Jennifer Lang
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jennifer Lang lives in Tel Aviv, where she runs israelwriterstudio. Her prize-winning essays appear in Baltimore Review, Under the Sun, Midway Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is an Assistant Editor at Brevity. She runs Israel Writers Studio and practices/teaches yoga. Her award-winning Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature will be followed by Landed: A yogi's memoir in pieces & poses (10/15/2024) both with Vine Leaves Press.
What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?
Nora Krug's illustrated memoir, an expression I had never heard before, called Belonging
It's as if every book is written for the person reading it, so unique and colorful and complex and thought-provoking.
What do you worry about?
Will the place with which I have wrestled for over two decades, where my French husband and I have invested our life savings in a beautiful apartment, where two of our three adult children live, where our siblings and their families live, where my 93-year-old great aunt and her three grown sons and their children and grandchildren live, and with which I finally made peace and claimed as Home, survive and find the tools to help all who have endured tremendous trauma and loss over the past two months?
There are no more givens.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
I give it anywhere from 2-50 pages. About 15 years ago, I heard Francine Prose speak in Westchester, NY, where we were living at the time, after her new book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them was released (2007). During the Q & A, I raised my hand and said how much trouble I had sometimes with books, especially ones everyone was raving about, especially Oprah. Should I stick with it or not? She laughed and said something like life was short and why read if you don't like the story and gave me permission to judge a book not by its cover but by its first few pages and let go.
Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?
Lipsticks and tea towels since they are small and light and can always, easily fit into any carry-on.
Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?
French fluently though I have lost my reading and writing prowess and Hebrew well enough to converse with shopkeepers and follow exercises classes at the gym but read and write like a first grader.
I sometimes have words in French/Hebrew come to me or fit into my sentence better than in English. I occasionally find myself translating a word or expression from the other language to my own.
In my writing, I sprinkle in both languages, which play a huge part in my daily life married to a Frenchman, living in the heart of Tel Aviv. In my first book, Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature, I do it all over the place.
