Masterclass Promo Coming: Fiction, Memoir, Family History

But first: Get to know me better before I offer it--I know that was a long title ...

Jun 11, 2026

I’m offering a Masterclass, a five-day intensive via Zoom—so, before I outline that in this post, you should get to know me:

Here’s my story:

First get to know my writing. Here’s a fiction-story link: "Sine Die" and here’s a memoir link: Rugalach: A tribute to my mother.

I published my first book at age sixty. You might argue I was a has-been before I began. I argue, “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.” Inside that bravado lies a question I was unable to address until my world cratered.

I stood at a distance from this question, I, who began writing with my life’s breath in 1987 when my first piece, an elegiac tribute to my mother, was published and illustrated on the editorial page of The New York Jewish Week, at the time of year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—the time of self-reflection for Jews. It was not the best thing I’ve written, but it was a beginning, way too late.

My mother died in 1990, my sister in 1993, my father in 1999—all from long, tortuous illnesses while I remained well and strong. In 1996, I left my corporate job when I was fifty and went off to grad school on a paid assistantship and soon a full scholarship to do the work of my life: To write. I now believe that work sat in wait for reasons I had yet to discover.

When I turned sixty, The Woman Who Never Cooked won Mid-List Press’s First Series award and was published. The writing of that book I thought—and I thought is the key word here—brought me through.

All the stories in that book appeared in literary magazines, and many won prizes. Don’t think lit. mags matter? See this post —even though the best are perhaps moving to Substack: an example is Ginosko Literary Journal.

But the year the book was published, my husband left me for reasons he couldn’t explain and I couldn’t understand. The bottom of my life fell out from under me.

My memoir (Re)Making Love—a book—you may purchase but also fully up for free here on Substack: (Re)Making Love, the Substack link that oddly began as a live blog and was picked up by a publisher, reading along with some seven hundred others on every continent except Antartica— “What the hell is wrong with Antartica?” a lover said to me and made me laugh. I tell the good, the bad and the foolish that was me after my husband left.

I’m still working on the self-discovery this book explores, how I swooned and wept, the ingenue in a romantic comedy of my own making.

What I want to explore here is where the writing comes from and why it had lain in wait.

I read some time ago A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson and this quote struck me hard: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Because I grew up in a household of illness—goodness, yes, but linoleum hospital halls were my home away from home—I grew up with the fantasy that my being alive took lives. The child couldn’t understand.

The adult wrote this, when the last of the three was dying:

I think my father knew I wanted to abandon him. Did he know that I asked myself, What has he to offer me now, to give me? That I thought, What he wants from me is too much. My mother’s and my sister’s slow, painful anguished deaths that filled my years with long linoleum hospital halls, while my father sat in the orange chairs in the waiting places for the families of the sick. While he sat distant, apart, I went to the gurneys and the bedsides. I walked down the halls to the elevators that led to the operating room where one day they cut off my sister’s leg and then one day cut off the other—the diabetes. While I held my mother’s hand and felt the blood inside her fingers slow as if the blood that bled into her brain came from that hand, reversed and went another way, took a wrong turn, and that left her hand crooked and bent like his, while I went with her to the room where they put her in a tube to look inside her brain, to confirm the stroke, the bleeding in her brain, while I did that, while she lay in the tube unconscious, he sat in an orange chair in a waiting room.

I think now, Why were those chairs, plastic-leather-cushioned or hard-curved-molded in all the rooms where he waited, all orange? Like the unexplained orange on the forehead in that poem: “the night nailed like an orange to my brow.” My father was nailed to my brow. He sat in his wheelchair with his arm around my head. Bent and angled bones that would not straighten out. I felt no blood coursing through him, no soft flesh pressing down on mine.

No way out.

The way he felt while he sat in the orange chairs?

(from “To Swim?” The Woman Who Never Cooked)

As raw as this might seem to you, it still did not get at the conscious understanding I needed to write the memoir (Re)Making Love. I had known that aggression must be part of the writing, but I feared what must be done to create: Say the unsayable.

I don’t mean the writer must crush another. I mean the writer must crush herself.

My path to that end was to rediscover the past in the therapist’s chair—not in the writing chair. It took me way too long to get into that chair, but I have to thank my husband’s announcement, Oh so Greta Garbo, “I need to live alone” for getting me into therapy. If he’d not left me—and he was the straw that broke this camel’s back—if he’d not sent me on my journey, I’d never have written the memoir that dares to go without fear to the heart of the matter: The question, Who am I?

With that event, I set aside what would become my novel Who by Fire.

You have your reasons for waiting or for writing. I have mine. I know this: The little girl in this photo wrote the short story collection, the novel and the memoir and she keeps writing.

To reveal more, here is a link with an intro to the first piece of memoir I published in 1983, the memoir, hardly the best thing I’d ever written, but a start that I’ll explain in the Masterclass: Would you want to join or have advice about how or when you might join?