Category: Memoir

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Jailbreak: Memoir Excerpt

Credit: Aliven Sarkar / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

Hi there. This is from my new work in progress, a memoir where almost all the events take place entirely in my own mind, and the fighting, competing characters are parts of me. This is Part 1. For Part 2, see here.

My jailer has lead at the bottom of his boots. Lead at the toes and lead at the heel, it is a trial for him to walk but he walks anyway, sadly, seriously, everywhere through my mind. He patrols with his lamp, scanning the walls and edges. I am so tired already but he wants me to sleep so he can perform all his jobs: sweep the rooms, kill the vermin, dust and mop. My jailer is also a janitor. There is a gleam in his eyes, but his head is just as heavy as his feet so he walks always looking down slightly, peering in the corners to catch the mice of my mind.
My jailer has tension in his shoulders, he almost is tension in the shoulders, he thinks if he relaxes I will fall to pieces and he will be responsible. My jailer leaves the apartments to nervously walk the port streets of my mind, hunting for the rot and decay piles in the niches, the filth to root out. He paces: his bloodshot eyes cast themselves over the harbor, over the empty streets, spying out the midnight people who still remain.
They huddle together. They are poor. Dirty clothes, no showers. They are companionable. A sister and a brother, or at least so they consider themselves. My jailer has a big baton and I admit he does get pleasure out of rousting them with it, swinging it in their direction, and yes, hitting the brother on the leg with that big black object.
There is an energy around his nightstick, a sort of snap. It is the most energy that is ever around the jailer, for he is a droopy sort. His pleasures are few enough, I tell myself, why deny him this?
The jailer lives in a mean little room. He has a set of cubbyholes, an iron bed, a dusty floor, a set of fleas. His cleaning is not meant for his own room. The bed is bolted to the floor and cannot move. He has a jug of milk, which he drinks each day because he is intolerant of it. It will teach him temperance, he believes. It makes him break out and have diarrhea.
He has a little net that he prefers to use with mice and insects. It is unusual, maybe, to catch mice with a net, but he prefers the personal touch, the up-close involvement. He wants to see the mouse directly, wants to interrogate it.
I am afraid of my hands being broken. I am afraid of the bones being broken and never being able to help myself, never being able to bring food to my mouth again. I am afraid someone will hurt my hands deliberately and I will be a husk, just lying there in a corner waiting for the jailer to come and examine me more.
The jailer has caught a particularly smart and bold mouse in his net today, it’s a cute thing with a stripe down the front of its face and he is proud of it.
I am hurting in my left shoulder blade, the whole left side of the shoulder, as though I’ve been shot there, and I’m worried I will always be in pain.
The jailer says: “How does it feel when I do this?” and he rubs a point inside the shoulder blade until I scream.
He seems rather powerful right now, now that I think of it. He wears an old, coarse black fabric, burlap or coarse khaki, two pieces, it looks a little bit like a pajama-top and culottes, cut like a medieval merchant’s garment and interestingly outlandish, but not well-fitted. It’s too large for him and looks itchy.
***
In the morning, I wake and the jailer gives me coffee and buns. “You were wonderful last night,” he says.
It is a pleasure that he gives me sweet buns, the kind with glazing on top, because I have been prediabetic and am not usually allowed to give myself sugar buns. If the jailer serves it to me it doesn’t count.
I try to drink the delicious coffee and eat the buns before dealing with him, but he grabs my head and makes me look at him.
“You were on the floor last night and you can be there again.”
***
Pause while I look at the cleaning schedule for the day. The cooking schedule, which I myself supervise and am quite good at. The panic-inducing work schedule. Let’s take a moment out from this moment out to look at my relationship:
It’s great. Er.
WHAT IF IT’S NOT GREAT WHAT IF IT’S NOT GREAT
Let’s go back to walking the streets of my mind: somehow in my mind’s eye, I am never in the beautiful downtown or the place with the art buildings, I am in the garbage streets, the dangerous blocks. The wharf is always a fun place to go, with the prostitutes and the poor kids. No, there is a nice building pretty near to here and I will go to it:

It is carved out of something pink, and luminous. I don’t know who made it. It is tall. It has unusual curves and lines, I don’t know what it is about it but I like the place. How did it get here? Was it carved in one continuous block out of some substance I don’t know? It has a strange light inhering in it, it looks as though each stone were lit from within, and it smells of a warm spice like cinnamon or red curry.

I touch the column and it soothes me, no it repels me, no it soothes me. It is so beautiful I do not want it to repel me, but it literally pushes me back like a powerful negative magnet, it makes me step back in the street when I touch it.
Help me, I say to it. Please. I talk to it but not in words that the jailer might hear, I fervently think these words to it: Help me. From the center of the stone something pulls me in, and I hug the building.

***

I will be posting new excerpts from Jail Break periodically, please check back for more!

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Growing Up Golem

Golem
This is an excerpt from my memoir Growing Up Golem, published by Riverdale Avenue Books and available from Barnes & Noble, Powells, Amazon, and your favorite independent bookstore:

My mother loved to make things. One day, when I was thirty-two years old, my mother created a giant, half-lifesize doll that looked just like me. (This is absolutely true.) It had yarn hair the same color and kink as mine, and real corduroy pants just like the ones I wear. My mother called it the Dyke Donna doll. (Mom was very pro-gay and lesbian, so she always felt very happy using words like “dyke.”) The doll wore a stripey red shirt like a circus performer, along with real, removable, bright red booties made of felt, and extravagantly long curling eyelashes that my mother drew in by hand, quite lovingly. It had big red apple blush-marks on its cheeks, like Pinocchio as I have always seen him drawn. It stood a discomfiting three feet tall (I myself am only five feet two). My mother gave it to me as her gift, to keep in my tiny apartment. I had to keep it under my bed because I couldn’t bear to see it sitting in my chair. But I felt like I was hiding a child away there, without food or anyone to talk to.

Starting in her early 20s, my mother had made a whole series of dolls and wooden soldiers and little straw figurines and puppets, and I believe that one of them was me. A few years after the Dyke Donna doll appeared, my arms broke. (This, also, is true.) I don’t mean that my arm bones broke – I’ve never had a broken bone – but that my arms’ capacity as limbs, their functionality and coherence, suddenly ended. Continue reading “Growing Up Golem”

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I’ll Be Your Editor Today

My name is Donna, I’ll be your editor today. I edit book manuscripts of memoir and literary nonfiction. I edit shorter memoir pieces and essays. I even edit shop book proposals.

And if you want, I can edit something by you. I’m willing to work with you to create a package that fits your budget and your needs. Also, my editing packages and writing classes make a great gift idea for the holidays. Contact me at minkowitz46@gmail.com.

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Exciting Stuff

Hey everybody! I’ve been having some exciting stuff go on, but I haven’t updated here for a while!

First, I’ve been thrilled to start doing Moth-style, personal storytelling without notes, at The Artichoke’s sold-out stage in Beacon and Beacon’s wonderful other venue, Adult Stories with John Blesso! One of my stories was about being at close quarters with some very scary people, and the other was about the very first time I went in disguise to a Christian right conference.

I am so excited to be pursuing this new art form. I’ll be doing more of it Saturday, June 29 at Pros(e) of Pie’s LGBTQ Pride Show at Philipsburg Manor and Saturday, September 14 back at The Artichoke, where the story will involve parents and porn.

Other stuff going on: I’ve been touring local Ethical Culture humanist congregations, speaking on “Atheism and the Alt-Right: A Horrible Confluence,” about the weird and disturbing fact that alt-right politics have been permeating atheist subcultures for the past several years. Next up is Sunday, June 9 at the New York Society for Ethical Culture!

Stay tuned for a project I will launch soon that combines lyrical, sensual writing with service journalism! (Bet you don’t hear that a lot! :-) )

I’ll be featured speaking about my career and reading my work at Julie Chibbaro’s amazing series Get Lit Beacon Sunday, July 14 at 5 PM! I will read from my memoir Growing Up Golem and read/tell some harrowing and funny personal stories about hanging with the far right.

Also, my fall memoir workshop starts Wednesday, September 25, and goes for eight weeks (we skip October 9). Let me know if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, I’ll be teaching a one-day summer memoir writing intensive in Beacon Sunday, July 28.

Oh, and I’m in a podcast.

More news soon!

With love – Donna

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Sensitive


The Bellingham Review has also just published the following short essay by me (published under the title “Tender”) in their fall special issue of creative nonfiction about disability.

I’m on Facebook. Some of my friends are posting their fury, as artists and radicals, about something that’s just happened: A few art students have complained to college administrators about their professor. He’s made them watch, as part of a regular class session, an experimental film he made. It shows, among other things, his erect red penis again and again, at one point going into a woman’s mouth and later, her vagina.

These friends of mine are furious the students have interfered with their professor’s work by complaining. On their pages, commenters condemn students for their “fragile sensibilities” and “fragile feelings,” for how “delicate” they surely are.

Oh reader, I am fragile, I am delicate, in fact I’ve often wanted to write a book entitled Sensitive. Because spectacularly, insatiably, annoyingly, unbearably, I am.

I am not saying that everyone who doesn’t want to have to watch their professor fucking a woman on camera is someone who is Delicate, like me. But I thought I would tell about my own experience.

I am sensitive in almost every way a person can be. And most of my sensitivities come from disabilities. I have a couple different ones of those (physical, psychic), but the disability that has made me the most sensitive of all, the tenderest, perhaps the choicest meat to the touch, is the abuse and neglect I experienced as a child.

But the tender meat is tickled all day, and sometimes it’s// unbearable

“Grow up,” says one Friend of a Friend, and others echo, “Yup, they should grow up.” A woman comments, “One would hope that they’re mature enough to care of themselves and leave.”

None of us has read the students’ complaints because they are not public, so we don’t know what they told administrators about being made to watch the film. But a man mocks them for having what he writes in capitals as “Triggers. Oof.”

Oof. I am able to be triggered, yes indeed, and definitely not always able to take care of myself in a situation of harm and just leave.

About that last bit, no human being is in fact so powerful that we are always able to remove ourselves from what we can’t endure.

My friends’ 5000 fans condemn the students’ “latent puritanism,” their “learned helplessness,” their “censorship, punishment, and scapegoating.” Says a man, “The conflation of discomfort and harm is a truly bizarre phenomenon that I believe can be attributed to a vocal minority of bourgeois, sheltered millennials.”

To read the piece on their site and see the other work in their special issue on disability, click here.

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Magic Puppet: On Writing Golem

I’m really pleased that the following piece about how to write about “unbearable experience” has just been published in The Bellingham Review. It’s also about why I chose to use fantastical elements in writing Growing Up Golem.

When I set out to write a memoir about my parents 16 years ago, one of the things that stymied me was early feedback from my peers that the content was “too unbearable” to read about.

It was indeed difficult to be my parents’ daughter. My father hit me a lot. He was also remote and didn’t often speak, and my mother encouraged my sisters and me to make fun of him and call him names, which often resulted in him hitting me more. Despite this ugly bit of manipulation, my mother was nurturing in some other ways – she always fostered my love of learning and books, and continually stimulated my mind. Yet she also would parade naked in front of me, or in flimsy panties and bras, and force me to tell her she was sexy and that I loved and adored her more than anyone.

I didn’t think my parents were too unbearable to read about, but would my readers? An even more compelling issue for me was that I wanted to capture the “uncanny” feeling I had always had of being my mother’s puppet, or her creature (like a magician’s familiar, or something she had created in a laboratory, to experiment on with different stimuli or provocations). How could I write about this when, in the strictest sense, it wasn’t “true”? That is to say, it was truly my feeling, it was indeed what it had subjectively felt like, but my mother wasn’t actually a magician, and I wasn’t actually her homunculus.

Without the magic, however, there was no understanding the frozen way I had lived my life, as if completely separated from my own will and desires, or the fact that I’d never had a long-term relationship till after she died — as though forbidden or prevented by a mysterious spell that destined me for her alone.

Then I remembered that my mother had actually told us she could do magic – a mixture of Jewish magic from the Kabbalah and pagan European magic from Romania, which she claimed she had learned as a child from her grandparents. In fact, up till early adulthood, at least one sister and I had believed that she could actually practice this magic (not to the extent of making golems, but we believed that she could, as she said, foretell the future and interpret dreams).

I decided to use this factoid, with a twist, as the controlling metaphor for the memoir. The twist would be that I would write the book as though my mother really WERE a powerful Kabbalistic magician. And I would combine memoir with fantasy and write the thing as though, instead of giving birth to me, my mother had created me by magic as her own personal golem, an animated clay servant out of Jewish legend. Every statement in the memoir would be true, except those involving magic or other fantastic activities.

This way, I wouldn’t have to let fiction writers have all the fun, but could actually make use of all the richness of myth and archetype in telling my life story. How could I turn myself from a magic puppet under a lifelong spell, into a human being? That would be the question of the book.

It might also be a way to make my father’s physical abuse, my mother’s (nonphysical) sexual and emotional abuse, more bearable for the reader to come on an extended journey with me through it. The light coat of fantasy would be one way of “tell [ing] it slant.”

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Funky Spunky Literature Night at Quinn’s

As part of my participation in 2018 Beacon Open Studios, I am throwing a Funky Spunky Literature Night at Quinn’s, the best and funkiest venue in Beacon!

April 29, 2018

Funky Spunky Literature Night with Donna Minkowitz and the BOS After Party! 6:30pm, Quinn’s, 330 Main Street, Beacon NY 12508.

Join Donna Minkowitz and special guests in an evening of sexy, edgy, heartfelt literary writing. Minkowitz and Julie Chibbaro, Ruth Danon, and Banana Bag and Bodice theater company will read from their funkiest, most vulnerable, fiercest work, then guide the audience in a game-show-like Memoir Write-a-Thon with prizes for the best sentences and scenes that audience members write about their own lives!

This event will also be the official After Party for Beacon Open Studios! :-) Come one, come all. Music by DJs follows the readings and game show! Delicious food and drink available.

You can RSVP on the Facebook event page here.

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Cooking Up Rebellion

In times of trouble, cooking makes me whole. I may be tired, irritable, I may have gotten home late, I may even be sick, but I stand at my fry pan tossing in onions, that base of almost every culture’s cooking. To me, it might as well be the base of life itself, as I stand there trying to make something tasty and satisfying and warming out of a few teensy bits of vegetables and some shreds of meat.

Cooking, which I came to only in my 40s and disabled, like someone clutching a lifeline, reminds me of the sacredness of the act of creation. It feels like making something out of nothing: whatever’s assembled on my cutting board – a little mess of garlic bits and bitter vegetables and cheese snips – always seems so poignantly small to me as the basis of a hot dinner that will somehow sustain two adults. The process that transforms these scraps into a whole always seems mystical to me: what god created this eggplant parmigiano pasta?

Certainly not me.

With cooking, as with writing, providence comes in and accomplishes what we ourselves, with our conscious minds, can barely accomplish. When I say providence, I don’t exactly mean God. Who made this dish? It was the fire (which reshapes molecules and “denatures” proteins and divinely caramelizes eggplants). It was the balsamic vinegar in all its oddness, sour, acid, musty, sweet, powerfully itself and shaped by hands and minds other than my own. It was the traditions of a million years of hominids cooking (while humans have only been around and making dinner for 200,000 years, our hominid ancestors have been cooking for even longer). It was my innumerable memories of meals out and Food Network snippets and half-remembered recipes, plus glimmering images in my brain (my mother’s ancient Italian friend’s fresh sausage and tomato sauce), and, maybe most of all, dumb luck and inspiration!

It was also me, yes, along with all of these. It was my own arm strength and my thinking mind, saying “Now! A dab more tomato paste!” and “Now! I want sesame oil and more parsley!” In point of fact, I feel really butch when I cook, much more butch than I do when writing, say, or making love. Turning the flame up and down, I am Hephaestus at the forge; I am Casey at the switch. I feel powerful, capable, gripping my 11-inch pan and smelting tomatoes, refining wine, building skyscrapers out of flour and beef. I am doing this for my family which consists of my partner and me, making things to keep us good and warm inside, and feeling loved. I am blending tahini in a machine noisy as a cement mixer, making a sauce so sumptuous it can make steamed zucchini taste good. I am butchering squashes and making rebellious Jewish bricks out of walnuts, apples and wine that will make our conquerors choke. I am constructing fantasy universes out of ground turkey and breadcrumbs and spices and egg. The turkey meatballs I make will make our hearts happy as we eat them in a radiant red sauce before going to the demonstration.

So, gentle reader who loves the taste of food, dear one who loves kimchi, posole, and democracy: go to the demonstration. There are a lot this week, and there will be more the week after, and the week after that. Keep going. Eat something hot before and after. Take care of yourself. Take care of other people, too. There is no contradiction between activism and compassion, no contradiction between activism and tenderness or sweetness: remember that. What I am trying to say is: everything we do, whether we are masters or novices, we do in the context of other people. I’m no great chef by any measure, but I learned to make a damn good dinner, and so can you. Individual writers don’t create literature, individual cooks don’t create the art of cooking, and individual actors don’t create entire movements. Everyone is needed, and everyone needs others.

Everyone is important in cooking up this struggle, even and especially you.

Originally published in Gay City News on January 19, 2017.