Category: News

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Summer News

makeshift 15

Hi loveys.

I hope you’re having a great summer. I haven’t had time to share all my news of the past few months, so here it is!

First, I had a great review over at the radical, trans-positive feminist magazine Make/Shift by Allison McCarthy. You can find out a lot more about Make/Shift here, but they don’t put their articles online, so here’s a taste from the review: “Far from conventional and always insightful, Minkowitz sets herself apart from other memoirs through sharp language and a clear understanding of her family’s dynamics… I cheered for her triumphant reclamation of self.” Thanks, Allison McCarthy!

Second, here’s a guest post I did over at my publisher Riverdale Ave Books’ blog, on “Why Should Fantasy Writers Have All the Fun?” It’s about how you too can have enchanted dolls and child-eating witches in your memoir!

Third… want to take a free memoir writing workshop in September? I’m teaching one Saturday, September 13 at the Brooklyn Public Library, under the auspices of the New York Writers Workshop. 2 PM at the Windsor Terrace branch, 160 E. 5th Street near Fort Hamilton Parkway. We will explore ways to use emotion, the senses, critical thinking, and storytelling to write relatably about your life. For more information, contact growingupgolem@gmail.com.

If you’re really interested in taking a memoir course in NY, I am then teaching an eight-week workshop in Brooklyn, on Tuesday evenings starting September 16 (7 to 9 PM). The class will focus on craft: extensive feedback in a supportive atmosphere. Small class size. Fee is $300. You can use the same email for more info :-)

Finally – live in the Bay Area? On October 30 I’m coming to SF to do a Growing Up Golem book event with Keshet (the organization for LGBT Jews), Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, and the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center of the San Francisco Public Library. What do golems have to do with growing up queer, Jewish, and physically abused? Get your Halloween groove on and find out! More later.

Be well – Donna

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On Making People Into Things

Play-Bill-Caliban-1916

Do you ever wonder why there are so many stories about things that want to be human (or real), but aren’t? Pinocchio, the Velveteen Rabbit, Data on Star Trek? Caliban in The Tempest, who to my mind IS human, but has been told so often he’s a monster that he believes it?

African-American slaves were told they weren’t persons, and Jews in the Nazi camps were told that they were “vermin.” My recent book, Growing Up Golem, is very much about this dynamic, and I spoke about this curious confluence of fantasy, bigotry, and the psychology of survivors of exploitation and abuse in a recent talk at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Ever wonder what golems and physical abuse have to do with Hegel, Marx,  robots and racism? I lay it all out here!  :-) Hope you enjoy.

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Lilith and The Great Chicken Shawarma

shwarma JPEG

I had an emotional experience with some chicken shawarma recently. I’ve never had warm feelings for shawarma before – if you’re curious you can read my piece at Matthew Taub’s lovely new site Local Writeup.

I also had an extraordinarily sweet review this month in Lilith Magazine, which says, “Fierce imagination, fascinating … compulsively readable. Growing Up Golem contains all the power of her earlier work, but it is written without the cloak. Tills new and important ground. Demonstrates Minkowitz’s capacity for personal exposure and vulnerability.” I was thrilled. Thanks, Lilith! If you’re interested, you can read more here.

I was also delighted to get a Kirkus review which said, “Holds nothing back… the same brutal introspection and clever humor [as her first memoir, Ferocious Romance] , but this book is much more personal and sexually explicit … Minkowitz brings a defiant, playful energy to writing about her difficult and dark past. Intelligent but not for the prudish or fainthearted.”

And finally, here are some upcoming readings:

If you’re on Long Island next week, come hear me speak and read from the book at Temple Avodah in Oceanside on the South Shore, Monday, February 24 at 7:30 PM, at 3050 Oceanside Road. More info here.

If you want to find that Ivy League boyfriend or girlfriend, come to the NYC reading I’ll be doing in April with one other author and the filmmaker of “Pier Kids,” sponsored by the Princeton and Yale Gay and Lesbian Alumni Associations! $30 includes Chinese dinner, appetizers, and dessert. Cash bar. Wednesday, April 9, 6:30-9 PM, People Lounge, 163 Allen Street.  Reserve here.

I’ll be reading at this cool church called Not So Churchy and doing a short memoir writing workshop at the same time, on Monday, May 5 at 6:30 PM, 85 S. Oxford St. in Brooklyn. They apparently provide chocolate at every worship.

Thrilled that I’ll be speaking at the Sunday platform of the New York Society for Ethical Culture Sunday, June 15 at 11:15 AM. My subject: “On Turning People into Things.”

And for the really big news… drumroll… the first events on the West Coast for Growing Up Golem, will be 1) at Antioch University in LA on May 20 (details TBA), and 2) next October in the San Francisco Bay Area with the LGBT Jewish organization Keshet, the Hormel Center at the San Francisco Public Library, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav and several other groups. Watch this space for info. :-)

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Travels in Bookland

Historian Jonathan Ned Katz, y yo (c) Social - Diarist/Jon Nalley, 2013
With historian Jonathan Ned Katz
(c) Social – Diarist/Jon Nalley, 2013

It takes infinitely more work to launch a book in 2013 than it did in 1998, last time I had a book come out. Or is it that I’m determined to be more integrally involved this time, the way the poet Denise Levertov said “the earth worm” “aerates/ the ground of his living”?

It’s been fun, draining, exciting, exhausting. Here are some pictures and other bits from the publication fray:

Jen Ivan golem
Two of my favorite comic book artists, Ivan Velez Jr.  and Jennifer Camper, at my book party at Queers for Economic Justice, NYC.

book party food

The food!

book party also

Community muckety-mucks, and my friends!

(c) Social + Diarist/Jon Nalley 2013
(c) Social + Diarist/Jon Nalley 2013

Reading at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.

(c) Cathy Renna 2013

Back at QEJ, reading. It was a fun night! :-)

Btw, if you’re free, come out to see me next Tuesday, November 26 in NYC at Literary Mischief, an event where I’ll be reading with sex writer Rachel Kramer Bussel, author of The Big Book of Orgasms. There will be door prizes.

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Terry Bisson/Ellis Avery

SpongeBob blushesI am so grateful (and blushing like SpongeBob) because I just got my first blurbs. The legendary science fiction author Terry Bisson called my book, “Rich and wild, dark and funny, as fearless as her legendary journalism and as scary as a fairytale.” And the extremely exciting fiction writer Ellis Avery said, “Brilliant… Minkowitz takes a dazzling leap of fancy and then writes a new bridge into being behind her for the rest of us to follow.”

I am SO thankful to both of them.

Here’s a quick update:  The final title of the thing is Growing Up Golem: Learning to Survive My Mother, Brooklyn, and Some Really Bad Dates, and it comes out September 21 from Magnus Books.

You can hear a preview at the reading I’ll be part of in New York Thursday, August 22 7:30 at the Lit!  series at Dixon Place, where I’ll be reading with four  superb writers, Rachel Simon, Melissa Febos, Shelly Oria and the aforementioned Ellis Avery. (161A Chrystie Street, no cover, cash bar.)

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Publishing in September!

Pinocchio statue

[POST UPDATED August 17, 2013 : The book title is Growing Up Golem: Learning to Survive My Mother, Brooklyn, and Some Really Bad Dates.]

Hi lovely people who read my blog,

I just wanted to let you know that my new memoir will be published in September by Magnus Books!

I am very excited about this :-) :-)

The book, whose first chapter you can read here, is a magical realist memoir that uses the conceit that my mother created me as a golem, the magical servant-creature out of Jewish legend. (In real life, my mother actually did tell us that she could do magic she had learned from her Romanian Jewish grandparents, and my sisters and I believed her. My mother was an extraordinarily– at times revoltingly — creative person, so it was no great stretch to believe she had made me by hand like a golem or a living toy.)

In the book, I try to pass for human, becoming a golem who does queer activist reporting for the Village Voice, etc., trying to have relationships with real human women, but I remain, inescapably, an obviously fake imitation of a person programmed to obey commands, not have feelings or take pleasure. Matters come to a head when I turn 36 and all the false trappings of my life – career, friendships, fake sex life, even my body – suddenly flare into crisis.

So what, you’re probably wondering, is the title?

IT IS STILL UP IN THE AIR!

I feel like Bilbo Baggins In Lord of the Rings, feverishly writing and crossing out MY DIARY. MY UNEXPECTED JOURNEY. THERE AND BACK AGAIN. AND WHAT HAPPENS AFTER. ADVENTURES OF FIVE HOBBITS. THE TALE OF THE GREAT RING, COMPILED BY BILBO BAGGINS FROM HIS OWN OBSERVATIONS AND THE ACCOUNTS OF HIS FRIENDS. WHAT WE DID IN THE WAR OF THE RING.

What am I going to call this mashup of memoir and myth?

Stay tooned!

If you want me to keep you posted on further developments, just write “keep me posted” in the comments section!