I welcome offers and proposals for commissions and collaborations in all literary, theatre, and television genres, whether fiction, non-fiction or documentary.  

 

The subjects and themes with which I work include but are not limited to:

 

Jewish Life; Woman/Feminist; Technology/Reproduction/Communication; Memory, Culture, History and Heritage; Immigration, Refugees and Displaced Persons

 

The following is only a partial list of works that involve one or more of these themes. If you are interested in discussing a commission or collaboration with me, and are interested in reading one or more of the following, please contact me to request and discuss.

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                          to discuss a commission or collaboration.

 

BOOKS

 

Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss, and the Lotus Position (Illustrated humor book)

Born Knowing (Poetry)

I am dirty (Poetry)

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Selected chapters from memoir-in-progress, Spit: A Jewish Adopted Woman’s Reckoning with her Refugee Origins, including:

 

“ISO Susan “

“Eva’s Face”

“Meeting Pere Sperm”

“Dead Ends”

 

PLAYS

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Almost Pregnant. Full-length play. Private link to video recorded performance available on request.

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Roosevelt’s Guests. Full-length play about the refugee DPs interned in the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter, Oswego, NY, August 1944 – January 1946.

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SHORT THEATRE PIECES and MONOLOGUES

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The Next Right Note: A COVID Chronicle by Ally-Cat Stern

Rebecca Talks With Alexa, or

“I’m sorry there are some things I cannot do yet and explaining why is one of them.”

On Resemblance: No Bridge is an Island

Birth Tale: 1966

Evidence, or Moon Immigrants

Rachel Polanski (A Survivor in the Schools)

My Omama is an Occasional Anti-Semite

Marlene Dietrich Kissed my Grandmother

Marketing Mary

I Was Lucinda Williams’ Girlfriend

The Rabbi’s Confession

Eddie’s Barber Shop

Shopping at Loehmann’s with Freud

Hari, Figaro and Me: Nothing Something

Dreaming of Exile

Sitting Shiva for Loehmann’s

Sandra (excerpt from Sitting Shiva For Loehmann’s)

Sarah (excerpt from Sitting Shiva For Loehmann’s)

The Prayer Collector

Barren Mother Time

 

SHORT STORIES

 

The Storytellers

The Gathering At Friendlies

The Society of the Rememberers

The History of Silence

Marketing Mary

From Here to Maternity

Between an Iceberg and a Hard Place

 

Searching For Susan - Treatment for a Television Series

Yiddish Yoga: The Musical - Pitch Sheet

Yiddish Yoga – Television Series – Pitch Sheet

 

Multi-media literary art installations

 

Gestations of the Cross: An Art Installation 

 

This installation has not yet been exhibited. It would be the first installation to use critical theory, feminist thought, art history, comparative religion, literature and cultural studies--indeed, a fusion of discourses, to produce an innovative art exhibition, both visually and poetically. Gestations of the Cross imagines an infertile woman being almost born, almost pregnant, almost dying, over and over again, as round after round of IVF brings her to her knees. 

 

Gestations of the Cross would be the first art installation of its kind devised by a woman, a poet and professor of Comparative Religion and Cultural Studies, who has gone through the ordeal of infertility. I have approached this installation wanting to conjure a theatrical and meditative space for you to transit and traverse, to walk through, to suspend your own reality, your own subjectivity, to feel what it feels like to bear the cross of infertility.

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         With these and other stories, plays, poems, monologues and art installations, I am composing a literary oeuvre that is at once intellectual and performative, tragic and comic––jocoserious, to use Joyce’s word, and which wrestles with fundamental questions facing 21st century Jews and women; questions of identity and memory, nature and nurture, sexuality, biology and culture, heritage and transmission. What does it mean to be Jewish, a woman, an artist today?  I posit these questions to myself and in my work over and over, turning them again and again, transmuting and translating them through different literary forms and genres. I am that kind of writer who, Elias Canetti wrote, is a “keeper of metamorphoses.”

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         A child and grandchild of survivors and refugees, I contend with abiding personal and catastrophic loss, with Holocaust memory and history, with how the personal becomes history and history, in turn, becomes personal. For, as (so to speak) a native-immigrant, I am always between memory and history. My poems, especially, are a literary space in which I  renew these questions and contentions within myself while turning them into works of imagination. How have Jews lived, how do they now live, between worlds, between cultures? What possibilities and choices of literary vision, forms and subjects, what realms of writing, comic and tragic, do they afford me? 

 

      I write with a style that is  ironic, tongue-in-cheek and feminist, and that can always elicit laughter and the unexpected insight from quintessentially ethical, profoundly philosophical questions, as well as from the perennial, universally unanswerable questions. “Not knowing is most intimate,” yes, and very funny too! As is Keats’ “negative capability.” As is Zbigniew Herbert’s “uncertain clarity.” And in my literary laughter, like the character in my poem “Eve Writ’s Travels,” I am neither young nor old. I too wait to womb the world.