By Melissa Quiter, TIWP Women’s Writing Program Reposted from https://momsgottawrite.com/2019/06/28/a-love-letter-to-jewish-summer-camp I sent my eldest off to camp this past Sunday. Two weeks away from home – no parents, siblings, TV. Only two books, one stuffy, and an open heart and mind. My relationship with Judaism is complicated and fraught with angst, and that’s another story. […]

By Elizabeth Kaur, TIWP Women’s Writing Program If you let it in, how bad would it be? Would it hurt too much? Would it remind you of the chocolates they gave you when your dad died? Would it remind you of when they told you he was traveling and that because, they said, you were […]

By Melissa Quiter, TIWP Women’s Writing Program Reposted from https://momsgottawrite.com/2019/08/12/guns-suck/ I often feel paralyzed by the gun violence plaguing this country, and after last week’s grotesque number of mass shootings – in Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton, Chicago, Brooklyn, and more – I was shocked to arrive at the park to find a dad distributing toy […]

By Elizabeth Kaur, TIWP Women’s Writing Program My father was born to parents who didn’t know sound, deaf mutes who found each other in the non-hearing community of 1920’s San Francisco. His Jewish father had fled Russia as The Revolution swelled, sheltered with his 16-year-old sister in the bathroom of the Trans-Siberian Express, coins for […]

By Lauren M. Fahrer, TIWP Women’s Writing Program I am bent, burnt and broken. I rise. I walked this path long before you arrived. I will be here long after you go. If I could tell you all my secrets, it would frighten you. It would give you reason to doubt humanity. But most of […]

By Cathy Lambert, TIWP Women’s Writing Program Walking down that oh-so-familiar path, surrounded by familiar sounds, familiar sights and familiar smells, I hear the blue jays and woodpecker’s overhead, boat motors in the distance, the gentle rhythm of the creek whirling over the stones it’s been polishing for hundreds of years, the steady rhythmic snapping […]

By Elizabeth Kaur, TIWP Women’s Writing Program We stopped to pick up the blue heron. It was waiting for us in that California-ware shop at Duncan’s Landing, near the end of the road that leaves Guerneville, the road that hugs the Russian River, winds through coastal redwoods, past the tin hut movie house in Monte […]

By Melissa Quiter, TIWP Women’s Writing Program Reposted from https://momsgottawrite.com/2018/07/06/harry-potter-the-daughter-of-terror/ Summer “break” began six days ago, and for my 7-year-old daughter, that means more time to read and play Harry Potter. She would scold me for saying “play,” because this is real life; it’s not a game. And after today’s Harry Potter pentathlon, I can […]

By Ariele Taylor-McManus, TIWP Women’s Writing Program Twelve rides her bike into town, as she does sometimes on Saturdays when her mom is working. Normally, she and Lida would go together, but today Lida has a softball game. When Twelve was younger, even as recently as a year ago, she used to stop for a […]

By Cathy Lambert, TIWP Women’s Writing Program What did I do? What did I say? Did I wear the wrong cloths or my hair the wrong way? We’ve been friends for so long, and I wanted to stay. But they all stopped talking to me; they wouldn’t even look my way. I was no longer […]