Joanne Jackson Yelenik
jyelenik@gmail.com
What writers do:
Writers write; they think about what they plan to write, and reflect upon what they have written.
Writers search out material about which they can write.
Next to the joy of writing is the pleasure of responding to questions about writing. The questions may come from someone else, or be self initiated.
What am I working on?
“Working on,” is a phrase my students use to convey their intentions for self-improvement. “Today,” they say, “I am working on listening better to a friend who needs my attention.”
The phrase is foreign to my way of thinking.
As a writer, I become a “kli,” a receptacle, for an experience, a person, a thought, a feeling or I give over an image, a thought, a feeling, an experience.
Currently, I am “giving over” to prospective publishers my completed manuscript, my debut novel, “Eucalyptus Leaves: Deliciously Asymmetrical in Israel.”
The novel unfolds the relationship between a young adventuresome man and an older, sophisticated woman during a two year period as they settle into their new-old, much loved homeland, Israel. Their friendship is chaste, yet filled with passion flowing just below the surface.
When I see my inbox contains comments from readers of my manuscript, I feel frightened and exhilarated.
How does my work differ from others of my genre?
When I was growing up in Brooklyn, I knew the proper skirt length to wear on each and every occasion. Shopping in Manhattan, “the city,” I wore a certain style skirt; Flatbush Avenue adventures required a totally different color and fabric skirt. Weddings demanded gowns and so on. The same was true about genres. At Brooklyn College, where I completed my undergraduate studies in English Literature, genre definition was rigid. Authors who crossed lines were mocked; students who presumed to overstep red lines received those same red lines across their papers. The teachers were excellent as is the school; it was just a sign of the times.
Now skirts of any style may be worn to any occasion at any time of day, formal and informal alike, high, low and anywhere in between. So, too, genres are a mix; hybrids have become the fashion. My writing has always been a melting pot, flavored with dashes of poetic prose and the tangy sweetness of narrative poetry.
My writing combines the imaginative and fanciful, with elements of autobiography throughout. Had I not moved to Israel, I could never have written my novel’s story line of a friendship that defies differences in age, background, common interests, and national identity. Had I not been a single child growing up in a huge family centered apartment building on Ocean Avenue called “the Ocean Castle,” I would never have nurtured, within the castle’s hidden hallways and walkways, the active fantasy life that is at the root of my writing.
My editor, Yael Unterman, a talented author, teacher, life coach, whose book of short stories, “The Hidden of Things,” was recently launched, described my writing as “raw.” I like the word, and its nuance of something primal. I strive to balance that which is “raw” in my writing with a careful refinement of my words. Success comes with the emergence of a “perfectly gorgeous sentence,” as Yael exclaims. Readers comment that the rhythm of my prose evokes traveling on waves; my readers and I take ocean voyages together.
The strength of a mixed genre style, fantasy and autobiography, poetry and prose, resides in the sound of a singular voice telling a tale that could have happened, maybe, but most likely did not. Somewhere, amidst the language and the rhythm, lies the kernel of the tale, and the truth of emotion, thought and perception that I seek.
My writing closet, like my actual wardrobe, is filled with skirt lengths that trail along the ground, and others which reach just below the knee, in fabrics as varied as silk, chiffon, linen, and denim. Ultimately in skirt and novel, I am searching for a clinging suede jersey, falling mid-calf. Like my writing, I am a mixed genre.
Why do I write what I do?
I am a people watcher. Early on, I fancied myself to be a Toulouse-Lautrec, or Edgar Degas whose art emanated from what each observed in places he compulsively frequented. I have no particular haunts. My stories come to me in cars, cafes, on beaches, air flights, buses, wherever I am, there is a story.
In the silence of my mind, and the stillness of my body, I listen to the inner voices of those whose stories I narrate. I resonate to what Yael Shahar wrote: “Writers are, first and foremost, moodsmiths and only secondarily wordsmiths.” The mood of my writing is often elegiac; the tales depict ordinary people experiencing epic battles: tales of redemption, life victories. I grew up holding within me the image of my grandfather. Yaakov ben Gedalya was murdered at the time of the Russian Revolution by Cossack soldiers who attacked the shtetel of Wysokie Mazovietskie, where he lived with his wife, after whom I am named, and his children, two sons, one of whom was my father, and a daughter.
As a young child, I would lie on the floor of our living room watching my father. I let myself imagine how my father felt when he witnessed his father and the other Jewish men being marched off to forced labor in 1917, never to return. With that story in my mind, I walked to my bedroom and wrote my first short story.
Other stories followed: the tale of my dressmaker, Mrs. Eva Fried, whose father had been the mayor of a small city in Poland, and who spent the war years, 1939-45, sewing uniforms for German soldiers. As she measured my skirts and dresses on her tiny raised platform, while I turned and twisted according to her instructions, the story she told me of her life entered my spirit. I internalized also the story of Reb Abram Parczewski, the last Jew to live in my father’s shtetel, who, ultimately, my family and I brought to Brooklyn, New York to fulfill his wish to “die among Jews.”
In the past ten years, my writing has taken a turn toward the lyrical and the romantic. My tales are filled with longing, humor, love, memory, and the vagaries of time. Amidst the flow of memory, Isabel, the protagonist of Eucalyptus Leaves, exudes a tone of quiet optimism and childlike hope.
Redemption, in its many forms, is at the heart of stories I love to read, (from Joseph Conrad’s, “Lord Jim,” to books such as “Olive Kitteridge,” and “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”).
How does the process work?
In the beginning is the word. My quagmire is whether the word comes in a voice, or as a story line. My process begins with a voice. In Eucalyptus Leaves, the voice that first came to me was Aryeh’s, a young man from Australia, living alone in Israel without any family, intent upon building his own house, and obtaining a high school diploma. After writing several sections on Aryeh, I came to a story line. I heard Isabel’s voice; their voices became layered as I wrote and revised the book.
Infused in the process of listening to a voice are periods of silence and waiting. Voices come in the form of rhythms as well as words. I remember hearing the soothing breathing of Winston, my tri color basset hound. I reached down and touched his deeply folded layers of skin. Winston’s breathing became part of the rhythm of my novel.
eucalyptus Leaves 