Selected Writings
Queen of the Night:
What Blossoms in the Dark
by Geri Lipschultz
A Summary
It was only after I decided to teach writing that I realized the extent of my affair with the written word. Not only had my writing practice kept me from the brink, but my teaching had reinforced a fervent belief that it could do the same for others—that writing was a birthright, that it could not only save a person’s soul, but it could save the soul of a nation—and even possibly that of a species.
Such is the power of words that spring from thoughts and feelings harbored in the depths of ordinary people—people like me.
That an ordinary person could express themselves in words was not among the lessons I’d been taught in my years of study. But it was this one thought that drove me to teach writing.
Literature was never meant to be our closeted gems, but our air, food, shelter, water.
Writing as the people’s art—and art avgailable to anyone with access to the language.
An art dependent upon desire and tenacity, a willingness to subject oneself to its rigorous demands.
I look back with the lens of the writer that I am. I lived it with the lens of the writer I wanted to be, the one who for reasons that have to do with family of origin, with gender, with the generational norms cast upon a twenty-two-year-old in the early 1970s, meant that I suspected I would likely fail.
And yet, even in the face of that, I succeeded in publishing my first novel, albeit forty years after it was first penned.
I teach what I have learned, what my journey with the written word has shown me, namely that writing is a way for anyone to alchemize the darkness into light.
It’s Never Too Late to Bloom
by Geri Lipschultz
A Summary
Every writer has a writing story, but not everyone will keep going for forty years without a book they can claim as their own. I did not realize the muscles I would grow—I’m calling them muscles, but they are the rudiments of character. If I were a plant, you would call them stems and leaves and roots. I would learn to look for the light. I would learn to be proud of those stems and leaves—and mighty grateful.
And I would publish a book.
Nature provides us with so many examples of hope. The grass that emerges between slabs of cement, the tree whose roots inch their way around a mammoth boulder, the flower that withstands a first frost, the butterfly whose fragility—not to mention the fleeting nature of its life as such—is so apparent. That transition, wherever stationed, while vulnerable and lingering, waiting for large, wet, beautiful but ungainly wings to settle themselves before the readiness to launch into glorious flight.
It was writing that gave me wings.
No one told me that writing is there for anyone who has access to the language.
No one told me that writing can help you to know yourself—and to grow yourself.
No one told me that writing is self-healing if you are willing to try, willing to fail, willing to try again. As Samuel Beckett wrote, “Fail again, Fail better.”
Difficult times force us to confront ourselves, oddly presenting us with an opportunity for growth. I would realize that hope comes from self-empowerment, from courage in the face of despair. An unspoken promise that tenacity and resilience will bear fruit.
My story shows me as a late bloomer—although some would say I’ve been blooming all along. Still, mine is a story of tenacity—because at the heart of my turn toward writing over fifty years ago was an urgency to stay alive.