We’ve pub­lished Hal Sirowitz’s won­der­ful poetry in ear­lier issues of Tiferet. You’ll enjoy this recent inter­view with him on “Being Human.” Be sure to scroll down — there are two parts to the inter­view! http://www.riffraf.typepad.com/

Spring offers the pos­si­bil­ity of renewal, and many spir­i­tual rit­u­als have this idea at their cen­ter.  The sec­u­lar cul­ture, too, embraces spring with the rite of clean­ing, a chance to remove clut­ter and air out one’s liv­ing space.  Whether you prac­tice a par­tic­u­lar tra­di­tion or not, these sea­sonal rites offer sim­i­lar lessons as writ­ing. In the Jew­ish tra­di­tion, with which I’m most famil­iar, we remove leav­ened prod­ucts from our homes and eat matzah for the week of Passover.   The removal of the leav­ened (think fluffy and puffy) is a reminder to be hum­ble and not let the (inflated) ego run the show.   Good writ­ing demands the same, that we sub­sume our­selves to the more uni­ver­sal theme we are try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate, whether it’s a novel, mem­oir, story or essay.   In mem­oir, this could mean being will­ing to expose aspects of one­self that ego works hard to pro­tect.  And effec­tive writ­ing means not flaunt­ing arcane or sophis­ti­cated vocab­u­lary that earns points in acad­e­mia or cock­tail par­ties, but using as few and as pre­cise words as pos­si­ble to show, and not tell, the story. Writ­ing, in turn, has great advice for spring clean­ing.  Know the phrase, “Kill your dar­lings?”  It refers to those Read the Rest…

You can read an essay about my first writ­ing room  when I was a teenager in Ahvaz, Iran,  published in LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-caw-off-the-shelf10-2009may10,0,2468635.story In case you are inter­ested I will be teach­ing a fiction-memoir work­shop in Assisi, Italy, this sum­mer. Here is the infor­ma­tion: I will be teach­ing a fiction(memoir)workshop in Assisi, Italy, August 1–14, open for credit and non-credit. You can use the course as a vaca­tion in a com­mu­nity of writ­ers at a four star hotel in a beau­ti­ful ancient city. Credit option: through John Cabot Uni­ver­sity in Rome,students may use fed­eral title IV stu­dent aid. For more details please click on: for my course: http://www.artworkshopintl.com/rw/wsDtCRW.aspx?wsID=69 for gen­eral info: http://www.artworkshopintl.com/rw/About.aspx  

The Etch A Sketch toy was invented in the late 1950s by André Cas­sagnes. He some­how put together the cling­ing prop­er­ties of alu­minum pow­der, along with rigged sty­luses and came up with one of the world’s most pop­u­lar draw­ing toys.  That he did so just in time to cap­i­tal­ize on the baby boom makes me won­der whether the toy is genius enough to sur­vive decades, vir­tu­ally intact, or if the momen­tum of inno­vat­ing a toy at the onset of a pop­u­la­tion explo­sion can make what’s sim­ple appear to be last­ing genius. Mil­lions of chil­dren all over the world have cre­ated alu­minum pow­der mas­ter­pieces, only to have them dis­ap­pear on a whim.  Kind of like life, isn’t it? We twist and turn our desires into cre­ative projects, and some­times they last for a long time, and some­times they are gone before we have fin­ished with them.  So it goes. But some­where within the Etch A Sketch, every cre­ation still exists, and each creation’s fate is only to become fod­der for the next one. No two cre­ations are ever iden­ti­cal.  Sound famil­iar? I have been try­ing my hand(s) at writ­ing for just over a year.  I’ve been in and out of writ­ing classes, every­thing Read the Rest…

One of the tasks I set my advanced cre­ative writ­ing stu­dents is to have them, one stu­dent a week, find three poems to read and then unpack from what­ever anthol­ogy I hap­pen to be using. We do this not only for mean­ing but also for craft, the tech­ni­cal and strate­gic ele­ments that cre­ate the psy­cho­log­i­cal atmos­phere of the poem. Poetry, to me, is an act of atten­tion. And I think that the reader’s atten­tion to the poem, his or her engage­ment with the words of the poet, can allow access to the poet’s atten­tion to the Power of Things. The best poems—those that evoke what used to be called the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—can reward this atten­tion with some­thing akin to spir­i­tual com­mu­nion: a direct access to a deeper real­ity. Other poems, unfor­tu­nately, ren­der lit­tle more than access to a poet’s web­site. But that’s another story. This week, my stu­dent Phyli­cia brought this poem to our atten­tion:   The Bat­tle by Abra­ham Abu­lafia When Yaweh spoke to me, when I saw His name spelled out in blood, the pound­ing in my heart sep­a­rated blood from ink and ink from blood, and Yaweh said to me, “Know your soul’s Read the Rest…

Writ­ing From the Heart & Soul: a work­shop in Spir­i­tual Writing

Don’t wait for inspi­ra­tion.
Show up for it.
Thurs., Feb. 9 | 8:30–9:30 EST

TIFERET: A Jour­nal of Spir­i­tual Lit­er­a­ture offers mon­e­tary awards in the cat­e­gories of fic­tion, non-fiction and poetry.

Read­ing, I think, is a fun­da­men­tally spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence. The phe­nom­e­nol­o­gist Georges Poulet once remarked that, when we read, another person’s “I” enters into our own souls. Think about it: when we read the word “I” on a printed page, that silent mono­syl­la­ble res­onates within our own being. That is, this is the only way (out­side of purely gram­mat­i­cal and lin­guis­tic con­sid­er­a­tions) the word “I” sounds within our souls while not simul­ta­ne­ously mean­ing our­selves. This is a kind of inti­macy we habit­u­ally over­look, but one which can carry with it pro­found impli­ca­tions. In a let­ter to the Domini­can priest Jean-Marie Per­rin, the 20th cen­tury French philoso­pher Simone Weil describes a way in which one exam­ple of the reli­gious writ­ing of early mod­ern Eng­land ini­ti­ated for her a kind of reli­gious expe­ri­ence: There was a young Eng­lish Catholic…from whom I gained my first idea of the super­nat­ural power of the sacra­ments because of the truly angelic radi­ance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to com­mu­nion. Chance—for I always pre­fer say­ing chance rather than Providence—made of him a mes­sen­ger to me. For he told me of the exis­tence of those Eng­lish poets of the sev­en­teenth cen­tury who are named meta­phys­i­cal. Read the Rest…

I first met Madeleine L’Engle in a writ­ers’ work­shop she was lead­ing at a New York City con­vent when I was try­ing to sell my first novel. She was very com­pli­men­tary about my writ­ing and in a burst of dar­ing, I asked, “Will you read my unpub­lished novel?” She hes­i­tated a moment and then said, “Yes.” And I think I ran the forty blocks home, my feet not touch­ing the ground. It was a warm Octo­ber night in 1989. She loved the novel and sub­mit­ted it to her own pub­lisher who did not take it, but she endorsed my work, and when Nicholas Cooke: actor, sol­dier, physi­cian, priest was accepted by W.W. Nor­ton two years later, she sent me an enor­mous bunch of flow­ers. She rec­om­mended notable peo­ple to blurb for the novel. But more than that, she became my friend and I adored her. Many small writ­ers’ sup­port groups grew out of that annual work­shop, and once a year we’d all gather for a pot luck din­ner at her house, one of those rare old New York apart­ments with a view of the Hud­son River, posters of her late actor hus­band in the kitchen, and long hall­ways lined with books. Read the Rest…