Creative Writing

Writing prayers and liturgy is creative work, and it grows from the same place that gives rise to my poetry. (Indeed, some of my prayers are poems and vice versa, as in my series of morning blessing variations.)

Three chapbooks of my poems have been published by three different presses, and in 2009 I released a small collection of themed poems on my own. The first, the skies here, was published by Pecan Grove Press (San Antonio) in 1995; the second, What Stays, was published in 2002 by the Bennington Writing Seminars Alumni Chapbook Series; and the third, chaplainbook, was published by Laupe House Press, an imprint of Phoenicia Publishing, in 2006. In 2009 I released a short self-published chapbook of poems called Through, which chronicle the experience of miscarriage and healing; you can read about that in this blog post.

the skies here sold out its first printing within the year, and though a second printing was once promised, it grows unlikelier with each year. If you happen to own a copy, mazal tov; maybe it will be a collector's item someday!

If you don't own a copy, here's a secret for you: lately I'm fonder of What Stays and of chaplainbook. Neither is widely-distributed, although I sell copies at my readings. You can also buy them at area bookstores...and chaplainbook is available for purchase online.

Also available for purchase online is an anthology of poems I co-edited with Rachel Rawlins: Brilliant Coroners (Laupe House Press, 2007.) You can read about how that collection came into being here, if you're interested.

Meanwhile, I'm sending a book-length collection, Manna, on the rounds of the first-book contests, as one does. Its themes include place, season, Judaism, and God. I think it's a good collection and I'll be sure to let you know if/when it's accepted for publication!

I also write a lot of nonfiction, some of which gets posted to my blog and some of which is just for fun -- like this essay about our cross-county drive, illlustrated with the photos we took along the way, or my 2005 India travelogue.

I've been blessed with a fair number of magazine editors who like my poetry, so it's appeared in a number of places. (You can find the list in my bibliography, which is linked in the sidebar on the left of the page.) A while back, three poems from my "Brakhot Cycle" -- a series of poems arising out of engagement with the mishna -- were accepted for publication at Zeek, the Jewish journal of thought and culture where I serve as a contributing editor. (You can find those here.)

If you'd like to read more of my poems, here are links to two Elul poems published at Tel Shemesh a while back; Sufganiyot appears in the December 2004 issue of Zeek. Since 2003 I've been writing an Elul / New Year's poem each autumn and sending it to family and friends; in 2009 I collected all of them here at VR New Year's Poems.

Please note that my writing is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Thanks for respecting it!