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Sunday Series: Vicki Mayk on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Vicki Mayk, who speaks to how a story sometimes finds us and we are compelled to write.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

When people ask me why I chose to write my book “Growing Up On the Gridiron: Football, Friendship and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas,” I tell them: I didn’t choose it.

The story chose me. In 2009, I had started to occasionally attend services at a church less than five miles from my home. I’d lived near that church for more than 25 years. A lapsed Catholic with bad memories of attending Catholic school, I’m not a person who follows an organized religious or spiritual practice.  Nevertheless, I began attending services there.

Just months later, in April 2010, Owen Thomas, the son of the church’s senior pastor, Tom Thomas, died by suicide in April 2010 at the end of his junior year at the University of Pennsylvania. In this age of social media, someone set up a memorial page on Facebook – R.I.P. Owen Thomas. I joined it, even though I had never met the young man with the engaging smile, piercing blue eyes and a shock of red hair that made it seem as if his head were on fire. Membership on the page grew to 3,000. Posts about Owen came from teammates who loved him, from casual acquaintances who recalled his kindness during chance encounters, from high school teachers and Penn professors who remembered his sharp, questioning mind and from members of his father’s congregation who knew him as an impish kid who crawled commando-style under church pews.

The comments and stories people wrote haunted me. I began asking myself: Who was this boy and what about him inspired such love, such loyalty? By that September, something else emerged: Owen was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the traumatic brain injury that was being found in professional football players. Owen’s was a landmark case because he was an amateur player never known to have a concussion.

I’d been a writer for my entire career, first as a newspaper reporter, then as the editor of university alumni magazines. I earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction in my 50s. There’s no question that writing is at the center of my life. Even after years spent defining myself as “writer,” the answer to the question of why I write only became clear after I chose to write about Owen Thomas. I’d never written about sports. Yet I couldn’t let go of the thought that this was a story I needed to write. One day I saw a quote from Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical “Hamilton.” He said, “You have to live with the notion of, If I don’t write this, no one’s going to write it. If I die, this idea dies with me.”

I completely understood what Miranda meant. The story had chosen me and I was compelled to write it. I teach a class for college freshmen called “The Power of Story.” In the class, students learn that neuroscience researchers have proved that humans are wired for story – and are drawn to story almost against their will. Neurons in our brains light up when we watch or read a good tale. I didn’t need scientific research to convince me. It’s been that way for me since I was kid. I love fiction, but for me, true stories became what I most wanted to read and write. Sometimes my own stories, sometimes those of other people. As I researched Owen’s story, I attended high school football games for the first time in more than 40 years, toured the brain bank in Boston where his brain was studied, and sat with young men and women while they shed tears over their lost friend.

I learned I wasn’t just writing a book about football. It also was a book about friendship. It took me ten years, but I never considered giving up because of something that is true for writers of fiction and nonfiction alike: I didn’t want to come to the end of my life with this story in my head instead of on the page.

A former reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, VICKI MAYK has enjoyed a 35-year career in journalism and public relations. She has reported for newspapers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and her freelance journalism also has appeared in national and regional publications, including Ms. magazine and The New York Times.

Her creative nonfiction has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station and in the anthology Air, published by Books by Hippocampus. She’s been the editor of three university magazines, most recently at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Her nonfiction book, Growing Up On the Gridiron: Football, Friendship, and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas (Beacon Press) is available Sept. 1, 2020. Her love affair with football began at the age of nine, when her father first took her to a Pittsburgh Steelers game. Connect with her at vickimayk.com.

Join Vicki Mayk, along with authors Athena Dixon, Berry Grass, and Tim Hillegonds for a Night of Nonfiction (as part of HippoCamp 2020’s virtual events) on Saturday, August 29th, 6pm Eastern. This event is free via Zoom.

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Sunday Series: Gila Green on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Gila Green, who writes about finding her voice.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

I have never attended a Canadian creative writing program, so I cannot say with certainty that my distance from Ottawa, my hometown, allows me to mentally glide over to the 1980s version of the city, pecking at bits and inserting them into my fiction, squirreling away savory pieces for later use, because I don’t know any other writing experience beyond my present geophysical reality in the Judean Hills, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

For all that I gained, intangible things vanished when I chose to leave my birthplace, and for me, my mother tongue was my first and perhaps, most agonizing casualty; I mislaid other parts when I became a wife and mother, pieces I might not even have known I had.

The youngest of half a dozen children, seven other voices thundered and cracked through my childhood home, and there was little chance of me denting the din. I’ve always felt – and still feel — that people tuned out when I spoke: at home, in school, at parties, especially at parties. I lacked athletic grace and, as much as I longed to sew and paint, I was impatient and clumsy. There has only ever been one act that makes me feel as potent as Elijah: writing. With a pen in my hand I could raise the dead, ascend skyward and bring fire down from the heavens. My voicelessness fueled my writing into adolescence, and at the end of that period I decided to channel the need to be heard into a Bachelor of Journalism degree at Carleton University.

By the time I approached the end of my third year, any desire to rival the polished anchors I saw on television news lagged behind my need to experience the world beyond the local snow-banks. For a Jewish girl, Israel offered a price I could afford: a free scholarship to Haifa University. The Holy Land may have been exhilarating but my voicelessness resurfaced in a new form. I could read, speak and write Hebrew, but it was only good for telephone calls, cafés and the occasional fax, not for journalism, editing or any type of professional writing. And especially not for creative writing: living in Hebrew had silenced my passion.

Marriage and motherhood had their quietness too, the hush of trying to calm my infant son in the noiseless adult world, the red stillness that glowed within me as I sat in a job interview: “I see you have a baby, aren’t you planning to give him a sibling?” Which, of course meant “why would we hire someone who will take maternity leave in a year?” Not to mention the immobility that flooded me when I received societal messages like ambulance sirens, that was the biggest shush of all. I understood that if you kept the Sabbath you couldn’t write (read: think, believe) this and if you didn’t keep the Sabbath you couldn’t write (think, believe) that. In Israel, I felt individual thought or at least individual thought you were allowed to publish had gone the way of boils and locust infestations. By my first child’s first birthday, the irritation overwhelmed me: I gave up writing and reading. For a girl who received regular reprimands at meals— “can’t we even go out for dinner without you reading a book under the table?” — this was terrifying.

Pretending that I didn’t need writing in my new life was a charade with an expiry date. To the outside world I was a content mother of three, well-versed in homemade Play-Doh recipes. But I had an insidious double who was starving for pen, ink, paper and what chemistry might result from the combination of all three. The inevitable explosion happened, with my husband caught by the blast. He spat back: “I see there’s a new English creative writing program. Apply!”

I had excuses. I’m pregnant. We can’t afford it. Maybe the real writers in the course would laugh so hard they’d be wiping the tears from their eyes the way the Egyptians had swabbed blood off their faces after their first dip in the bloody Nile.

The program freed me from the silences of being an English writer in a non-English speaking country. It liberated me from the confines of Israeli culture that defined what I could publish by my dress, gender, and level of religious observance. I was once again a prophetess soaring through time and space on a thunderbolt. It was the time that signaled rain after years of famine from the one act that has always fed my soul and given me a voice.

Canadian GILA GREEN is an Israel-based author of two adult novels: King of the Class and Passport Control; novel-in-stories, White Zion; and her first young adult novel No Entry, the first in an  environmental series that highlights the dangers of elephant poaching and extinction. Green’s stories are about everyday people tackling immigration, racism, alienation, war, politics, romance, poverty, terrorism, and surviving.

Gila Green spoke on her new young adult novel, No Entry, for Hidden Timber Books’ Small Press Author Reading Series. Watch her interview HERE.

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Sunday Series: Sharon Hart-Green on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Sharon Hart-Green, who shares her apprehensions about becoming a writer of Jewish Fiction and her realization that historical fiction provides greater understanding of actual events.

Photo by Majkl Velner on Unsplash

I must admit that before writing Come Back for Me, I felt a sense of trepidation about writing a Holocaust novel. Since neither my parents nor grandparents are Holocaust survivors, I did not feel that I had the “right” to do so. At the same time, I was caught between two opposing pulls: a sense of obligation to somehow give voice to those who were brutally murdered; and the knowledge that no book could ever do justice to what they suffered. How could I possibly resolve what seemed to be an impossible dilemma?

I believe that I was able to negotiate a solution to this impasse by taking what I would call an “indirect” approach: writing about the lingering effects of the Holocaust on two generations of Jewish families, rather than trying to write directly about the Holocaust itself.

Since I had grown up in a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors and their children, I felt well equipped to undertake this task. This allowed me to explore the event through the experiences of those who survived as well as how it affected their offspring. History, after all, is composed of many layers of experience, and if I could approach it from this indirect angle, then perhaps I would be able to unearth some truths about it that could not be otherwise revealed.

Indeed, one of the most effective ways to teach about history is through fiction. Why? Because fiction beckons the reader to enter another person’s life—to “live” that life on an emotional level—even if only for a short while. That is not to underestimate the value of learning from history books as well; to be sure, reading about the rise and fall of great leaders and analyzing the causes and effects of historical change is vital. However, historians rarely tell stories about ordinary people. Fiction has the unique ability to draw a reader into the personal life of everyday individuals. In fact, this might be the best way for readers to learn most deeply about a historical period. When reading about characters from other eras, they not only acquire factual knowledge, but also emotional affinity.

Yet teaching about the Holocaust through the use of fiction is a particularly complex matter, partly because the enormity of the Holocaust itself makes it a difficult subject to convey in any form. How can any of us fathom that it was only seventy-five years ago that a regime arose which attempted to systematically murder every man, woman, and child of Jewish descent in all of Europe? The victim toll alone is so massive that most people who read statistics like “six million” can barely grasp what that means.

However, I think that if a work of Holocaust fiction is written with historical accuracy, then it can serve as an invaluable resource for teaching about this dark period, especially in schools.  By this I mean that a writer of fiction must be absolutely unwavering in representing the brutal facts of this event before taking on this task. I say this because some novelists in recent years have tried to commercialize the Holocaust, and in doing so, misrepresent it, sometimes in grossly distorted ways.  For example, there have been some novels that inject elements of romance into their storylines in order to make their plots more exciting. (The Tatooist of Auschwitz is only one such example.) What does this convey to the reader?  It gives the impression that the Holocaust “wasn’t all that bad,” which of course is not only a contemptible distortion of history but it also trivializes the suffering of the victims.

I hope that writers continue to write fiction about the Holocaust—about the factors leading up to it, the people who were destroyed by it, and the world that allowed it to happen. My main hope however is that they do so with caution and with a deep sense of duty to represent it with accuracy. It is the least we as writers can offer as a gesture of respect to those who perished.

SHARON HART-GREEN is a Canadian writer and academic whose debut novel Come Back for Me (University of Toronto Press) is a gripping story of trauma, loss, and the redemptive power of love.  Come Back for Me was chosen as an Editors’ Choice Book by the Historical Novel Society and was shortlisted for the Goethe Award for Historical Fiction. Dr. Green holds a Ph.D. in Judaic Studies from Brandeis University and has served as an Associate Professor of Hebrew and Yiddish literature at the University of Toronto for many years.

She is the author of two previous non-fiction works: a book on the fiction of Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon; and a volume of original translations of the Hebrew poetry of Hava Pinhas-Cohen.  In addition, her short stories, poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Jewish Review of Books and The Jewish Quarterly. She is a popular speaker who has delivered talks in Jerusalem, Boston, New York, Vancouver and Toronto. You can find Sharon on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Come Back for Me tells the story of Artur Mandelkorn, a young Hungarian Holocaust survivor whose desperate quest to find his sister takes him to post-war Israel. Intersecting Artur’s tale is that of Suzy Kohn, a Toronto teenager whose seemingly tranquil life is shattered when her uncle’s sudden death tears her family apart. Their stories eventually come together in Israel following the Six-Day War, where love and understanding become the threads that bind the two narratives together, revealing the scars left by tragedy and the possibilities for healing. Purchase a copy of her book from Indigo.