportunities were limited. Nevertheless, from the time I first trod the boards until the time I left for college, there was never a window of more than a few weeks in which I wasn’t either rehearsing or performing.

Whether it was a school performance, community theatre, a KU production, or something at the large Jewish Community Center an hour away in Kansas City, my Vati was in the audience at every show, cheering me on. Nothing made him prouder than having people come up to him after the show and gush about what a phenom I was.

In junior high, the competition started to catch up. The first time I lost a role, it was a crash course in humility.

In seventh grade, my school was doing a production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, and I was angling for the role of Snoopy. Although I read for it in a couple of callbacks, the role ultimately went to my childhood friend Becca, who’d played Nancy in our elementary school production of Oliver! a few years before. Her mom—an English teacher at the school and the head of the drama club—was directing the show.

My Vati was livid. Of course she would cast her daughter! It wasn’t fair—she should have recused herself! It was an obvious case of nepotism.

Although I railed alongside him about the unfairness of the situation, I had to acknowledge in my heart of hearts that Becca made a fabulous Snoopy. Her smooth alto voice sailed to notes that had landed awkwardly in my vocal break, and her flexible, loose-limbed physicality hilariously captured Snoopy’s determined dogginess.

I ate humble pie and joined the chorus, which had been added to the small-cast show so that more kids could participate.

I remember Vati driving me around town in Sir George—our cream-colored Chrysler LeBaron—to check the bulletin boards when cast lists were announced. That’s how we did things in those days. Vati was always as anxious as I was to see whether my name would appear beside the role I coveted. When I got it, we celebrated together. When I didn’t, we ranted and mourned.

At some point in high school the depth of my father’s investment in my theatrical endeavors started to bother me. During my junior and senior years at Lawrence High, I enrolled in a couple of classes at KU, which allowed me to finagle my way into regular theatre department productions, where I competed against college students. I remember being sixteen and standing in the hallway beside the green room at KU, looking at the cast list for the musical Hair. My name wasn’t on it.

On the car ride home, I sobbed inconsolably. My dad tried to comfort me by saying they were fools not to cast me, since I was obviously the best. He speculated that they needed to spread the wealth among the less gifted of the college students, who after all needed to be cast sometimes too.

“Stop it!” I sobbed. “You don’t know that! You didn’t even see the others!”

He didn’t have to see them, he told me. He knew I was the best.

I felt a flash of anger. “Stop saying that!” I yelled. “It’s not true! You just … You love me too much!”

In my memory, the scene ends there, as if the lights went to black after I spoke those words. I have no memory of his reaction. But I remember saying that—You love me too much—and feeling that the words had been building within me for quite a while. That it was somehow too much. I knew he didn’t see things clearly when it came to me. That his idea of my greatness was not rooted in objective reality. And that it was hard enough carrying my own fierce hopes and disappointments without having to carry his as well.

As a mother myself—my sons are sixteen and twenty-one—I have tremendous empathy for the distress my Vati must have felt as I went about my wild, dramatic process of grieving the roles I failed to get. I know now that there’s nothing more painful than witnessing your children’s suffering and knowing you can’t fix it.

Looking back, it’s easy to say that my Vati should have helped me build the resilience a life in the theatre requires—or any life, for that matter—by conveying the message, Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose—just keep working hard and doing your best, as opposed to, You’re the best there is, and if anyone doesn’t see that they’re flat out wrong. I’ve learned, though, there’s not much value in faulting your parents for being the very human creatures that they were.

My Vati had a kind of innocence about him. In his eyes, I was perfect in every way. That’s all he saw, and nothing I said could convince him otherwise. And although it’s easy to say he set me up for some brutal disappointments in the years to come, I could also say that his belief in me gave me the underlying confidence to withstand them.

P.S. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much love.

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You can find Part 2 of my journey HERE, in which I head off to college and begin the long, knotty process of questioning my theatrical calling, even as I continue to perform.

For an introduction to my beloved Vati, who suffered tremendous loss and displacement and still remained the most life-loving person I ever knew, check out The Exuberant Professor. You might also enjoy Sunrise Sunset: A Lyric Essay (about my parents’ divorce), The Road Between Us (about the aftermath of my parents’ split), On Forgiveness (about his extraordinary capacity to give others grace); and The Night I Made My Father Cry.

Help! I call. There are ants crawling in my brain, forever searching for sugary crumbs. They make me fretful and jumpy, and I can’t seem to focus.

Silence responds, Listen.

I wait a full thirty seconds.

Yes? I say. Is that all you’ve got?

What’s your hurry? Silence asks. Do I scare you?

I plead the fifth.

Silence laughs. To be at ease with yourself, you must be at ease with me. And to be at ease with everything and everyone else, you must be at ease with yourself.

I sigh. I’m not used to your company anymore. The world is so noisy.

Believe me: I know, says Silence. You must stand against the clamor. Or sit against it. Or walk. Take off the headphones: No audiobooks, no podcasts, no NPR. Notice the robins and squirrels; the cerulean patches and tufty clouds; the pale, coiled buds. You don’t have to be a monk in a cave to benefit from my company.

It’s hard, I say. When I hang out with you, I feel too much.

My dear friend, says Silence gently, when there’s an ache in your heart, and you try to obliterate it with cacophony, that’s when you need me most.

But I’m a writer, I say weakly. My life is about words.

Silence chortles at this. You and your precious words.

Hey! I shout.

I’m sorry, says Silence. Words too have power. But they must be the right words. Without my help, how will you find them? How will they find you? Filling your head with chatter is like filling a field with cement. Nothing grows.

Silence continues, I am your fertile soil.

Within me, something settles, calms.

Silence says, I am the one who, when you invite me in, will always return you to yourself.

I set the table with cloth napkins and my mother’s bone china, each plate with a different flower pattern, and I invite Silence in. I serve a hearty vegetable soup flavored with garlic and bay leaves; crisp green salad in a light vinaigrette; and hot, crusty sourdough bread. Together, Silence and I eat. And it is good.

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I. Innocence

Praise the mutilated world. The broken one.

Praise, too, the hopeful world, the shining one.

Praise the brand new world, reinventing itself each day, each moment.

Praise the ancient world, the 4.5 billion-year-old one.

Praise the changing world, the mysterious, unknowable one.

Praise the humans who keep trying. Who get up each day and stumble forward, perpetually second-guessing themselves, never quite knowing if they’re doing the right thing, but trying, still, to be humble, to be kind.

Praise their open hearts, their willing gazes, their bleary eyes, opening again and again to the rising day.

Praise sun and fog, rain and snow, clouds and mist, hail and sleet.

Praise infants, hatchlings, fry and larvae. Praise each newly minted creature coming into this world guiltless, blameless.

Because if ever there was a misguided idea, it’s “original sin.”

You can never persuade me that anyone is born guilty, no matter who they are born to, or where, or when.

So let me praise innocence, which I believe in. I praise the newly hatched and the freshly born, and I praise the innocence that still dwells in each of us—our innocent yearnings, our innocent longings, our innocent hearts.

II. Broken

A dear friend was ranting on Facebook the other night, to the point where I wondered if he was having a breakdown.

People you love will die before this is over, he wrote. They will disappear. And if you think that’s not true, then you haven’t been paying attention to history and seen what’s happened in every other authoritarian regime in the past hundred years.

For a moment this struck me as extreme. But as I sat looking at his words, I could not say he was wrong. People are disappearing already. Immigrants. Mahmoud Kahlil, detained for lawful protest. And people many of us loved died of Covid, in large part due to the arrogance, inaction and willful misdirection of this same authoritarian buffoon.

I paused, trying to think of something to say to my friend.

Finally, I wrote, I love you. You are not wrong. And still there is friendship. Still there is love. I am grateful for that.

When I awoke the next morning, he and two other friends had hearted my comment.

I am listening.

I am trying to listen to life and figure out what it’s saying. What it wants from me.

I remember a time when one of my sons had a meltdown. I heard him screaming in his room and throwing things. I ran up to his room and found him under a blanket, sobbing.

I want to go home, he wailed. I want to go home.

What do you mean, sweetie? I said, holding him in my arms. You’re home.

I don’t belong here, he cried. Nobody talks to me. I don’t have any friends.

I thought of my friend Do Peterson, in his song Soul Stretch, chanting

I feel lost.
I feel lost.
I feel lost here
take me
back to Africa.

Do—pronounced like the action verb—is a Black man born in New York City. He’s never been to Africa. And though I am neither Black nor a man, I’ve always felt a deep connection to his words. I too have felt lost. I too have been at home, longing for home. I believe we all ache for that bright unbroken planet Tony Hoagland wrote about, that place where we feel wholly loved, wholly accepted, whole.

III. Brave

It’s a brave thing to get up each day and try.

It’s a brave thing to stand before the mirror, meet your own eyes, see the ways you’ve fallen short, and vow to try again.

It’s a brave thing to say, I don’t know what to do, and I’m afraid, but I love the world, so I’m going to keep trying to figure it out.

After reading my friend’s post last night, I dreamed of Nazis. They were holding me hostage in a garage. It was scary, but not quite as scary as it sounds, perhaps because I’d figured out how to escape. My energy in the dream was not one of terror but one of ferocious focus. I’d discovered the people who’d kidnapped me were not who they said they were. They weren’t a well-armed militia. They were just small-time criminals looking to ransom me. The Nazi insignia was there to scare me. Which isn’t to say they weren’t Nazis, but if they were, they weren’t part of a coordinated team. They were just desperate bigots trying to make a buck.

Is it enough to love the world?

When my child was crying that day, saying I want to go home, my heart broke. I thought, I can’t bear this. I thought, If it’s gonna be like this, I don’t want to be alive.

I knew then, and I know now, that he will have pain, and he will recover from that pain, and then he will have pain again. That’s what it is to be human, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Nothing any of us can do. It’s the hardest part about being a parent, the part nothing can prepare you for. Once your offspring are here, you have to stay here for them. After my children arrived, my go-to escape fantasies became too selfish to contemplate. Still, there is nothing harder than witnessing their pain.

Let them be okay, dear whoever or whatever powers there may be, up there or out there or in here. Against all odds and against all logic, let my children, and all children, and this shining, mutilated world, be okay.

Our prayers make no sense, but we incant them anyway. We send our nonsensical prayers out into the universe; we move through the world, step by step, never sure if we’re going the right way; and we keep loving each other, even as we long for that bright, unbroken planet to which we can never return.

What else can we do?

The poems that inspired this writing:

1. Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh

2. Jet, Tony Hoagland

3. The Hand that Heals, Julia Fehrenbacher

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Dear Friend,

I’ve written countless drafts of this post. When I sent the last one to my brother Len for feedback, he wrote, “This is fine, but I can’t tell what you’re asking for.”

I responded, “If you can’t tell what I’m asking for, it’s not fine. It’s an epic fail!”

So I’m going to put this very simply:

I’m inviting you to pay for something you can get for free.

Why would anyone do such a thing? you ask.

The answer is: To support this publication and its creator—me.

Think of these Off-Leash Chronicles as public radio on a much smaller scale. You get to read these thoughtful, engaging personal essays for free, just as you get to listen to and enjoy all those interesting programs without paying a cent. Then once in a while someone comes on the air and says, Hey, friend, people work hard to bring you this content. Can you kick in something to help keep us going?

It’s just like that, except without the lengthy pledge drive.

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My Commitment

I’ve been publishing this blog/newsletter since 2018 at no cost to readers. I’ll share more about the paid subscriber option below, but first I want to promise you one thing:

I will never put my primary content—the personal essays you’ve come to know and love—behind a paywall.

This is because, whether or not you choose to become a paid subscriber, I appreciate you. You buoy me up simply by being here.

Here’s what you get at the different subscription levels:

FREE SUBSCRIBER: Access to all my posts and archives—the personal essays you’ve come to know and love. Ongoing freedom to read, like, comment and share.

MONTHLY SUBSCRIBER ($6/month): All that PLUS extra special monthly subscriber-only emails filled with gorgeous photos and creative tidbits.

ANNUAL SUBSCRIBER ($50/year—this comes to $4.17 a month): All that at a lower monthly rate, because you pay for the whole year upfront, PLUS a personal thank you via email.

CORE SUPPORTER ($150/year or … your choice!): With this category you can pay the suggested rate or write in any number from $50/year on up. Feel free to surprise me. 😃 You’ll receive all of the above, plus a personal, handwritten thank you card via physical mail and one hour of editing/writing consultation should you desire it!

If my words have moved or inspired you, either through these chronicles or through my book or plays or solo performances, I’m more than glad. It’s why I’m here. And should you choose to support me with your hard-earned dollars, in addition to supporting these chronicles, your generosity will bolster my ability to write my next book and to continue offering periodic free community writing sessions and need-based sliding scale pricing for all my classes.

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With warm wishes and appreciation,

Tanya

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Whenever I hear the opening strains of the Bee Gees’ How Deep is Your Love, that first swelling chorus of aahs, I’m transported back to 1984. As soon as Barry Gibb’s voice comes in, light and tender, singing, I know your eyes in the morning sun; I feel you touch me in the pouring rain, I’m pierced by an ache so deep I have to close my eyes and wrap my arms around myself to contain the flood of memories.

I met him at a party. I was a senior at Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas. He was a Lawrence High graduate, now a sophomore at KU. I’d spotted him before at Off-the-Wall Hall, the club where my friends and I danced on weekends, but we’d never been introduced.

Now here he was at this party, leaning against the living room wall. The room was loud and smoky, filled with people laughing, drinking and dancing. He watched them, his arms crossed over his chest, an expression of mild disdain on his face. He had spiky brown hair and wore black and white checked tennis shoes. His vibe was James Dean, his face Rob Lowe. I’ll call him Dylan.

I’d always felt like a wannabe around the punk and new wave kids at school. I looked up to them, in awe of their brazen edginess. Though I considered myself a free spirit, I knew my rebelliousness was relatively tame. I loved my parents and got good grades. The only drug I’d ever tried was marijuana, and I’d barely done that. In the Land of the Cool, I was a cipher. Dylan, on the other hand, was king.

I sidled over to the wall, positioning myself a few feet away from him. I can’t remember which of us spoke first or what we said. Probably some derisive remark about the music or the way people were dancing. I remember him glancing at me sideways with a small, mocking smile, eyebrows raised, doling out a few syllables at a time, as I tried desperately to mimic his cool. Occasionally his smile deepened, and a dimple showed itself. When that smile broke through, I felt chosen, touched by grace. He was so beautiful I could hardly breathe.

Soon we were up in someone’s bedroom, making out. I was pressed against the wall, fully clothed, kissing in a way I’d never really enjoyed—the kind that’s all tongue, all the time, where you have to unsuction yourself to come up for air. Most of the boys I’d made out with in high school kissed that way, leaving me with a chapped face from all the saliva.

So while I didn’t enjoy the physical sensation of kissing Dylan, I loved the idea of it. We were still in this position when someone came upstairs and told me my dad was ready to go home.

Yes, it’s true. I’d come to this party with my dad, a radical professor much beloved by his students. The party was hosted by a graduate student activist who adored my dad and, like other students who were estranged from their families of origin for one reason or another, considered him a surrogate father. My friend Leslie had come along too, disappearing into another bedroom to make out with another college boy.

I flashed Dylan a sheepish grin and a quick wave and ran downstairs. We didn’t trade numbers, but we had friends in common. I felt sure I’d see him again.

All weekend I thought of nothing but him. The thought of his face breaking open with a rare, dimpled smile sent shudders through my body. I strategized with my friend Leslie on how I could endeavor to run into him, but within a few days, my craving had reached such a fever pitch I had to take immediate action.

The next day was Valentine’s Day. It took only a couple of phone calls to learn where his dorm room was.

When I got out of school on the day itself, I walked downtown to Joe’s Bakery, a legendary spot for townies and students alike, and bought a heart-shaped doughnut.

I then climbed the hill to the dorms. I arrived at his door, sweaty and out of breath, clutching my doughnut in a paper bag. I took the doughnut out of its bag and arranged it on a napkin.

I breathed deeply, trying to calm my heart, which ping-ponged crazily in my chest.

Carefully balancing the doughnut on my left palm, I knocked.

A moment later the door opened, and there he was in all his impossible coolness: slouchy jeans, t-shirt, bare feet, messy hair. After imagining him all weekend, the three-dimensional physicality of him, standing before me, dizzied me.

“Happy V-D,” I blurted, extending the doughnut.

He shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe what he saw.

“You brought me a doughnut?”

“Uh huh.”

He stared at me a moment, and then the sun broke through, and he smiled, that brilliant, transformative grin.

“You’re so corny.”

“Uh huh,” I said again, smiling back.

He opened the door wide and motioned me into the room with a gallant swish of his arm. I walked mutely forward.

He broke the doughnut and handed me half. I ate it slowly, its glazed sugar melting into nothing on my tongue.

He turned on the radio. How Deep is Your Love was playing.

“What’s this shit?” he said, reaching to change the station.

“I like that song.”

“You do?”

I nodded. “Uh huh.”

He grimaced. For a moment he seemed poised on the edge of a cutting remark. Then he shook his head, gave a What can you do? shrug, and broke out once more in that wide dimpled smile. He looked, for a second, like an adorable little boy.

He opened his arms, and I stepped into them. We swayed to the music, pressed together so tightly I could feel his heart knocking hard against my own. I felt a rush of joy such as I’d never known. A blissful, tingling heat moved through me from head to toe. I’d made a bold move, and it had worked. This mysterious, movie-star-gorgeous rebel was in my arms, and we were dancing.

After that day, we hung out for a few months, on and off. My goofiness quickly lost its hold on him, and his mockery, at first playful and sweet, took on a mean edge. I was a square and a goody-goody, hopelessly inexperienced in a myriad of ways. He grew increasingly rude and dismissive, slow to return calls and prone to last-minute cancellations. Eventually he stopped calling altogether. I wallowed in misery for months, simultaneously hating him and pining for him. For several years afterwards, I clung to a narrative in which the relationship, such as it was, had left me scarred.

But things change. Looking back, I can see that, as sophisticated as he appeared to me at the time, he too was shy and insecure, struggling to find his place in the world. Forty years after the events of this tale, my most vivid memories of Dylan are not of how he hurt me, but of how he dazzled me.

Now, when I hear the opening notes of How Deep Is Your Love and Barry Gibb begins to croon, I know your eyes in the morning sun, something vast opens up inside me. Heat rushes through, and I remember, all over again, the giddy revelation of that day: that if this could happen—me in the arms of this unspeakably beautiful boy—anything could happen. And I remember the pride I felt: I had done this. I had brought this miraculous moment into being. Since then, I’ve known truer love, deeper love, longer-lasting love, love that evolved into beautiful friendship, yet this is a memory I’ll carry to my grave. And all it took was a heart-shaped doughnut.

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If you’re looking for a funny, snarky take on Valentine’s Day, check out my offering from last year, Confessions of a Valentine Scrooge. And if you’d like to see me belting out I Will Survive in a gold lamé jumpsuit, wig, and sparkly blue eye shadow, complete with choreography, you can find that here.

Itching to write your own stories? I lead writing workshops and retreats to help free your voice and craft your story. Starting March 3, I’ll be teaching an eight-week class called Shape, Sharpen and Shine through Laurie Wagner’s wonderful organization, 27 Powers. In this class, I’ll help you turn your raw drafts into polished work.

I also offer private coaching and editing services. Visit my website to learn more and get on my email list to be notified of future opportunities.

The Night I Made My Father Cry

I have only one clear memory of seeing my Vati1 cry. It happened in Florence, Italy, in August of 1982. I was fifteen.

My parents had divorced when I was nine. Since then, I’d spent the school years with my Vati in Lawrence, Kansas, and the summer and winter breaks with my mom in Berkeley, California. That summer of 1982, I’d had my first serious actor training from the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival’s Summer with Shakespeare program, where I’d gotten to work with some of the Bay Area’s best actors and directors. It was exhilarating. In addition to lapping up the training, I’d fallen in love with the other teens in the program. I felt I’d found my people. To top it all off, I had a huge crush on one of the guys.

Over the previous few years, my mom had periodically suggested that I come spend the school year with her in Berkeley.

“Wouldn’t you like to come live with me?” she’d ask, a wheedling note in her voice. Sometimes she’d accompany this with a pouty face, sticking out her lower lip.

Whenever she did this, I was overcome by a squirming, cringing kind of guilt. I’d remind myself that she was the one who’d left Kansas, my father and me behind. Still, it was terribly painful for me to say no to her. I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to have a daughter living so far away. Putting myself in her shoes, I felt an almost unbearable sadness. I had to lash out at her in anger to rid myself of the sensation.

The discomfort of those moments was multifaceted. The truth was, I would have loved to live in Berkeley. Even before my Summer with Shakespeare, I considered Berkeley a kind of mecca for nonconformists, a place I could be wholly myself. Whenever I visited, one of the first things I’d do was stroll up and down Telegraph Avenue, where artisan stands lined the sidewalks leading up to the university. I was entranced by the handmade jewelry, the spinning crystals casting out rainbows and the bright tie-dyed garments laid out in the California sun. I was equally taken with all the wild-looking characters hanging around, from the Bubble Lady to the Naked Guy. They all seemed to my Midwestern teenage self to be utterly free, living life on their own terms.

The guilt I felt when I considered my mom’s feelings, however, was nothing compared with the anguish that consumed me when I imagined leaving behind my Vati, the sweetest man on earth. We were a team. How many times had I heard him tell people that his life’s greatest joy was raising me? He’d been through so much suffering in his life already. How could I deprive him of his greatest joy? Besides, he needed me.

For as long as I could remember, I’d worried about my father’s health. He was forty-seven years old when I was born, nearly twice the age of most of my friends’ parents. His asthma frequently rendered him out of breath and fumbling for his inhaler, and his chronic bronchitis often produced violent fits of coughing. There was also a parade of surgeries: hernia, prostate, and the endlessly returning vocal cord nodes he called papillomas, which he’d gotten removed more than a dozen times. I’d gotten used to camping out at friends’ houses while my dad was in the hospital. I’d been keeping a diary since I was eight. Each day’s entry ended with a prayer for his health: “Please let Vati be okay, please let him live a very long infinity long time, please please please please please.”

On that August night in 1982, after spending most of the summer with my mom, I’d flown to Florence with my Vati for a two-week vacation before the start of my junior year of high school. Shortly before I left, my mom had once again tried to coax me into living with her. Just say the word, she said, and she’d enroll me at Berkeley High. I could continue my acting training and hang out with my new friends. I could see that boy I liked so much. I’d yelled at her to leave me alone, but I was torn.

On the flight to Italy, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mom’s offer. My dad knew, of course. We were best friends; nothing stayed hidden between us. And though he told me I should do whatever my heart desired, I wasn’t fooled. I could see the effort it took for him to shape those words.

When we arrived in Florence, we rented a car, and my Vati drove us to our pensione, a cross between a hotel and a bed and breakfast. Pensiones at that time usually had between eight and twenty rooms, individually furnished with heavy, old-fashioned wooden furniture. They always had fat white duvets on the beds, folded into crisp, puffy envelopes.

We got our key—one of those satisfyingly thick old-fashioned ones that jangles around in a keyhole wide enough to peer through—and brought our suitcases up to the room. Vati’s bag was heavy, filled with his medications. His history of hernias prevented him carrying heavy objects, so either I lugged our bags up the stairs or we took the help of a porter, if the pensione was large enough to have one. In any case, we got the suitcases upstairs, and Vati went to go park the car, which we’d left double-parked at the curb.

I flopped down on the bed, took out my journal and began to write about the journey.

After a while, I became aware that the sky outside my window, which had been dusky when we arrived, was now completely dark. How long had it been? I looked at my watch. More than half an hour had passed. Where was Vati?

I waited a while longer, then went downstairs and told the person at the desk—a painfully thin woman with dyed black hair and bright red lipstick—that my dad had gone to park the car and hadn’t returned. It had been close to an hour at this point. Her English was not great, and my Italian was non-existent, so communication was challenging.

When I’d finally made myself understood, she said, “Parking difficult this area. He come soon.”

I went back upstairs.

There were no cell phones then, only pay phones. As time passed, I ran up and down the stairs between our room and the lobby multiple times, asking whether he’d called. Finally, panicked, I asked her to call the police.

“Police?” she said skeptically, “no need.”

“Yes, need!” I said. “It’s been an hour and a half! He might be hurt! I have to find him!”

“We wait little more. If not come, we call.”

“How much more?” I started to cry.

“Little.”

I went back up to my room and threw myself once more onto the bed, sobbing. My heart pounded. What if he’d been in an accident? What if he were dead?

I whispered the prayer I’d written so many times in my journal, “Please let Vati be okay. I’ll be good, I’ll do whatever you want, please oh please oh please please please.”

As I did this, a part of me flew out of myself and up to the ceiling. It hovered there, looking down on my weeping self in judgment.

This is unhealthy, this part scolded. You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t be spending so much time worrying about your dad. He’s supposed to be the parent!

This critical self reminded me of all the times I’d played an adult in my relationship with my dad, from chatting with him about girlfriend woes to talking him down from panic attacks. A flash of anger rose up alongside my fear.

If he comes back alive and well, you should take your mom up on her invitation and go live with her, this other self said. You need to separate yourself from this overdependence you and your dad have on each other. It’s too damn much.

Two hours had passed. I’d cried myself dry. I was just about to go downstairs and demand the woman call the police, when the door opened and in walked my Vati, red-faced and out of breath. He sat down heavily on the bed.

“What happened?!” I yelled. “Where were you?”

“I got lost,” he said. “I had to go a long way to find a parking place. I walked and walked. The streets all look the same. And I couldn’t remember the name of the pensione! Finally, I asked a police officer for help. He drove me around in his car until I found it.”

“I was so worried,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I was frantic too, worrying about you!”

All the emotion of the last two hours welled up in me.

I steadied my voice. “I’ve made up my mind,” I told him. “I’m going to live with Mom next year.”

“What?” he said. His voice, roughened by so many surgeries, came out a high-pitched squeak. “Why?”

“We’re too dependent on each other!” I yelled, everything flaring back up. “It’s not healthy!”

My Vati turned away and put his face in his hands. His back shook with poorly suppressed sobs. It wasn’t enough he’d spent the last two hours frantically searching for the hotel. Now he would lose me too.

Looking back on that moment, I’m appalled by the cruelty of my teenage self. Could I possibly have chosen a worse moment to speak those words to my dad? At the same time, I feel a deep compassion for that girl, self-absorbed though she was. To her, the choice of where to spend her last two years of high school felt unbearable. Whatever she did would let down one of her parents. Whatever she did would let down a part of herself.

I ask myself, too, whether the judgy voice that emerged that night was right. Were my dad and I overly enmeshed? Sure, in an ideal world, I would have spent less time worrying about my father’s welfare. In an ideal world, he would have enjoyed perfect health. In that world, there would have been no Hitler, and he would not have lost his home, his country and his planned career. He would not then, in his new life in the US, have gone on to lose his first wife, second child, mother, grandmother... In that perfect world, he could have stayed in Austria. Then again, in that world, my parents would probably never have met, and I would never have been born.

Obviously, we don’t live in that world. In the broken world we inhabit, I was blessed with the most loving, devoted father a girl could ever want. And honestly, where did we get the idea that parents should be invulnerable and young people carefree? Speaking as a flawed, sometimes emotionally overwrought parent myself, I think perhaps it’s time to give that idea a rest.

Our imperfect lives make us who we are. On good days, I like the person I am. Much of that is thanks to my dad.

Ultimately, I did not go and live with my mom. I finished high school in my hometown, allowing my dad to exult in the fact that he’d raised me until I was ready to leave the nest. Then, although my dad murmured about the University of Kansas and my mom suggested I apply to UC Berkeley, I set my sights on Oberlin, Ohio, and I was gone.

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If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy these other memoir pieces: The Exuberant Professor; Sunrise, Sunset: A Lyric Essay; The Road Between Us: A Daughter’s Story; On Forgiveness.

Itching to write your own memoir? I lead writing workshops and retreats to help free your voice and craft your story. I also offer private coaching and editing services. Visit my website to learn more and get on my email list to be notified of future opportunities.

“Remember, there is no right answer to where you are going, except forward.”
- maya stein

Dear Friend,

I don’t have to tell you what a gut punch of a year this has been for those of us craving a just and equitable world.

Everyone I know worked so hard this year—donating, door-knocking, texting, calling, you name it. And yet, here we are.

Where do we go from here?

In The Denial of Death, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote, “The most any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion. To make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”

This resonates with me. We never know where our efforts will lead. All we can do is to continue stubbornly and patiently loving each other, bearing witness, and making beauty. Making our offerings, each in our own particular way—to the life force.

Looking Forward

For me, this means putting forward my own writing and offering writing workshops and retreats so that others may find their authentic voices and use them.

Leading writing workshops is both my livelihood and my way of giving back. As such, it’s my commitment to make the workshops affordable for all who want to be there. So if you find yourself drawn to participate and the cost doesn’t work for your budget, feel free to email me and we’ll set up a sliding scale and/or installment plan.

Starting in January, I have the following offerings:

• Online Off-Leash Writing Workshop (starts Jan. 9—one spot open)

• In-Person Off-Leash Writing Workshop, Ann Arbor, Michigan (starts Jan 14—two spots open)

• Online Memoir & Fiction Workshop (starts Jan 15—four spots open)

• Online Intensive Memoir & Fiction Workshop (starts Jan 14—one spot open)

• Learn about the Off-Leash process

• Learn about the Memoir & Fiction Workshops

Looking Back

This year I realized a long-held dream when Katie Goodling and I co-led our first Women’s Creativity Retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii. For five days and six nights, we wrote, painted, danced, sang, and ate delicious plant-based meals. We swam in the ocean, visited the volcano, learned about Hawaiian culture, and basked in the rugged beauty of the Big Island. I couldn’t have asked for a more delightful group of people or a more rejuvenating experience.

Stay tuned for our next big adventure in 2025!

This year I also poured a lot of myself into this Substack newsletter. I’m profoundly grateful to all of you who have joined me on this journey by reading, subscribing, leaving comments and sending emails. I look forward to continuing to build our relationship in the coming year.

I began the project of writing about my dad in 2023 with my personal essay, The Exuberant Professor: Introducing Harry. This portrayal of my beloved Vati’s irrepressible spirit remains my most popular Substack post.

This year I added three more short pieces to that memoir project:

• On Forgiveness (about an anti-semitic experience I had in grade school and my efforts to live up to my dad’s example)

• The Road Between Us (about my relationship with my mom)

• Sunrise, Sunset: A Lyric Essay (about my parents’ divorce and my own separation)

I got a lot of positive response this year to my essay What Comes Between Mother and Crone?—a reflection on the stages of a woman’s life.

I also gained traction and interest with the pieces Splinter Selves, in which I ruminated on the roads not taken, and Are You A Follower, a Bender, or a Breaker? in which I playfully explored my own relationship to authority.

Speaking of playful, I delved into the holiday of roses and chocolates with the piece Confessions of a Valentine Scrooge, which includes a link to my gold-lamé-suited performance of the disco anthem I Will Survive.

In November, I shared reflections on meeting the challenges of the moment through the essays Unstable Ground and An Agnostic’s Prayer.

I also introduced you to someone living life on his own terms in The Man Who Dwells on Lava and shared some fabulous reads in Haiku Reviews: 20 Books I Loved in 2024.

Thank you again for sharing this journey with me. You inspire me and buoy me up. Let’s keep making our offerings to the life force in 2025. You never know how far your ripples could reach.

With love and solidarity,

Tanya

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Find your authentic voice within a warm circle of creative peers. Off-Leash Writing Workshops and Memoir & Fiction Workshops start in January. Join us.