The power of a determined voice

When Sarah Aronson was a nine-year-old girl growing up in Pennsylvania, she writes in the Author's Note to her new book, Abzuglutely: Battling, Bellowing Bella Abzug (Calkins Creek, 2025), she learned about a woman named Bella with a strong New York accent and a powerful voice that let people know what she believed. 

Years later Aronson decided to write a picture book about her childhood heroine. 

Bella grew up as a young Jewish girl in the Bronx, the daughter of immigrants, Aronson tells us, and she was "never a sugar-and-spice gal." 

From her parents Bella learned about Tikkun olam--a Jewish value that means repairing the world and eliminating injustice and inequality. Determined to make a difference in the world, to make the world a better place, she devoted her life to bringing justice into the world for everyone, not just for Jews. 

With her big hats and loud voice, Bella could be seen as a strident example of how a woman should not behave. But for many Bella was leading the way to help make the world a better place, just as she'd hoped to do as a child. 

Bella's voice made a difference in the world, Aronson tells us. Bella became a lawyer. She raised money for causes and organizations that she believed deserved support. She led protests and fought for the rights of women and equal rights and education for everyone. She organized large rallies against the Vietnam War.

She stood up to one of the most despicable senators in American history--Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. She believed in protecting the environment. She believed in racial equality. She believed in social justice. 

As Aronson writes, "Bella was a trailblazer." She became the second Jewish woman to serve in Congress, and her victory was proof, as Aronson explains, that the voices of young girls and women matter in the world. 

If you speak like Bella with courage and passion for what matters to you, Aronson suggests, you can make a difference in people's lives.

In the end, Bella's story is a story about the courage to stand out and be yourself, to use your voice to call out injustice, to believe in yourself as a woman who has the power to change things and not submit to society's expectations of women as weak or subservient. It's a story about speaking your truth to the world.

But Bella's story is also a story about love--not just about Bella's love of justice and fairness for all but of Aronson's love for Bella, a woman who showed the author when she was a young Jewish girl growing up in Pennsylvania that she could be a girl with a strong voice who didn't have to be someone she wasn't, and that she could grow up to become a woman with a strong voice of her own... speaking and writing her own truth. 

Bravo, Bella, and bravo, Sarah Aronson, for inspiring young people--both girls and boys--to be themselves, to make the world a fair place for all, and to not shy away from speaking and writing the truth.

For more information about Abzuglutely, take a look at these reviews:

School Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

The Horn Book

And for more information about Sarah Aronson, visit her website: 

https://saraharonson.com/

Finding Your Way Home

"Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn." -- Leo Tolstoy

"Light will someday split you open." -- Hafez

As you write into the unknown, swimming alone for weeks and weeks (and often for years and years), it's not always easy to find your way home.

You may look up from the page one day and find yourself far from shore, disoriented, unable to see the shoreline, unsure of what direction to swim in.

If only the sweeping beam of light from a lighthouse could guide you back to land.

But, alas, there is no lighthouse.

You are swimming in water that is deep and dark, and your arms are tired after swimming for so long, and you can barely kick, and you are close to sinking in a story that no longer makes sense.

It can feel like you’re drowning and that you will never reach solid ground again.

It’s just you… and the deep, dark water… and the empty sky…and your story, and words swirling in your head, and a faint whisper of a voice pleading with you: please, please, keep writing!

But how can you keep writing?

How can you find the strength within to keep going?

At some point you might stop to tread water and gain a little extra energy from the pause in your stroke.

Or you might float on your back for a while to rest and catch your breath.

Taking a break is always a possibility, an essential one at times for the future survival of your project (and for yourself as a writer).

But here’s the thing. After you rest and start swimming again, you may still not be sure what direction to swim in. (And remember there are sharks. There are always sharks.)

In the darkness, you keep wishing for a light to guide you.

If only there was a light.

And the thing is … there is always a light.

It’s the light that burns inside you like an eternal flame, a flame that will light your way and strengthen you once you become aware of its presence.

Most importantly, its light will help you remember what led you so far from shore in the first place.

It's this flame’s brightness that has the power to inspire you … and to reveal the way back to shore.

Remember: your inner light will always show you the way home.

End of Year Musings

It’s the end of the year and who can count how many hours we’ve sat at our desks waiting for words while the minutes passed by and our lives slipped off in directions that we could never have predicted?

Who can count the number of words or sentences or stanzas that we’ve written or the journal pages onto which we’ve poured our hearts?

Each year December comes like this, dark and dreary, with freezing rain and sleeting snow and a sense of doubt and hopelessness—and yes, with regrets, too—and then the sun makes its turn, and days begin to lengthen again as the earth sails into a new year.

And just as surely as the return of the sun and the dispersal of darkness, our words come, too—if we believe in the process and in ourselves—shyly, at first, perhaps, but they come again with a fresh urgency and need, seeping up out of the thawing ground, pouring forth like a melting stream onto a new page.

If we can hold onto our belief through the darkness and doldrums and frigid days of silence, if we can trust in this mysterious process to bring us what we need when we need it, if we can keep sitting at our desks and doing our work, waiting however long we might need to wait, then we can say we have written without regrets.

We’ve done our best.

And that is all anyone can ask.

It doesn’t matter whether we write fiction or poetry, memoirs or investigative journalism, short stories or novels, journal entries, notes on scraps of paper, forgotten thoughts in the margins of books that we've loved over the past year.

What matters is that we are still writing, still using pen and paper to explore the world and our life, still curious about what we might be thinking and eager to find out (thanks to the words that we put on paper) what thoughts are swirling through our heads, what emotions are hiding in our hearts.

It takes a stubborn determination and unrelenting perseverance to write.

Some writers may give up after only a few minutes of facing a blank page, the critical voices in our heads growing louder and louder until the voices become unbearable and we can’t stand to hear them anymore and have to push away from the desk and shout “Enough!” 

But other writers may just glare at the blank page and say, “Really? You think you can scare me? You think you can win?” And we stand up and go into the kitchen and brew a fresh pot of coffee, or steal a cookie from the cookie jar, and return to our desks and wait for the words to come.

And we wait for as long as we need to wait believing that patience is stronger than impatience and that words are stronger than silence.

Thanks to all for stopping by Wordswimmer this past year. Your presence in the water has helped keep me afloat more than you can know. May the the year ahead bring you a sweet-flowing river of words and stories.

A Dry Heart

Failure to sell your work, and the rejection that accompanies such failure, can eat away at your heart until there’s nothing left but a shell pumping blood but no longer pumping words. A dry heart.

It can happen to you if you’re not careful or vigilant enough, if you’re not aware of the words dwindling or the sentences shrinking or the desire drying up.

It’s a disease, this dry heart. Invisible. Silent. Before you know it, it has stolen your voice, and your pen stops moving across the page, and you can read but the words of others only echo in your ears, never penetrating that space where your own words used to form like new currents in a stream.

It’s like living outside of words, outside the world of words and stories that you used to inhabit. Now you are an outsider looking in.

How words begin to flow again is different for each of us.

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of time and letting the disease of dry heart take its course. It will leave like a drought when the clouds come and drops of rain and words begin to fall, and you can only wait.

For others it’s a refusal to wait; they dig, drill, and search in desperation each day for new sources of water to carry them through the drought.

For some there is no cure. Once dry heart strikes, the heart withers, words die, and the writer is gone, in the same way that grasses and wildflowers dry up and die, never to return.

To keep dry heart at bay, to keep your heart filled with words, you need to fill it with hope and faith.

You need to continue to believe in the possibility of finding stories wherever you might find them—in the aisles of a grocery store, in the waiting room of a car repair shop, on a bus or a beach, in books, in movies, on Facebook and Twitter.

Listening for stories—it’s what can keep your heart alive.

So can writing in a journal, even gibberish, day after day. The simple (or not-so-simple) act of writing can prime the pump so that when you’re ready to begin, your well has remained full, and your words are there, at the tip of your pen, ready to flow onto the page.

To keep dry heart at bay, you need to surround yourself with people who believe in you.

You need to read interviews with other writers to find out how they have combatted dry heart to keep writing.

You need to read.

If you can’t read, you need to watch Netflix, or you need to go to the movies, all for the sake of hearing and seeing stories.

If you can’t watch TV, then you need to sit in the park and listen to nature spin its ongoing story of seasons changing, of life and death, and of returning to life.

Each year we tell ourselves a different story. 

What story will we tell ourselves this year, I wonder, to prompt the words to flow again?

Are You A Writer?

Can you accept imperfection?

Can you accept that you'll need to revise again and again (and still again), that the word you're looking for may not appear until the twentieth or thirtieth draft? 

Can you accept that one day your writing will flow like wine and the next day the well may run dry and all you can do is sit at your desk and stare for hours at an empty screen?

Can you accept that one scene on a given day may work beautifully but adding another scene on the following day may make the previous scene unnecessary?

Can you accept that the purpose of your first draft is to lead you to your second draft and the purpose of the second draft is to lead you to your third, on and on until the story comes together?

Can you live for days or months or years with failure (which is what others will call your efforts if you don't publish your work) and accept that those---who see not publishing as failure---fail themselves to understand writing as an ongoing process?

Can you accept the unexpected mountains that you'll have to climb and the unanticipated twists and turns in the road and enjoy the journey for its own sake, not for where the road might take you but for the pure pleasure of being on the road?

Can you accept that you'll find others on the road who will try to discourage you from continuing on your journey (and yet you still keep writing)?

Can you hold fast to your own belief in yourself?

Can you steer through darkness by the solitary flame of hope that burns in your heart?

Can you find joy in writing with or without financial gain or reward or recognition?

Can you keep writing so that at the end of your journey, when you no longer have the strength to lift a pen but still feel the desire to write, you can say you gave your best?

Then, perhaps, you are a writer. 

A Snail’s Pace

This little guy, this snail (possibly known as the Globose Button or Mesomphix globosus, although I’m not a snail expert so I can’t be certain) is my hero, an inspiration for writers everywhere.

I love the patient way this snail moves, accepting the pace of his life as he inches forward without regard for what other species might think of him.

I love how he carries his shell on his back with pride. It reminds me of the way a writer carries his stories in an invisible sack in his imagination.

In each case the snail and the writer carry their homes—the shell and the sack of stories—with them, except one home is visible and the other invisible.

Most of all, I love the way the snail is absorbed in the task at hand, unperturbed by obstacles, focused on what he needs to do in order to take that next step, and the next, to reach his destination.

Of course, a snail doesn’t have an editor breathing down his neck shouting about a missed deadline. A snail doesn't need to worry about a broken computer keyboard or power outage or an empty ink cartridge.

Nor does the snail, I suspect, feel the same frustration as a writer at having to retrace his steps to find a different route, even after having gone many miles in the wrong direction.

But I love the snail’s devotion to movement, his persistence, his willingness to stick his head out and take risks, his desire to see just a little further than he might have been able to see from inside the safety of his shell.

The snail is such a vulnerable creature. His slow pace makes him ideal food for birds of prey, I suspect. And yet he keeps sticking his neck out, taking risks, searching for something that he hasn’t yet found. 

One step at a time—the snail is, after all, a monopod—he heads in a direction guided by some inner voice, some mysterious inner compass.

If a snail can listen to that inner voice and follow its own mysterious inner compass, so can we, don't you think?

If you want to see the grace, curiosity, and patience of the snail, click on this link to watch a brief YouTube video: http://www.jaxshells.org/treexx.htm