On a long distance phone call this morning, my uncle told me that he’s still very much trying to be a writer, like me. It is a compliment he has paid me more times than I can count, and which has therefore served as one of the biggest driving forces of any consistency to the discipline of writing in my life. And being that I’m two years into my longest writing drought, it really made me think about the writer I am.
At a very early age, I was an absolutely avid writer, when the act of writing became one of my earliest creative outlets where my curious mind and my curious imagination began to navigate the world in tandem.
This was especially true when I saw my first computer in the early 1980s. It wasn’t a personal computer, mind you, but a communications terminal for the international trading company where my mom worked. It was stationed in a closet across from her desk, this squat, beige, plastic trapezoid of a monitor, with a black screen full of green letters. The room it lived in hummed with the sound of tape backup machines and the sudden screetch of dot matrix printers that sprang to life whenever they received transmissions of invoices and shipping manifests. My mom, never a computer expert, somehow figured out how to activate the unit’s word processor - its only other (totally unsanctioned) function. With her help, we wrote my very first short story, and used those same printers to immortalize it into this world on cream-colored tractor-feed paper. And even in my pre-k mind, I somehow knew that any device that was capable of turning these stories we made up from the ephemeral into something tangible was deserving of my attention, so even though it would be more than a decade before we would own our own IBM, I was all ready for it to unlock my passion for writing.
If I didn’t come into this world already with that passion, I learned it immediately by being born into a family of storytellers.
In his youth, my mom’s dad had been a journalist in New York, with a press pass and a typewriter and a gift for gab. My great-grandmother, grandmother, and mom were called - respectively, and in this generational order - a balabusta, a yenta, and the “Yardley Rebbetzin” - which are three different Jewish terms that all mean the same thing - hearty women who built and sustained their families, and who could kibbtiz their way through a story with the best of them. My aunt on my mom’s side introduced theater and music into my world in ways that taught me that writing didn’t need to be confined to the page. And we’ll get back to their brother, the aforementioned uncle, later on in the third act, because I equally love both suspense and a good callback.
My dad’s dad was an engineer in suburban Philadelphia, so his stories were told in three dimensional steel, and always signed with his name. It was a very early lesson in the power of seeing your last name on something you can touch and hold. His wife, my grandmother, was a unique kind of storyteller - the keeper of all the up-to-date stories about everyone in our family. She would constantly recount their comings and goings, never telling those tales with any judgement or gossip, but dutifully, seeing the task as a vital service she performed to keep everyone aware and informed. My dad’s siblings and their in-laws told stories for their livelihoods - on radio, in classrooms, and at regular speaking engagements. I grew up surrounded by stories, told by people who knew how to tell them.
When my dad was healthy enough, he, too, was a writer. He jotted things down, scribbled notes everywhere, and kept piles of the stuff that towered and teetered on every flat surface of his life. His penmanship was distinctive and full of sharp lines that rendered everything hard to decipher at first glance, but it because almost pleasant for its precision once you finally figured out how to read it. He liked to write creatively and would dabble every so often with an idea for historical fiction. He would also write inspirational speeches for his employees, because he was perpetually inspired by studies in leadership. And he would write sermons for synagogue, where he served as a type of congregational volunteer focused on prayer and service. These deliveries were often well-crafted and heavily inspired by his deep education and love of jewish liturgy. And when he was about to undergo what was, at the time, an experimental surgery for his Parkinsons with good, yet scary odds, he wrote me a letter to share some of his existential thoughts on the off chance that he never made it back. That letter has been, and will continue to be its own callback in my life. It’s the nicest thing he ever did for me, because it’s still readable in his voice, which he hasn’t been able to use, and we haven’t been able to hear, in a really long time.
I learned my abilities to write from these places and these people. They taught it to me on long car rides, or at the dinner table, or over boxes of Entenmann's cakes and donuts at snack time, or at group classes, or at game nights, or at memorial services. They’d compare stories with their friends, or laugh about them with “second parent” families, or throw them around with each other, because that’s what Jews do. Above all else, Judaism is a tribe of storytellers, and we’ve been repeating our family dramas since Moses saw some dry grass burst suddenly into flames and ran back down the hill, saying, “boy, do I have a story for you.”
But it wasn’t just learning by osmosis - they pushed me to write constantly. It was more than pushing - it was challenge and it was encouragement. My journalist grandfather often threw down the gauntlet and told me I had to write. My mom used her extremely limited hacking skills to get me space to explore writing on her company’s mainframe computer, and then knocked out school assignments with me on typewriters for years before we got our first PC. Eventually, I used that machine to publish a family newsletter. That’s what I called it - “Family Newsletter” - and naming it was the first executive decision I made as its obvious editor-in-chief - a role I would later hold with a bit more legitimacy on the college paper, and then twice more at start-up music magazines.
And then there is my uncle, the one who’s “still” trying to be a writer, like me, whose stories of the music and entertainment business inspired me to pursue lives in both worlds, whose insightful criticism of film, culture, and music influenced me to study filmmaking and train my own journalism on all three, and who has constantly provoked me, in very helpful ways, to ask myself what kind of story I want my life to tell. What can I say…the dude abides.
Defining the kind of writer I am has been a lifelong effort. I have struggled with the act of writing quite a lot over the last two years, and I’ve asked myself countless times if writer even falls amongst my adjectives anymore.
I spent a lot of 2020 writing at a feverish pace in an effort to capture the strangest year of our lives. It yielded some of my favorite personal writing, but it burned me out, to say the least, and I felt like I’ve had less and less to say at a time when we’ve all become inundated with everyone and everything and every new house gadget constantly talking all at once. I’ve wondered if writing still holds the same functional purpose for me that it used to, and I’ve pushed myself to look at it as a discipline of its own merit, going so far as to jot down on the cover a notebook: the utility of daily writing is the discipline itself. In an age of social media oversaturation, I have long now felt that it’s hard to know when to speak, hard to know what to say, and hard to even be seen, with everyone’s feeds inundated by repetitive video and advertising.
These days, I write more for work than I write for me. I start things on occasion and often don’t finish them. I’m learning to keep some writing more privately for myself, rather than hitting the publish button right away. The practice of telling stories may have felt more foreign for me recently, but it’s all still in there and I’m still using it with the occasional bit of filmmaking, or a journalistic rant on Twitter, or by starting advice with Jewish parables, the way my dad often did. The spirit of my writing remains in notebooks, on the internet, in software, or work articles, or on this blog, or in tiny scraps of paper - all scribbled together the way my dad’s writing used to be - scattered everywhere, in piles that tower and teeter on every flat surface of my life.