A Note From Judy About Her Writing
In my twenties I began to write articles influenced by Joan Didion's style in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Jerusalem was undergoing rapid change after the heady "victory" of the 1967 Six Days' War. I appointed myself the person on the ground to describe these changes for readers back home in Cleveland, Ohio. The Cleveland Jewish News put my eye-witness stories about the building boom and the attempt to blow up Al Aksa Mosque on the front page.
Later, in my thirties, as mother of three small children, I slouched more towards home. While I wrote about family dynamics, my sense of humor emerged. These writings became "Mum's the Word," a column in The Jerusalem Post.
It was a great day in the late 1980s when my ex-husband-to-be told me he did not want to read about our family in the newspaper. This forced me to slouch inwards, towards myself, my most comfortable and natural beat. I began writing about my grandmother's quilt, my father's death, and Friday night dancing school classes in Cleveland, circa 1957. These pieces appeared in the "Out There" column of The Jerusalem Post Friday Magazine. I never exceeded my 1,500 word limit.
In 1999, I began Goucher's MFA program in creative nonfiction and learned that these "pieces" were called "personal essays". You could stretch them to 7,000 words. You could write a book and call it memoir. I didn't think I had that much to say, but by now I was living by myself, so I enjoyed the freedom to try. My longer essays found homes in magazines and literary journals.
In 2004, I began writing short stories in the framework of Bar Ilan University's MA program in fiction. I wrote a collection of short stories that all take place on Bethlehem Road in Jerusalem.
I grew up writing. Clutching the pencil and forming the letters in first grade gave me my first sense of boundaries and safe home. Script in second grade offered a taste of flight. Writing poems in third grade and beyond taught me that digging deep and counting syllables is as exhilarating as diving into a mountain pool surrounded by willows. From being a crutch, the pencil morphed into a machete for splitting through the underbrush of the psyche and a sword for defending and defining my Self.
I write, therefore I am.
Judy Labensohn, January 2007
