We’re all formed by the small, unexpected and even weird moments of our youth.

One night, when I was around 4 years old, I decided to disobey my mom’s order to sleep early and sneaked into the kitchen instead to have some sweet desert. As a green chili burned my mouth mercilessly, I learned that looks can be deceiving and that bad decisions can bring consequences hard to digest.

On that same year, I finally got the hang of riding my bicycle after many, many, MANY falls, learning that perseverance and determination were needed for happiness and confidence. And when I got my favorite chocolate – which came with COOL animals’ pictures and that I was saving for a special moment – stolen from my Care Bears backpack at school, I learned that people could be selfish and envy what you have, even if their actions make a little girl cry.

It was another unexpected, weird moment that made me realize I wanted to be a storyteller. My two-years-older brother took up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and decided to draft me as his “sparring partner”. As much as I tried to escape, I’d always find myself keeping my dogs company on the floor after his sweeps. But one night, surprisingly, he left me alone. He didn’t search the whole house for his victim. How come? After getting up the nerve to look for him instead, I found my brother glued to the couch watching The Goonies. His eyes locked on the TV, his mouth half open, breathing deep and slowly. He didn’t even bother to cast me a sharp look when I borrowed some of his popcorn. I wanted to channel that power, the power of a great story!

Later, I noticed that same hypnotized look when my mom was reading a novel. Everything was going wrong for her that day, but the book somehow managed to extract a grin from her and then even a laugh.  I felt like I was witnessing a magic trick. The book had not only grabbed my mother’s attention, it had completely cheered her up and made her forgot about her troubles. Could I ever create something similar?

Soon, I found myself smiling while holding books too, and preferring to go to the bookstore rather than to stay home playing Mario Bros. It wasn’t long until I had some paragraphs and then a story of my very own. I wish I could say that one day I felt inspired while watching the birds singing and a strong force compelled me to grab a notebook to share my thoughts with the world… but, no… It wasn’t that poetic. I was coerced to write my first story – I wanted to buy some candies and, to solve my problem, I offered my dad to clean the car for spending money. He liked the idea but ended up giving me a different assignment: write a small story about the city where we lived, Rio de Janeiro.

I accepted the challenge, angry with the audacity of my dad’s proposal, but it paid up a lot more than a box of gummy bears. I realized that seven year old me was able to perform some magic myself. The feeling of being able to combine words into a story was so overwhelming that I didn’t want to let it go. Now it was just missing the second part of the trick – inspire people with my stories or just simply make them smile.

That goal made me start paying more attention to my surroundings to use them as a source to my stories. The housekeeper’s black clothes and strong laugh made her into a character of one of the horror stories that I created to terrify my friends. Their high-pitched screams told me I was on the right path.

As I developed my story-telling abilities, I realized that no matter how crazy my life was, or how stressed I was, writing could always make me feel cheerful. Time could pass, Santa Claus didn’t exist and my housekeeper no longer seemed scary, but the magic of story telling has only grown.

The pleasure of writing and the idea of brightening another’s day inspired me to create theater plays, then screenplays, then finally to my first novel – The Chosen of Gaia, a book that combines everything I’ve loved in a good story: deeply human characters living out adventure with humor, suspense and personal growth.

Check it out, and let me know if I brought some magic to your day.

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To some, the eighties might be remembered as a time of big hair, big shoulders, and Molly Ringwald pouting on movie screens across America.  For me it was all those things—as well as a time of great upheaval in the community in which I was raised.

Rain pelted my hair as I stood at the funeral for Rabbi Moshe Feinstein on March 23, 1986. Throngs of souls stood for hours, paying respects to one of the last great leaders of a generation. His death marked the loss not only of a Torah scholar—but of the traditional Lithuanian leadership of the entire Orthodox Jewish community.  Bereft of leadership and afraid of a secular culture that spoke openly about premarital sex, AIDS and drug abuse—there were few leaders to guide normative Orthodoxy through the challenges of living a religious life in a secular society. Without the tools to navigate a seemingly threatening world, thousands of religious Jews worldwide proclaimed a silent retreat to insulate the community from the ills of modern society– to separate and hide.

On October 6, 1943, my grandfather joined more than four hundred rabbis on a march in Washington, to plead with President F.D.R. for intervention on behalf of the European Jews, who were being butchered by the millions. Though his calendar was free, F.D.R. refused to meet with the rabbis, tacitly allowing for the continued wholesale slaughter of my people. Could I live and work in a world that made it clear my people were unwanted? Could I express myself in a world that, at best, tolerated the religion of my birth? The pulsating music of Madonna and the fun Cyndi Lauper squealed that all girls just wanted to have, sparred with my own sense of responsibility to my community. Could I be a Material Girl—when my religious high school repeatedly encouraged a retreat into ascetics, to eschew all material comforts in support of marrying a Torah scholar? Dare I dream to pursue my passion for the creative arts—when only yesterday my people were fashioned into lampshades and soap?

The void left from Reb Moshe’s death saw thousands of Jews mired in fear. This fear impacted my community and I was constantly surrounded by it as I journeyed through adolescence into my adult years. The purpose of dating in such a world was very clear: it existed solely to orchestrate marriages, which main function was to propagate future generations of the Jewish people. Romance was not part of the vocabulary and again as a girl living in 1980’s America, I found myself conflicted. Who in the United States doesn’t marry for love? These experiences served as inspiration for my novel BROOKLYN LOVE, in which Orthodox girls who are dating find themselves in the midst of a culture clash and must choose who they want to be– and how they want to love.

My community’s fear was well justified: We were survivors, or descendants of survivors. But living in fear is killing us, slowly. Through my writing, I have learned that my community must stop their silent retreat from contemporary society and instead open ourselves to the world around us, to our neighbors and learn to balance our traditions with love. This is the only way to grow, the only way to live. The tension between fear and love; traditions and contemporary values drives all of my work.

This is why I write.

 —

A freelance illustrator and journalist, Yael Levy has been published in numerous venues, including The Jerusalem Post during her three-year stay in Israel just east of the bustling capital city of Tel Aviv.

She holds a degree in Illustration from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. But it’s the questioning journalist inside her that has launched a new career in writing literature. Her debut novel Brooklyn Love (Sept. 17, 2012, Crimson Romance) hones in on Levy’s interest in the underlying thoughts and expressions of the Orthodox Jewish culture.

A native New Yorker, Levy currently writes for The Times of Israel about her experiences as a Jewish mother now living in Atlanta. She is also studying for a Masters in Law at Emory University.

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For any young woman, it can be hard to follow the rules … especially when you’re falling in love. But for Rachel, Hindy, and Leah, it’s especially hard. Because as Orthodox Jews, they live by a whole different set of rules. No touching a guy—any guy!—before marriage. No dating—unless they are considering marriage—and then, only marrying a man who rates high on their parents’ checklists.

In Yael Levy’s Novel, Brooklyn Love, three Orthodox Jewish women who are caught between crushing guilt of defying their mothers and their desire to be “normal” are there for each other as they try to figure out who they really are … and what they really want.

When asked this question, I began thinking of the throes I go through to write.  Like getting up at 5 am to get some notes done or to work out a messy paragraph from the night before.  Or staying up until 1 in the morning during a weeknight, a school night, a “you have to get your ass up to go to work the next morning” night, just so I can finish a final section of whatever it is I’m working on, a story, an essay, a post for my blog, a chapter in a novel.

I also began thinking about some of the responses I’ve had to my writing.  Like the guy who told me once that my prose sounded like poetry.  Or another who said that my stories about black gay men filled a void in his life, because he saw so little representation of himself in print.  Or, back in college, when I wrote a commentary for the Daily Bruin about ROTC’s and the military’s then-exclusion of LGBT people from their ranks, how someone enrolled in ROTC called my parents’ house (this was before major FERPA enforcement and student phone numbers and addresses were printed in a directory for all the world to see and find) to talk to me about how my piece was unfair to the program and how it upset him.  I wondered, and still wonder, if he was dealing with some aspect of his own sexual identity, and if my piece struck too close to home for him.  We never spoke again, and I never met him.  I hope he’s OK.

It took me a long ass time to finally admit that I am a writer.  I entered college with hopes of becoming an astronomer.  I still love astronomy, but have no real aptitude for higher math or physics.  In other words, I sucked in my lower division classes.  By contrast, once I became a history major, and spent most of the time writing papers, I started acing.  But really, I wrote for the high school newspaper, I wrote comic book things in elementary school, my mother was an English major when she went to UCLA, and she and my father read a great deal, so there were books all around the house.  This is how I got into Poe and Ralph Ellison and Ray Bradbury.  If I had been paying attention, I could have figured out, “hey, this writing thing, that’s how I roll,” at a much earlier age.  But as a long-time student of the School of Hard Knocks, where I’m currently enrolled, I had to do things the hard way around.

All this is very well, but it doesn’t answer the question, Why Do I Write?  But then, seemingly out of nowhere, came something that I felt approached an answer.  The other night, while rewriting a section of my novel, I wrote the following sentence:

A soul in trauma often steps outside of itself and helplessly watches its body writhe in torment.

As soon I saw that sentence in 2D as pixels on my computer screen I said, “That’s it!”

I am a soul in trauma, constantly searching for identity and meaning, for validation and acceptance, for representation and confirmation.  And the only way that I know how to do this is through the written word.  Like so many before me, Baldwin, Ellison, Angelou, Walker, I must bear witness to what my soul observes, the changes I go through, the changes I see others go through, for doing so brings inner peace.  And as I’ve demonstrated above, I’ll go through any lengths to find that peace.

That’s why I write.

(PS:  My dad’s favorite line from Isherwood was, “I am a camera.”  Yep, Dad, indeed I am.)

Gregory A. McVey-Russell (or gar) was born in 1965 and grew up in South Central Los Angeles.  He went to an integrated magnet school, LA’s first, and then UCLA.  His fiction has appeared in the anthology Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Ages of AIDS (1993), Mobius (Spring, 1999), and Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly (Vol. 7, No. 3, 2005).  He began his blog, the gar spot, in November 2010.  He currently lives in Oakland with his partner.

It doesn’t have to hurt.  Unless you want it to be good.

Sometimes after dinner I leave the dishes to rot and mount the stairs to the computer like one of the Children of the Corn.  I type as though taking dictation.  This writing is like watching a movie in a darkened theater– my eyes see the characters in my scene, not the letters on the screen.  I love those characters. They are my creatures and yet they surprise me. My husband says good night and I keep typing until my fingernails click on the keys and the fact that I hear them, hear anything at all, tells me I’m back in this world.  Only then will I notice that my feet are freezing because the heat turned off hours ago and it’s three in the morning.

Three in the morning is a great time to write because the phone never rings, breakfast lunch and dinner are hours away and anything else can wait.   But morning writing equals guilt as I ignore my husband, again, let the phone go to voice mail, run late for an appointment, all to produce – what? Something I love until I leave it for a day to cool off.  Then I start to pick it apart.   Go to the thesaurus.  Change an adjective.  Move the words this way and that around the sentence.  No, that ruins the rhythm.  No, forget the whole thing.   Line the bird cage with the hard copy, toss the document into the dump folder, and answer the damn phone.

For me the hard, painful miserable part of writing is revision.  My patient first readers know that I write draft after draft, weeding and changing, which requires going back and changing other stuff, and likely as not deciding the first draft was better.  Too many choices!   Choosing which chapters to keep and which to leave out is harder than making the guest list for a wedding.

Which leads inexorably to why I write, if it’s so hard and it hurts so much.   I write because the work engages me fully.  When I’m in the middle of a piece, time stops and outside cares and worries disappear.  And then there’s catharsis.  Every once in a while, wounded, furious, or sad, I send forth torrents of words, the dam broken, from the place where writing starts.

Bronx born Jacqueline Grandsire Goldstein attended Fordham University. She has taught high school English in New York City Public schools, sharing her love of Jane Austen and creative writing. The mother of two grown daughters, she lives with her husband in Westchester NY. Her novel, Ms. Murphy’s Makeover, is currently being workshopped at the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute. Her work has appeared in The Westchester Review.

All my life I’ve been told I was funny.  I was never called “attractive”, “kind-hearted”, “smart” or “generous”, but I could make pretty much anyone laugh.  I went through a brief stint (going to a fashion school in New York City) and found a hipster boyfriend there.  SIDENOTE: don’t date a skater who lives in Brooklyn unless you want to spend the nights on a mattress in his kitchen.  After he dumped me I broke into his apartment with my friends, broke his guitars, punched a hole through his George Forman grill, and then cried on his bathroom floor for 10 minutes.  Now this may seem psychotic but what strikes me as even crazier is that the next week he told me he wanted to be friends.  I replied “I broke your shit why do you want to be friends.”  He responded, “Because you’re funny.”

This, however, is not the reason I wanted to become a comedic writer.  I just threw that in there to prove that I’m hilarious and I will win you over no matter how many of your guitars I break.  Besides the fact that I write for attention, and to be funny I wanted to do something that could potentially make me a lot of money so I could shove it in my family’s face. This may not be a reason that most people strive to do things for, but it’s the fuel to my fire for a good reason.

My entire life my family has thought that I was the dumb one.  I did not get the fat gene or the big brain apparently.  They have reason to believe this considering I talked to inanimate objects for a good portion of my life.  When I was young all I wanted to do was make people laugh, even if that meant having full blown conversations with garbage cans in front of my entire fourth grade class.  I had very little interest in school most of my life so I didn’t attend class that much . I am the product of being passed along.  I got good grades in school because most of my teachers thought I was a riot the one day a week I would come in.

However, not attending school has kept me behind on basic history and geographical information.  For example, recently I found out that Martin Luther King and Martin Luther King Jr. was in fact the same person.  Up until a month ago I thought that Martin Luther King died in a jail cell after the police took him in and brutally beat because he tried to lead a march to end segregation.  After his Father had died in his cell, Martin Luther King Jr. bravely stepped up and gave a fabulous speech that ended all racism.  This story is a figment of my imagination and would be Malcolm X’s and Martin Luther King’s love child story.  Of course, now I know that this is completely idiotic and I have Wikipedia to thank for that.

I’ve been the only member of my family to attend community college (which I rocked the fuck out of.)  I tried to explain to them that No, I was not mildly autistic; I’m just a tad quirky.  I’ve always known that there was something a tad off in my personality I just haven’t been ostracized for it yet so I haven’t done anything about it.  I’ve always marched to the beat of my own drum, have hated school, and have done things differently than the rest of my family.  While they were off getting their masters, I was playing Edward forty hands (a drinking game where you duct tape two 40 ounce beers to your hands, homegirl couldn’t scratch her face/give high fives for hours) with delinquents I met at community college in parking lots.

I don’t write to inspire the masses.  I’m not Ghandi.  If I didn’t eat for more than one day I’d die and I’m not positive what the salt march is but it sounds like it would make me bloated.  I write to be funny, and to make something of myself in the only area where I can excel.  I’m not sure where I’ll be in a few years or even days from now.  Maybe my family was right.  Maybe I will spend the rest of my life eating paste and struggling to get through the alphabet.  I will spend my life forever in the shadows of their Bachelors and Masters degrees but, there is one thing that they cannot take away from me.  And that is my ability to look phenomenal in red.  K-mart, here I come.

Trisha Tostanoski is a 22 year old aspiring comedic writer/lion tamer. She studies Creative Writing at Hunter College. She is a likeable gal with low expectations. If you would like to read her silly thoughts on life or just make fun of her face you can connect with her on facebook under Trish Tostanoski or on twitter @tweettwatanoski.

I write to find out what I really think.  I can find out what I think by talking, my favorite indoor sport.  But what I really think lies beneath the sheer exercise and animal spirits of a good conversation, which involves batting a conversational ball around until you’ve exhausted what brought you together and you part, or change the subject.  In writing, you are your own partner, plus a partner to all the books that changed you and were your intimate friends in the inner conversation that accompanies your life.  You surprise yourself.  You say things you didn’t know you knew, or didn’t know you’d noticed, and you build on what you’ve written down, doing, undoing, erasing, moving around,  a carpentry of the word with the capacity to surprise the carpenter.  Did I build that?

 Often I hate what I am working on as I work on it, but usually, if it’s put away for long enough, I like reading it, almost as if I am reading somebody else’s writing.  I think hey, that’s not bad, look what she’s doing here.  Occasionally, I have no idea what I was getting at, which is also interesting.  Writing allows me to explore a preoccupation, then step away from it, as if the writing embodies the preoccupation, which frees me, to move on to other things.  I love life more because of writing, since the act asks you to notice what you love, and what you care enough to write about, and being susceptible to the written word or I wouldn’t be a writer, I believe what I’ve put on the page.

Myra Goldberg got her BA at the University of California-Berkeley and her MA at City University of New York.  She is the author of Whistling and Rosalind: A Family Romance.  Her stories have been published in The Transatlantic Review, Ploughshares, Feminist Studies, The Massachusetts Review, The New England Review, and in the book anthologies Women in Literature, Powers of Desire, The World’s Greatest Love Stories, and elsewhere in the United States and France.  She is the recipient of Lebensberger Foundation grant and has been teaching at Sarah Lawrence since 1985.