I always try to say yes to things, which has worked out pretty well, with a few horrifying exceptions. So when fellow Gotham teacher Masha Hamilton asked me if I’d be interested in helping with the Afghan Women’s Writing Project I said yes and immediately forgot all about it. Several months went by and then she said, “How about now?” With the result that for the last few weeks I’ve been teaching a writing class on-line to a group of young Afghan women and what an experience it has been. What stories they have to tell!

The other night I had an e mail from a young woman, Shogofa, who wrote a lovely essay about the smell of rice. Her family was hungry, but her neighbors had rice; the smell of it was tormenting her. So her mother hugged and comforted her, which made her realize that her mother’s smell was so much more important to her than that of the rice. Then her mother died, but before she did, she asked her husband to take some of the little money they had, to buy her daughter some rice. She wanted her daughter to have that comfort.  The story was heartbreaking, but also inspiring and full of love and intelligence. What a joy to be able to connect to people like this.

In Masha’s words, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, was “begun as a way to allow the voices of Afghan women—too often silenced—to enter the world directly, without any mediation.” The women, some of them students at Kabul University, some of them survivors of refugee camps, some of them witnesses to hardships of life under the Taliban, must make their way to a computer, which is a struggle in itself.  The teachers, who sign up for a rotation of a few weeks, post lectures and exercises.  (Write about a place that was important to you, for example. Or, write about a smell.) There’s so much about Afghanistan in the newspapers, but it’s just not the same as reading an account by one woman, as I did the other night, of her meeting with Afghan President Karzai. One of the most important aspects of being a writer is having something to say, and these women definitely do.

So, if you’d like to read more, please go over to the blog site, which is where a lot of these essays are published. You can find it at  http://awwproject.wordpress.com   Then please comment on their essays and add your words to theirs.

Sola! (which means peace.)

First off, some very exciting news. My story, “Triplet,” has been selected for the anthology 2009 BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING. Dave Eggers was editor, Marjane Satrapi wrote the introduction and, as of two days ago, the book was featured in displays in every bookstore I went into.

Which brings me to the next point which is that my story was originally published by anderbo.com, which is an on-line literary magazine edited by Rick Rofihe. One of the subjects my students spend a lot of time talking about, especially toward the end of term, is what do editors want. So, I asked Rick some questions about that and here are his answers:

SB:  Can you describe Anderbo in three words?
RR:  Fiction. Poetry. “fact”.
 
SB: How many submissions do you get and how many do you publish?
RR: We put up about one poet every 3 weeks; one short story every 5 weeks; and one non-fiction (”fact”) piece every 8 weeks. The anderbo.com  acceptance rate is less than 1% overall; probably we receive submissions from 10 poets (up to 6 poems each) daily, along with, say, 4 story submissions and 1 “fact”. We have a LOT of editors weighing in on the fiction, editors who are pretty much more analytical and articulate than I’ll ever be.
 
SB: What qualities does the ideal Anderbo story have?
RR: They’re not what I call “situational/ensemble”; that is, the protagonist gets most — maybe 85% — of the story’s word-space. The light’s on the main character most of the time in the site’s best stories, I think.
 
SB: Do you ever like something, but think it’s not quite there and give the author suggestions?
RR: I might try to lead them to water: only sometimes do they drink….
 
SB: Do you publish works by debut authors?
RR:  Most seem to be. Of all those ones so far, probably Kayla Soyer-Stein’s work was most instantly-astonishing to me: her poem, “To My Landlord”  and her novella, “We Were There and Now We’re Here”

SB: What sort of work would you like to see more of?
RR: Good, well-structured, 1500- to 2500-word stories are not as plentiful as I’d hoped….

Only once in my life have I been punched in the face. So far. And that was a direct result of my writing.

I should backtrack to say I grew up in the Sixties on Long Island, in a neighborhood that was middle class and homogeneous. There were a lot of war veterans on my street and one of my favorite memories is of my neighbor, who had been a parachutist.  On weekend afternoons, after he had a bit to drink, he liked to hitch up his son to a parachute and that to the back of his car and then he’d take off down our road. I can still see my neighbor’s son floating over Cynthia Drive, his father red-faced and gunning the engine.

However, my mother was concerned that my upbringing was too sheltered. Why she wasn’t concerned about my brother I don’t know, but she decided to send me to a camp for children from the inner city. It would be a learning experience. (I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s great line about how he was sent to an interfaith camp where he was beaten up by children of all races and creeds.)

I’m small now, but when I was young I was like a whisper. I had pale white skin and was always either bruised or eaten up by mosquitoes. I was not a threat. However, I did have a journal that I wrote in faithfully. Every night I wrote down my thoughts and put the journal under my pillow. Of course it took all of 23 minutes for my fellow cabin mates to figure this out, and so every day after I trooped off to breakfast, they read my journal out loud and laughed. Unfortunately, I only found this out later.

There was a girl in our bunk who was an Amazon. Huge, powerful, strong, and I wrote down in my journal, meaning it as a compliment, that she could have been the leader of the Black Panthers. She didn’t take that well. I, oblivious, walked into my cabin one afternoon. She held up my journal, read it out loud, lifted me up by my neck and punched me in the face. She got into trouble. I spent the rest of the week with a bandage over my nose and the next summer my mother sent me to a camp where we put on musicals.

But I still remember the horror of the moment when I realized she was holding my journal. That was actually worse than the physical pain. It was the feeling of exposure. People who didn’t know me were reading my words and criticizing them. It’s something I think about at the start of a new semester. I understand when I see how nervous my students are about having strangers read their work and I sympathize. We all just want some mercy.

How about you? Have you ever gotten into trouble with your writing?

Last week I went to Berlin to visit my son. He’s been studying there for five months and I’ve missed him terribly and had been counting down the days to this visit. Being of a somewhat gloomy disposition, however, or perhaps just because I’m battle-scarred, I was convinced that something disastrous was going to happen before I got on the plane to Berlin. I anticipated a litany of things, but what I didn’t expect was that five days before the trip, I walked downstairs and found my dog lying motionless at the foot of the steps.

I’ll interrupt myself to say that the dog is now fine. He had a fever. He’s cured and panting right next to me. However, I didn’t know that at the time and there are few problems more terrible than seeing your beloved Golden Retriever staring at you mournfully and trying to figure out how to move that 110 pound unmoving friend to the vet. Thank God one of my best friends is a nurse and she figured out how to lift him onto a sheet and move him.

But the point of all this is that as I was sitting at the vet’s office, clutching onto Tino’s paw, I was thinking about how if it hadn’t been for my crazy dog, I might never have written a novel. He’s always been a tad high-strung, but when he was young he was an absolute lunatic. My husband had to walk backwards into the house because if Tino saw him full on he started to pee. That was just the least of it. So at one point, when he was at the vet and doing his best to climb onto the poor man’s shoulders, the vet mentioned to me that there were tranquilizers for dogs that worked in much the same way as they did for people.

That fact stayed with me and a few years later I was arrested by an image of a woman who is trying to decide whether or not to take her dog’s medication. Something in the humor and tragedy of that moved me, and that was the original start of my first novel, Pitch. Recently I went back and read through that scene and I thought how wonderful it is for writers that we get to write about those we love.  Furry or otherwise.

So, thank heavens Tino is okay. And I had a great time in Berlin.

How about you? Do you ever write about pets?