Both Judith Sara Gelt’s memoir, Reckless Steps Towards Sanity, and Julie Zuckerman’s novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah, deal with Jewish families, and both are being published by small presses, but nearly everything else – the way they began writing, and particularly their paths to publication – were vastly different. They found plenty to talk about, though, and their conversation went on for about five times longer than we have space!

Judith: How did you begin writing? Do you have an MFA?

Julie: No, not at all! I have a BA in political science and an MA in international relations. Originally, I wanted to be a journalist, but then early in my career, I turned to business writing and then marketing. Around 11 years ago, a friend was taking a creative writing class, and when I heard about it, I said, “That’s it! That’s what I want to do!”

It was this crazy epiphany because I’d always been an avid reader of fiction – authors were my rock stars – but I’d never thought about trying to write creatively myself. So I found myself a teacher, and took a little workshop at her house. That was a great way to start, because everybody was very supportive. From the first prompt, I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I’d spent so many years not writing. What about you?

Judith: I also didn‘t get an MFA. My master’s in educational psychology comes nowhere close to what I do now. I was a teacher for close to 40 years; I always wanted to write, so when I retired, I designed Judith’s MFA. I went to conferences after deciding who the best teachers would be.

Denver happens to have a wonderful writing community. It’s called Lighthouse Writers, and I’ve been studying there as long as I have been writing. It’s very supportive.

It just amazes me the writers that I’m in touch with now. They’re brilliant. I’ve gotten referrals for editors who were geniuses, and it has made all the difference. My book has blurbs from terrific people, and I can’t imagine how that could have happened any other way without an MFA.

I’m still studying at Lighthouse. They bring in amazing people to teach in their summer program, Lit Fest. But I’m nervous about my book, and I didn’t think I would be. Since the marketing started, I carry this stomach ache around. What if no one reads it?

Julie: I know, the marketing part is so daunting!

Judith: And you have a marketing background!  

Julie: True, but marketing software has nothing to do with book marketing, so I’m also just learning as I go along. I’m not sleeping very much!

Tell me more about your memoir, Reckless Steps Towards Sanity.

Judith: I couldn’t start writing my memoir until my father had passed away; he was the hardest to deal with, emotionally, for me. My mother was 97 when she died; she was a big fan of my writing, but she was too old to really look at it by the time she died. I didn’t have a draft of the memoir yet, and she would have loved it.

The book deals with growing up in Denver with my seemingly happy Jewish family. There is tension between my father and us because he dominates the household, but things don’t fall apart until I’m fourteen in 1966. My mother has a “nervous breakdown” which is eventually diagnosed as bipolar disorder. The story becomes one of survival. Instead of chapters, it’s written in “steps.” How I manage my dangerous escapes from the misery at home with virtually no parenting. Eventually, I’m drawn back because of my ties to my mother who is still ill, and I work to understand and forgive both parents.

The book is candid about everything in my life, and my brother is in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community here. I thought he’d be disturbed because I’ve gone through and done things that are quite upsetting. But he loved the book; he’s been a big fan.

Julie: Wow, I can’t wait to read it. And I’m so glad your brother is supportive. I know other memoir writers and it really can go the other way.

Judith: Yes! It’s been great to have his support. Now tell me about your book, The Book of Jeremiah.

Julie: The Book of Jeremiah is a novel-in-stories, is also about a Jewish family, but fictional. It started with one story about a semi-retired professor who takes up a new hobby in his 80s. It was natural for me to make Jeremiah a political science professor, but I was really taken with his personality. As soon as I finished that first story, I knew I wanted to find out more about Jeremiah, so, I went backwards and forwards, unraveling his life, looking at him at all different ages, as well as from the perspective of his family members. There are 13 stories in total, starting with his boyhood during the Depression, through his service in World War II, as a young husband and father, and finally as an academic in the Berkshires. It’s quite interwoven with the American-Jewish experience in the 20th century. I like to think of him as a Jewish male version of Olive Kitteridge.  

I started submitting the stories to various journals, and of course tons of rejections came in, but I kept revising away. It took me about five years to write the entire collection. My mentor suggested that instead of trying to find an agent, I should check out small presses. I started submitting to those, sometimes through contests. I got some encouraging rejections, but I wasn’t sure it was ever going to happen. When I got the email from Kevin Morgan Watson at Press 53 saying I was the runner up in the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and that they’d like to publish my collection, I had to read the email four or five times to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me.

What about you? What was your publishing journey like?

Judith: I didn’t know what I was going to do about publishing. I go to all these conferences, attending every single panel, and you can talk to agents and publishers. I met the senior acquisition editor of the University of New Mexico Press, and I thought, wow this is a really nice press. I’ve puzzled over the small press versus the big. There are so many pros and cons for each, but I kept listening and trying to learn as much as I could. That’s another story. But I kept running into her and chatting with her about it. I sent her a manuscript and she returned it, saying, it’s not for us, but work on it more and send it back. I did send it back, and she said no again, but I kept in touch with her.

I kept revising and got in touch one more time and said, I really hate to ask you again, but it is really different this time, and she said to send it. Well, this time she loved it!

I thought when she said yes, it was a yes. But then I found out that at this university press they have to send it out to two people who are well-known in the genre, who don’t know me or the University of New Mexico. And both have to agree that it’s worthy of being published. So, it wasn’t a done deal, at all! But fortunately, the memoirists they found both agreed it was worthy of being published, once it had gone through certain revisions. I then had to write a letter to a committee at the university about how I was going to adopt the feedback. The suggestions they made were so smart, I was excited to get to work on those revisions.

Julie: Oh my god! What a difference in our paths to publication! Let’s talk about fiction vs. nonfiction for a minute. I’ve just started dabbling in nonfiction.

Judith: Right! I read your essay, Subsoil of Memory, the one when you’re with your daughter in Berlin. That was so beautiful.

Julie: Thanks! I enjoyed writing that one so much that I’ve just taken my first essay-writing class with Grub Street, which was great!

Judith: And your fiction is so fun to read and your endings, oh my gosh. How do you get there? You have these endings that people love, where you are like, boom you have gotten somewhere, but it’s not an expected place.

Julie: Have you heard of Kathy Fish? She’s a really well-known teacher of flash fiction, based in Colorado. She runs these amazing 10-day workshops online; they’re so hard to get into now she had to institute a lottery system. Some people in those workshops write flash nonfiction, too. Some of my weird endings probably came from prompts she gave.  

Judith: My favorite thing right now is experimental or hybrid kinds of essays. They’ve drawn me completely away from the paragraph / prose structure, and I find the writing really unleashes me somehow.

Julie: Like the hermit crab essay you talk about in your video. I loved that!

Judith: At Superstition Review, where I had my hermit crab essay published, “Loneliness Recovery Rubric – Female,” they asked if I would do an author’s talk, which is talking about your piece and how you did it. I taped it three or four times to get the video right, and I didn’t really like it, but they said, “oh no, it’s great. We’re leaving as is.” They are so fun.

Then they invited me to write on their blog, so I wrote this really weird and funny thing about how much harder it is for nonfiction writers.

Julie: I think my favorite line from that piece is when you wrote, “Novelists don’t create in a genre tagged with terms like ‘naval gazing’ or paired with adjectives like misery as in misery memoir.” Hah!

Judith: That’s the fun for me, I want to write another memoir but I don’t want it to be what I have written. I don’t want it to be strictly chronological.  What are you working now?

Julie: I have a novel draft that I wrote three years ago. Would you believe — all by hand! I didn’t want to keep revising the same first paragraph a thousand times. I took a month off, and then transcribed it, which took a whole summer. Then I basically put it away for two years. When I found out The Book of Jeremiah was being published, I said, okay, now it’s time to get back to the novel. I worked on it from about May of last year until like a short time ago, and now, with all the book promotion stuff going on, I’ve put it on the back burner because I feel like I take two steps forward and three steps back. For some weird reason I decided to set the novel here in Israel, dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and part of the time I ask myself, “Why do you want to wade into this shit?” But I hope to make it through a complete second draft at some point.

Judith: I can’t imagine. And it sounds like you are the same kind of reviser that I am, when you write something but you cannot go on until you go back and revise. That circle of revision can be deadly, but I can’t keep myself from doing it.

Julie: When I was in 10th grade my English teacher forced us to rewrite and rewrite. We’d hand in an essay and he’d give it back to us without a grade, all marked up. And we had to resubmit each essay three or four times before he’d give a grade. At the beginning of the year we couldn’t stand him, but by the end of the year, he was my favorite teacher. It was the first good lesson I had in revision.

Judith: He worked hard!

Julie: Yes, indeed. I kept in touch with him a bit when I was in college. He’s retired now, but I know he won various awards like teacher of the year from the state. I thanked him in my acknowledgements. He’s one person I’m going to send a copy of the book to when it comes out, even though I haven’t really talked to him in about 20 years.

Judith: Those acknowledgements are so special to have. I’m so excited to thank people in the book. I never thought that would be me writing them, but I love the acknowledgements and the dedication. All of those little things mean so much to me. I have a friend who is a playwright. She just produced her first play, and acknowledged me the program. I was so shocked! It felt so good to be acknowledged, and I hope people read my acknowledgements so that they feel that, too.

Julie: I hope I didn’t leave anyone out of mine!

Though I could easily talk to you for another two hours, I think we have to wrap this up in the interest of space. It’s been great getting to know you, and best of luck with your book!

Judith: Me too! Good luck with your book.

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Reckless Steps Toward Sanity is Judith Sara Gelt’s debut memoir. Excerpts have been published in Iron Horse Literary Review and Portland Review. Other work has been found in Superstition Review, Broad Street Magazine, Nashville Review, Best of Referential Magazine, and The Denver Post. She lives in Denver where she was born, and she has a daughter and granddaughter. She hopes neither will decide to write memoir. For more information, please visit her website or follow her on Facebook or Twitter.

Julie Zuckerman’s debut fiction, The Book of Jeremiah was the runner-up for the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction and was released in May 2019. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The SFWP Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Sixfold, The Coil, Ellipsis, MoonPark Review and others. A native of Connecticut, she lives in Modiin, Israel, with her husband and four children. When she’s not writing, she can be found reading, running, biking, birdwatching, baking or trying to grow things in her garden. For more information, please visit her website or follow her on Facebook or Twitter.