One of the frustrating aspects of the current polarization is that it freezes everyone in place and eliminates the journey through multiple groups and identities that we call life. For a writer, that is a deep freeze, for stories lie in the journey, in crossing the boundaries out of the world where you were […]
I am not an historical novel writer, but The Inheritors grows out of the history of Chicago, especially of the neighborhood I’d chosen as a setting. This early industrial area area just west of the downtown (or Loop, as it’s called) , drew immigrant groups in the early Twentieth Century. My research carried me […]
As promised last week, here is the second part of the short story begun in last week’s blog—a writer’s view of the Sixties turmoil that, according to Ezra Klein and others, opened the split in the nation’s psyche. As I said before, these stories later became a part of my second novel, THE […]
Ezra Klein, in WHY WE’RE POLARIZED, cites the Sixties as the first major split in the nation’s identity. I was a housewife in those days, wife of a University of Michigan professor and city councilman (Democrat) and mother of two small children. It was the experience of living in […]
In THE INHERITORS, Alicia discovers her mother’s history in the abandoned Bartley mansion, once the home of a Chicago industrialist. Such mansions, their marble entries opening into warrens of apartments, dotted the streets of the inner-city district where I worked as a welfare worker. This particular one is fiction, and, bolstered by research into Chicago’s […]
Here’s a taste of my just released novel, THE CAMERA’S EYE, a story of two women in search of their harasser. Chapter 1 The crash sat Veronica Lorimer up in her bed. A second one, followed by a revving engine and spurt of gravel from spinning tires, sent her toward the stairs, pulling […]
I’ve been writing novels (for forty years or so) and blogging about them for quite a while. High time for a break. I love short stories and have always long to master them. For writers, they are a wonderful antidote to wordiness, an astringent for the mind. They remind us of the […]
Family secrets are imprisoned stories. The silences, the unnamed people or events that threaten the family’s sense of itself or bring stigma are erased by silence. Such is the power of language—cease speaking of it, naming it (or the person), and it ceases to exist. But someone knows or they’d never get passed […]
Judith Kirscht describes story weaving and the weaving of stories into her novel, The Inheritors
As promised in my last blod on novels set in the midst of tumult, here is a sample of my first novel. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NOWHERE ELSE TO GO by Judith Kirscht Chapter 1 Labor Day, 1968 Cassie Daniels stood at the door of the Norton Bluffs School Board room, taking in the semi-circle […]
Chances are, if you’ve ever been in a writing class, you’ve been asked to do a “freewrite” in response to a prompt. Writers are routinely asked to produce such spontaneous writing at conventions and workshops–usually protesting that such exercises never produce anything worth the time. I’ve been a protester, but as I was browsing through […]
We all read because we have to–to bake a cake, to put together a bookcase, to pass a test. But why do so many of us become addicted to that other kind of reading–to stories? We became bookworms as children. As escape? To cure loneliness? Boredom? Because books took us on adventures in distant […]
Judith Kirscht lives and works in the beautiful Puget Sound area. She is the author of four published works of fiction with more to come soon!
