From the Mouths of Babes

By Ellen Blum Barish
Posted on September 20, 2019

Seventy-five years ago, Anne Frank was pulled from her hiding place behind the wall of her father’s business offices in Amsterdam, put on a train and sent off to a concentration camp for what would be her final months on earth.

Her final months in human form, that is.

Thanks to the quick thinking of her father’s devoted Dutch employee, Miep Gies, who stashed Anne’s diary away in a drawer until the war’s end, Anne and her story are very much alive.

Anne’s words are what brings throngs of people to the Anne Frank Haus at Prinsengracht 263-267 in Amsterdam every day. Lines so long that even with reserved tickets on my recent trip, it took many hours to move through the small, cramped rooms where she and her family hid for two years between 1942-1944. Her diary entries highlight Holocaust history in a way that make people feel it.

The time I spent there with my husband and two friends earlier this month ripped me open, flooding me with memories from how I felt when I first read of The Diary of Anne Frank at 12 or 13. All the way through, this line from Psalms kept repeating in my head: “…out of the mouths of babes … comes strength.”

I’m not sure if the book was a school assignment or a gift from my German Jewish grandfather who emigrated to the States just before the war. I like to think he gave it to me as he was always lost in a book, reveling in words.

As I read, I distinctly remember feeling that Anne could have been a cousin. We were both cheerful and chatty German Jewish girls with dark brown hair and oval faces. And she not only wanted to be a writer, like me, her birthday was the day before mine in June! Among the few items she thought to grab with less than a day’s notice before going into hiding was the diary she had been given as a birthday gift.

From the very first page, I loved her.

She was passionate about the writing process. “I can say what I mean much better on paper.”

Boldly honest: “Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”

A deep thinker: “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”

And incredibly hopeful: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Her words prompted me to walk to my local drugstore to buy a diary with my allowance money and start a writing practice of my own.

I was not only moved by how candid, thoughtful and positive she was, I also resonated with her refusal to be silent. During the day she and her cohorts had to remain utterly quiet – a simple sneeze, cough, or toilet flush could upend their safety – and yet this didn’t stop her from finding a way to use her voice on the page.

Like Anne, I scribbled like it was an emergency, searching for truths that I didn’t show to the world. “I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.” Both of us connected with different parts of ourselves on the page in a way that we didn’t in our daily life.

I, too, had something buried deep in my heart that wanted to come out, a deep and silent pain that would take decades – and thousands of words – before I could fully understand it. It now lives as my memoir, still in progress. There’s no doubt that the words are what helped me heal.

Because, as Anne noted, “Paper is more patient than people.”

After a bite to eat at the museum, my body and soul were still vibrating so I headed back to our Airbnb to rest. As I drifted off, I began to connect more dots. All of those decades writing in a diary may be why I’m so drawn to the short-form, personal narrative – essays and flash nonfiction and short memoir. They are concise and distilled. They mirror how insight comes. And how we remember.

When I was a young girl, Anne gave me a huge gift: my first writing prompt. Her words stirred me to go to the page and find words of my own.

She’s seventy-five years gone. And yet her words are still with us. Still inspiring me.

These, in particular, stood out:

That writing is not only something that can distract you from the horrors of the world, but it might conjure up something inside of you that you didn’t know was there:

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn/spirits are revived.”

And finally:

Being vulnerable on the page can enable you to be seen and heard – and share the stories of others who longed to be seen and heard – long after we’ve walked the earth:

“I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.”

Old Friends

By Ellen Blum Barish
Posted on August 10, 2019

By the time we reach high school, I believe we are fundamentally who we are.

This thought has been knocking about in my head for a while as I’ve been writing a memoir that explores the aftermath of an event that took place at that time in my life.

Two friends who were around then are still in my life. Spending time with them this summer celebrating our 60^thbirthdays, I couldn’t help but see pieces of our former selves showing up. In the stories we told. Or the way we interacted with one another. But these pieces made a more complete portrait when we recalled our yearbook pages.

Our graduating class was small enough to allow each of us to choose our own photographs and quote.

The abstract painter who thinks expansively and notices how the light is shining chose the T.S. Eliot quote, “Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.”

The landscape designer and sculptor who selected a photo of herself leaping on a hill beside the trees selected Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found in me an invincible summer.”

And yours truly, the personal essayist who loves to take photos and listen to folk music went with lyrics from a Simon and Garfunkel song: Time it was and what a time it was, it was a time of innocence, a time of confidences. Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph. Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.

I know it’s a statistically small group, but isn’t this proof that we are who we are by the time we graduate high school?

Returning to these pages was a reminder of what attracted me to these women in the first place. Even as teenagers, the painter would look up at the sky to assess the color, texture and light; the landscape designer and sculptor wanted to understand the topography in three dimensions and the writer was always searching for the words to capture it.

We definitely change as we age. If we’re lucky, we even evolve. But what we chose to represent ourselves to be remembered for all time confirms my hunch that we are uniquely us at an early age.

And I think there is great value in rediscovering what that is. It may help answer the question: What am I here to do?

Which feels especially important now.

During these last lingering days of summer, for fun or if you are up for some personal discovery, I urge you to pull out your high school yearbook. If you don’t have one, retrieve that box of old photographs or letters. Maybe you can dig up that diary you started but never finished.

If you can’t get your hands on any of these, call an old friend. Ask him about back then. See yourself through her eyes and your grownup ones.

Until I began to write this post, I believed that the lyrics I borrowed for my yearbook page were the complete version of a song titled “Bookends.” Turns out I was wrong. The lyrics are the coda, a miniature melody attached at the end of a piece, from a song titled “Old Friends” from the album Bookends.

Old friends. Of course! How appropriate.

It’s the last verse that popped out at me.

I will have to remember to find a park bench and queue up this song when we get together for our seventieth.

Can you imagine us years from today,
Sharing a park bench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy

To resurrecting a lost part of yourself or reaching out to an old friend this month.

What’s up:

It’s time to think about your fall schedule! Check my Workshop page for day and evening workshops starting in October.

I’m in production for the Fall Issue of Thread scheduled for a September/October release. Submissions are on hiatus through September, but reading is open for Stitch.

Time for a web redesign with new programming! Keep an eye out on social media this fall.

We’re Just Drawn That Way

By Ellen Blum Barish
Posted on July 3, 2019

Earlier this year, I decided to stretch my literary ligaments by reading books outside of my regular go-to genre. So it’s been novels instead of my usual steady diet of essay collections and literary memoirs.

I really enjoyed Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng.) I loved The Friend (Sigrid Nunez.) And I’m really enjoying Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. But I wanted to like Little Fires Everywhere (Celeste Ng), Commonwealth (Ann Patchett) and City of Girls (Elizabeth Gilbert) more. I started two or three other novels that I just couldn’t finish.

All of which brings me to: We like what we like.

An eloquent essay elevates me.

A meaningful memoir mesmerizes me.

It all began for me in the early 90s when personal essays were showing up in women’s magazines, the Sunday papers and on public radio. It was the era of the New York Times Hers column. Later it was the Lives column. There was Anna Quindlen’s “Life in the Thirties” column and Marion Winik’s radio essays on NPR and then, Modern Love. The essays explored work, motherhood, family, relationships, life, death and health in layered and honest ways.

I moved from essays to memoirs: Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club.These writers showed me how to make art from life with a willingness to go deep, choosing well-chosen words and metaphor. Then I discovered Joan Didion, Jo Ann Beard, Brenda Miller, Elizabeth Gilbert, Anne Roiphe, Abigail Thomas, Alison Bechdel and Dani Shapiro. There were male writers, too, of course: Jean Dominique-Bauby. David Sedaris. Brian Doyle. Phillip Lopate. James McBride. Darin Straus. Augusten Burroughs. Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But among the writers who wrote in all genres, what I leaned toward were the stories they wrote from their lives.

Friends – literary and otherwise – recommend, give or loan me their favorite fiction, insisting that I’ll love it. I do try them. If a writer doesn’t grab me in 50 pages, I simply have to move on. I have a life to lead. But rarely, if ever, did I fall in love with a novel like I have with a memoir or essay collection.

I take that back. I can think of one: Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. It’s one of the rare books – novel or memoir – that I actually read twice.

It’s the job of a writer to take her reader by the head, hand or heart, I tell my writing students, to keep that reader engaged.

Too much to ask? Maybe.

But in this current attention-challenged climate, I think it’s even more important for writers to ensure that their readers get lost in their words.

I tend to like concise, thoughtful, spare and honest writing. Writing that’s funny and self-aware. I know there are plenty of novels and short story collections with these qualities. But for me, it’s more about the approach to the subject matter, the lens through which the writer is looking. I am pulled toward material that explores the psychological and the mysterious. Pieces that rely on curiosity about human nature with a hunger for insight and wisdom. Stories that invite the writer and reader to journey together to make meaning from them.

I’d like to think of myself as reader-curious. I often wish I was more genre-fluid. But I do think it’s worthwhile to be able to name the kind of work we like best. It tells us something about ourselves. For those of us who write, it’s valuable information that may help identify the form we want to explore with our own words.

Our choices are, after all, a miniature mirror. They are a small reflection of our authentic selves.

Whatever you are reading this summer, may it be full of exploration, escapism and self discovery.

Thinking ahead to Fall? Check out my selection of day and evenings workshops here.

Ellen’s Eight

By Ellen Blum Barish
Posted on June 1, 2019

There’s no sure-fire formula to teach creative writing. I don’t believe there’s a prescription to teach any kind of art.

Instead, I think writing teachers and coaches do our best when we create a safe space. The more comfortable the writer, the easier the “brain dump” and the chance to capture words on the page or screen.

Creative process is as varied as people are. There’s no one method to get those words out.

However, I do rely on a post brain-dump checklist.

I call them Ellen’s Eight Elements of Essay and they are applicable to all forms of personal narrative after the first draft is down.

On the sentence level, there’s detail, scene, language and pacing.

For the work as a whole, there’s storyline, structure, voice and theme.

I could write volumes on each one, but there isn’t space for that here. Besides, it’s more efficient to talk about them within the context of an essay or piece of memoir – a conversation that is the foundation of my workshops for many years now.

But lately I’ve been thinking that these eight elements don’t just apply to essay and memoir.

The more I talk about them as they relate to a piece of personal writing, the more I see that they are a pretty good checklist for living a meaningful life.

Starting small:

Detail. You’ve heard the expression, The divine is in the details. I’ll just leave that right there.

Scene. Paying attention to the scene you are in is living wholly in the present tense.

Language: The words we use are not fleeting. They can be a reflection of ourselves. In fact there’s some science behind this.

Pacing. The rhythm of our sentences and the pace of the story is a mirror to our mood.

Moving larger:

Storyline. You are living your story, telling your story and you can reframe both.

Structure. We are comfortable with how our lives are shaped and organized, or not.

Voice. Your voice is the your vision. How do you define yours?

Theme. What would your life’s mission statement look like? What matters most to you?

Ted Talk author Emily Esfahani Smith’s defines a meaningful life as one filled with belonging, purpose, transcendence and storytelling. I believe writing provides all four. The storytelling, for sure. The hours lost in the writing can feel transcendent. The subject you are writing about can give purpose to your life. And belonging can come from connecting with a reader or being with other writers.

Making art isn’t just about making something expressive, poignant or beautiful. When we make art, we make meaning.

Read my recent craft essay on the Brevity Blog!

A new month, a new Stitch! So much said in so few words.“Tied and True” by Ruth Rozen.

Watch for the Summer Issue of Thread to be released this month! Missed the Spring Issue? Read it here.

I’m taking a much-needed break from reading Thread submissions this summer, but will continue to review pieces for Stitch. Check out the Submission Guidelines.

We’ve only just stepped into summer, but it isn’t too early to think about writing in the fall. Take a look at my offerings for fall.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish

First Threads: An Origin Story

By Ellen Blum Barish
Posted on May 8, 2019

Last Thursday night, more than one hundred friends, family members and art appreciators left their homes – some from as far as California, Colorado, Pennsylvania and New York – for a night of storytelling to celebrate Thread’s fifth anniversary.

Threadaversary: An Evening of Personal Stories was the seventh live lit event – the biggest show yet! A sell-out of 140 seats!

It was a chance to shine a light on the art of words; beauty made by the human hand, head and heart. Words that are witty or weighty. Heartbreaking or haunting. Poetic or poignant.

Decades into writing, editing and teaching personal narrative, I am still astounded by how we can take the experiences from our lives and simply by connecting words into sentences, we can connect and move people.

The house lights illuminated nine dazzling Chicago writer-storytellers (David Barish, Ada Cheng, Eileen Dougharty, Nestor Gomez, Jill Howe, Diane Kastiel, Sheri Reda, Jeremy Owens and Scott Whitehair as well as a few special guests including author Richard Reeder) All had interconnecting storylines to Thread.

But we quite literally couldn’t have gathered if it wasn’t for The Grant Street Writers.

These writers met in one of my writing workshops almost a decade ago. The essays they were writing were good. Good enough to publish. I urged them to consider submitting their work and Marie said, “Maybe we should make our own literary magazine.”

That’s when the idea for a publication first took stitch in my mind. But it was still an abstract concept.

In the spring of 2014, we invited friends and family to a final reading of their essays.

The following day, as I thumbed through the photos on my cell, I found one shot that had seemingly taken itself. It was a photo of the multi-colored braided rug on the floor of the café.

It captured the feeling of the evening: Strands of colorful stories braided together that created something separate and beautiful of its own. The word braid hung in my mind’s eye. Then yarn. Then thread.

Thread resonated because I often ask my students, what is the main thread here? Where does the thread fray or come loose? I love the idea that the thinnest strand of thread holds a garment together. Its presence – or absence – makes its mark in a piece of writing.

A tailormade title for a literary magazine.

Long after the workshops ended, these writers continued to meet on their own. And just recently, they made good on that idea to make a publication of their own. They published their first book of essays, Wednesdays with Winston in April.

Once the name was pinned to my brain, the publishing machine moved at lightning speed.

By late spring, I had a name, a URL and web hosting. By summer, I had a logo that I only realized later contained the word read in it! In the fall, web architecture and contributors. I invited two Chicago-area writers whose work I loved – Lee Reilly and Tom Wolferman – and four writing students to contribute essays to the inaugural issue. It was always my mission from the very start to feature established and emerging writers in every edition.

That December, Thread was launched.

Five years and 72 essays later, this solo-editorpreneur’s online literary publication has not only met, but surpassed my original mission. Thread has earned two spots on the Best American Essays notables list and has been the first published home for many writers whose names later appeared in bigger publications.

We say it takes a village and last week in the Village of Skokie – my Threadquarters – everyone who helped build, contribute, read or support Thread were sewn into its tapestry and my heart.