Dear readers,
When I updated the volume and issue number of this email, I realized that this is my third year of
publishing this newsletter. Hard to believe, indeed! In many ways, it still seems like a new endeavor to me. Before I embark on putting together a new issue, I often wonder what I should write about, but then, invariably, once I start, the ideas come, and it all flows together. Goes to show that the creative process never fails to amaze me and always reminds me that you simply need to start producing; as you work, it will come to you how it needs to be be
done.
|
|
So here we are, mid February, and my book launch is less than two months away! Yesterday I ordered the postcard invitations to my book launch party; old-fashioned, I know, but there still are a bunch of people neither an evite nor a Facebook event would reach. Plus I find that a postcard is a nice thing to receive. If you want me to mail you one, simply reply and I'll put you on my
mailing list.
Book Launch Party Thursday, April
6 4736 N. Lincoln Ave, Chicago
|
|
|
|
The book went to print last week and the publisher tells me that amazon typically ships preorders way before April 4, the official publication date. So, if you
preordered (thank you!), you should receive the book sometime in March. If you haven't preordered yet, and you can't attend my book launch on April 6 and support the wonderful Book Cellar, there's still time to preorder, of course.
This newsletter's banner photo features
my website's banner photo; my sister took this shot of me in September on our trip to our grandparents hometown of Liberec in the Czech Republic. I'm sitting on the steps of the Museum of Natural History, which is around the corner from our grandparents' former house. This museum is mentioned a few times in the book, and it feels appropriate to me to have locations of the book featured on the site.
In fact, I'm planning to run a series of "book companion" posts on my blog as soon as the book comes out that will visually complement certain chapters, so look for those come April. If you downloaded my Artist and Writer's Workbook 2017 this image will be familiar to you. This is one of the main thoroughfares, Masarykova, in Liberec. The street where my grandparents used to live (called Grillparzer Strasse in the book but now called Dvorakova) is to the right of where you can feel I'm standing taking this picture. The museum mentioned above is to the right at the
corner of the intersection farther down this street. Speaking of my Artist and Writer's Workbook, you may remember that I mention giving up on submitting to literary
magazines in my letter on the first page. I was having an interesting discussion about that kind of course correction with Barbara Bos, who runs the informative site Books by Women, and the resulting article The Year I Gave Up Submitting to Literary Magazines was just published today. These days I spend a good deal of my time on book publicity efforts. As the publicity machine rolls on, things are happening. One result of my efforts (and my publicist's success in placing it!) is the article
Proposals Are Overrated (that was my title anyway, I don't quite like the one it came out with), published in Woman's Day. It's based on a chapter in the book and on a friend's remark on how both our husbands never proposed to us and we've been happily married ever after.
"The following of [...] thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography." I wrote the above essay for Tablet without seeing the "thematic design" of my own life until the editor at Tablet slapped on the title of "The Day of Broken Glass." What a brilliant title, I thought, and then I suddenly saw the connection to Kristallnacht, to my family's past, to the chapter in Jumping Over Shadows when the synagogue in Reichenberg is destroyed during Kristallnacht while my grandmother holds vigil at the sick bed of her Jewish brother-in-law, whose father helped build that synagogue. The vandalization of my synagogue in Chicago does, by no means, compare to what happened during
Kristallnacht; nevertheless, there, in the glittering heap of shards that awaited us, swept together, on floor of the synagogue's foyer as we entered for Shabbat services the night after the front window was smashed, was a thread that stitched right through all the decades to another moment in time, when a much greater magnitude of glass was broken.
With best wishes that you may find all the "thematic designs" as you go about your own creative endeavors, |
|
|
|
