Fifty years since our first date

In a couple of days, on June 24, 2026, it will be the fiftieth anniversary of my first date with my husband, and I can't resist marking the occasion with a celebratory post. If you'd told us that evening that we were launching a fifty-year relationship, we'd have laughed our heads off.

We met at the Free Association, an anarchist free school on West 20th Street off Fifth Avenue long before that block's gentrification. After a few months of snappy banter and a couple of heated political disputes, he invited me out for a beer at Paula's, a lesbian bar on West 11th Street off Greenwich Avenue in the Village. Both places are long gone, but Paula's was resurrected briefly in the alternative New York of Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022). As his character Bernie Rhodenbarr says, “There were guys who came there on a regular basis, and not to hit on lesbians. I guess they liked the atmosphere." We were so skeptical about the evening going well that we each invited a friend along.

We had little in common beyond our zest for political dialectic—the left’s fancy word for arguing at that time. And we both were readers. My favorite book was Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. I was also reading P.D. James, Ellis Peters, and Patricia Moyes. He was reading Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, and Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. By two years later, much had changed. In a poem titled “Insomnia,”* I wrote nostalgically about

. . . love among the leaflets and petitions
we had no place else to go
all we had then is gone
the strangeness, the friendships, the poverty
we have nothing left of that
except each other

Change is a constant in a fifty-year relationship. At the beginning, nobody thought we’d stay together, including us. Today, we’re still discovering unexpected ways in which we’re so different we’d be incompatible if we hadn’t also spent fifty years on working out how to get along. When we married, we talked about growing old together but didn't quite believe it would happen or could have imagined what it would be like. He’s retired and I’m in that liminal space between setting myself a rigorous standard of productivity and doing as much or as little as I like, happy as a bee knee deep in pollen.

He’s currently reading The Triangle of Power by Alexander Stubb, current president and former prime minister of Finland. I read a book a day or sometimes two in three days. Right now I’m particularly enjoying Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, a riff on the Holmes canon that may be my favorite since Laurie King created Mary Russell. On our various electronic devices, I stream videos, mostly French and Korean series, also British and other English-language cop shows, rarely American. He hangs out online with global gaming friends he’s made over the years, listens to short story podcasts, and watches videos on art restoration, cooking, archaeology, and what’s going on in the world. I can’t get him to watch a movie with me, even on the rare occasion when it’s one I think we’d both enjoy. As I said, we’re different.

A lot of people ask us how we make it work. Certain aspects anyone can try at home (that’s the work). For the rest, you have to be lucky. You have to love each other (that’s the luck). It takes a lot of work, especially if you’re different: talking to each other; not always being right; letting go of expectations, including that you’ll agree on everything and do everything together. You can’t expect perfection. It doesn’t exist. You find that your beliefs and ways of doing things are not the absolutes you thought they were. What a liberating surprise, once you get used to the idea.


*included in my first poetry collection, I Am the Daughter, and in a volume of Best Poems of 1980 (Monitor)

The Unique Art of Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam Self-Portrait

Last fall, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced a retrospective exhibition of the work of Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. (His mother was Congolese and Spanish, his father Chinese.) But what caught my attention was an article in the newsletter of the Archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALBA), which detailed Lam's participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, when idealistic )social democrats and Communists banded together in a doomed attempt to stop a takeover by General Franco and his allies, Hitler and Mussolini.

The Civil War

From this perspective, "it was Republican Spain, where Lam frequented left-wing circles and read Marxist literature, which first politicized the painter. Lam rejected the Eurocentric primitivism of much modernist art, which he denounced for commodifying non-European cultures as objects of curiosity. In Lam’s paintings, Afro-Cuban culture speaks back. Toward the end of his life, he described his work as 'an act of decolonization.'” In Paris, Lam had close ties with Picasso and other European artists and writers. His painting, The Civil War, conveys the same anguish and chaos as Picasso's Guernica. Lam's, like many of his later works, was painted on brown wrapping paper, because canvas was expensive.

Lam and Picasso

On his return to Cuba in 1941, Lam became involved in Afro-Cuban culture and spirituality, both the Négritude movement of poet and theoretician Aimé Césaire and the spiritual practice of Lucumi. He said, “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but fully expressing the black spirit, the beauty of black [visual] art.” (wifredolam.org/biography) His magnificent painting, The Jungle, the centerpiece of the 2025-26 MoMA show, created a scandal at one of its first showings at a gallery in New York. When the Museum first acquired it in 1945, they hung it inconspicuously next to the coat check. Lam said, “I could have been a good painter from the School of Paris, but I felt like a snail out of its shell. What really broadened my painting is the presence of African poetry.”

Enough words. The paintings speak for themselves. I'm sorry if you missed the MoMA exhibition, which ended on April 11. I don't always have a visceral experience at the art museum, but I found Lam's work thrilling and unique.

The Jungle

Oggue Orissa

Body and Soul

Song of Osmoses (Bombing of Hiroshima)

Malembo, God of Crossroads

Grief of Spain references both the Civil War and images of African masks that influenced the Cubists in Paris. Lam would later criticize them for appropriating African motifs.

How do writers look at success?

Liz Zelvin with Lee Child

I have rubbed shoulders with a few writers whose success can be measured by the traditional yardsticks of fame and fortune: name recognition, sales in the millions, and New York Times bestsellers. (In the case of Lee Child, the shoulder-rubbing is figurative, since in terms of height as well as achievement, Lee's a mountain to my mole hill, even in this 2010 photo, when I was several inches taller than I am now.) For literary novelists, winning a Pulitzer or National Book Award are unassailable marks of success. For mystery writers, becoming an MWA Grand Master or winning an Edgar Award may be equivalent measures. For short story writers, a Pushcart Prize, a story published in The New Yorker, or a cover or lead story in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine has cachet. A novel or novella turned into a "major motion picture," aka a movie, or a popular TV series denotes success. Even making a yearly income the writer can live on is what many of the writer's peers would call success.

But what if none of these marks of traditional success comes your way? Can you still call yourself a success as a writer?

There's been a lot of talk on the Short Mystery list recently about the demise of markets and the lack of opportunity to make a living as well as the joys of getting a story accepted, especially in a milestone event eg for the first time or to a prestigious market. This made me think about my own measures of success, since I concluded years ago that both my successes and failures as a writer are genuine and made my peace with them. The failures have nothing to do with my talent or hard work as a writer, seventy plus years into my career. I can reframe them as disappointments, setbacks, or learning experiences, and let them go. The successes, whatever form they take for me, can bring me satisfaction, even joy, if I let them.

Here's an event that felt like success to me last month: my first novel, first published in hardcover by a major publisher 18 years ago, had two new readers on Kindle Unlimited, and other Kindle readers bought two novels, a novella, and one short story in the series, all but the novella originally published before e-books existed. I still have readers! New readers! They read the first novel and want to read the entire series all these years later. The numbers are minuscule and the royalties, especially for Kindle Unlimited, microscopic, but having new readers makes me feel I've succeeded as a writer.

Liz reads at Poets House, NYC

Moving the reader—or an audience—also makes me feel I've succeeded as a writer. My goal has never been fame and fortune in the first place, at least not since I passed my early twenties, when it hadn't happened, and I developed some common sense. I write to say what I have to say and make my readers laugh and cry. Finally, I believe I've succeeded as a writer because I know beyond all doubt that as a result of applying rigorous craft to an innate gift over many decades, I write well. Could I write Shakespeare's plays? No. Could a barrel of monkeys write my short stories? No.

I asked fellow members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society what defines success for them as writers. None of them fall into the rich and famous category, though quite a number of them are well published and winners of multiple prestigious awards.

Jeff Markowitz agrees with me about writing well: "The quality of the work itself may be the best measure of success. It's the one that keeps me in front of my computer, working on the next project."

Josh Pachter, who's been publishing for more than fifty years and had his share of kudos, says, "There's really only one metric by which I measure capital-S Success, and that's Am I having fun?"

Gary Earl Ross says, "After a ceremony honoring one of my old students, she introduced me to friends as her English professor and said she still needed to read my last book. I felt part of something much bigger than myself, the same way I feel when I interact with other writers. We’re rich in the ways that matter most."

Joseph S. Walker's views are similar. "I write because it's fun, it's personally fulfilling, and it's occasionally rewarding. It's the best way I've found of engaging with the world." Success? Joe says it's "having a story published because an editor/publisher liked it and accepted it (and, ideally, paid me for it); to keep writing, and to have the sense that I'm improving; to keep challenging myself to do new things--which takes me past the act of actually writing and into the broader world of being a writer. And finally--yes, knowing that a story has reached readers and, ideally, that they liked it. There are lots of ways in which you can learn that the story you threw out into the world actually meant something to somebody."

In the end, for each of us, success constitutes a unique blend of what writing means to us and what our work means to others.

"At the best of times when I write, when I'm done for the day I feel as if I'm coming out of a trance. It's gratifying." - Terry Shames

"The joy of having something in print—and having a reader tell me that they enjoyed something of mine they’ve read—is more of a high for me than a paycheck. Success also means finishing a story the way I imagined it in my head—that the pacing, voice, characterization and connections are all right and I’ve done my job properly. Even if no one reads a piece I write, I’ll know if it feels right to me." - Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier

"I regard myself as a successful working writer. I'll probably never make a lot of money at this, but I will be leaving a legacy, and a body of work. That gives me satisfaction." - A.L. Sirois

"It's your ability to write something that readers like and enjoy and love and can't put down. It's damned hard to involve readers with your writings to that extent, that they keep thinking about it for days and weeks afterward (or months and years)! - Yoshinori Todo

"I want everything to sell, the new and the old. Last month I sold one of my earliest mysteries and the newest one as well as a fantasy. I keep having new ideas; I’m not just finishing out old series. That is definitely success. I keep tackling new ways of doing things or learning something. That’s success because it means I’m still curious and accepting challenges. - Emily Dunn

"I write because I enjoy it. I like that there are a few people who say to me, "When is the next book coming out?" I am enjoying my life and, to me, that is the most important thing. As an older adult, I have found that those who feel most satisfied with their life - at this stage - are those who are doing, or have done, what they enjoy." - Elena Smith

"When a reader tells me they read and enjoyed my book, it puts me over the moon. I once had a woman I'd not met yet come to a sales event and tell me she came specifically to see me. That made my day far more than the sales did." - Rosalie Spielman

"A girl I met when she was four years old, sitting on her front porch reading, is now 35 and teaches high school language arts. She has influenced thousands of students to read and write. She says it’s all because she met me, because she saw me writing, and because I allowed her to go through my home library and borrow anything, any time she wanted to. Over the years, she’s kept up with every single one of my publications, read them and commented on them. That to me is success." - Bobbi Chukran

"I write almost daily. Love every minute. The pleasure is profound because I do exactly what I want to do. That is my measure of success. I've never been happier." - Wil Emerson

"I once got an email from a woman in Canada who was cleaning out her mother’s house after she died. She said she found a stack of my books. She hadn’t known her mother liked mysteries, and now she was reading them. That email was such a treat. A word of enthusiasm from a stranger once in a while can make all the difference." - Susan Oleksiw

"Writing from the heart, telling a story the way I want to tell it, and receiving positive reader feedback - that's success." - Catherine Dilts

Elizabeth Zelvin writes the Bruce Kohler Mysteries, the Mendoza Family Saga, and the Emerald Love Urban Fantasy Mysteries. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle (2025) is Liz's third poetry collection over fifty years as a published poet.

My Novel Picks for the Edgars

The Edgars, awarded annually by Mystery Writers of America, are mystery and crime writing's Oscars. As Best Picture is the Holy Grail of the Oscars, so Best Novel is the Holy Grail of the Edgars. Over time, MWA has chipped away at the main fiction category with separate awards for Best First Novel by An American Author and Best Paperback/E-Book Original as well as not-quite-Edgars. These include the Sue Grafton Award for a novel with a "strong, independent woman who is a professional investigator" as protagonist; the Mary Higgins Clark Award for a novel with "nice young woman whose life is suddenly invaded" as protagonist; and the Lilian Jackson Braun Award, for a "contemporary cozy mystery" that must be "light in tone, often humorous. While the book may reference serious themes or subject matter, it does so in a non-heavy-handed manner." This leaves Best Novel to some extent to literary crime or crime-adjacent fiction and what I still can't help thinking of as "boy books."

I'm a longtime member of DorothyL, a venerable online mystery lovers group of eclectic readers, including many writers and other crime and mystery professionals. In recent years, many of them have never heard of most of the Edgar nominees. This year, in a field of three men and four women contenders for Best Novel, we all knew veteran bestsellers Robert Crais and Scott Turow. Collectively, we considered their current books up to standard but not outstanding. Our first and second place 2025 Favorites votes went to Sally Smith, Of Mice and Murder, whose protagonist is a barrister in the Inner Temple in 1901; and Allison Montclair, An Excellent Thing In A Woman. The sleuths in this brilliant series, which always makes DorothyL's top ten list but has never been nominated for an Edgar, are a pair of formidable and delightful women running a marriage bureau in post-World War II London.

It seemed only fair to check out the Edgar nominees. My rule is to read on only if I'm enjoying what I'm reading. If the story doesn't grab me or the voice fails to appeal, that's it. No dutiful turning of pages because a book's been praised or because it's literature. So I'm not saying that my picks for Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Paperback Original are the books I think will win the Edgars on April 29. They're the three nominated books, one in each of these categories, that I read with enjoyment and appreciation.

Best Novel: Allison Epstein, Fagin the Thief
In this brilliant and compassionate twist on a Dickens classic, Epstein blows away the thick fog of anti-Semitism that allowed Dickens to describe Fagin the master pickpocket merely as a Jew for his readers to supply the stereotypes—small, contemptible, avaricious, heartless—and need to know nothing more about him to despise him and wish him a bad end. Instead, Epstein gives us Jacob Fagin, Jewish survivor, profoundly alone and not without heart.

Jacob loves three people in his life. His mother Leah nurtures him, reads to him, and believes in him. When Leah dies, Jacob blames God, turns his back on the Jewish community, strips himself of faith, vowing never to love again. Then he takes in a thirteen-year-old boy with nowhere to go, Bill Sikes, and teaches him the trade of thieving. He's played Pygmalion before, but this time he creates, not a Galatea, but a Frankenstein monster: a giant filled with rage and incapable of controlling his impulses. Enter Nancy Reed—again, it's Epstein who gives her the dignity of two names—a pickpocket as skilled as Fagin himself. When they work a crowd together, they're like partners in a dance. Nancy has charisma. She has only to enter a tavern to light up the room. When she stands on the table and sings, hardened criminals and down at heel old soldiers and sailors sing along. For Fagin, it's not a romantic love, but she is precious to him.

Epstein picks the right moment to challenge anti-Semitism, which is raising its ugly head again all over the world. She also takes on our current stereotypes of exploitation of child labor and domestic violence. Of course these abuses are genuine and widespread in the real world. But what goes on in Fagin's world is more nuanced. Fagin's school for thieves consists of children as young as six whom no one else wants. They come to him cold and starving. He gives them shelter, food, clothing, and a sense of family. He also teaches them a trade that will allow them to eat from day to day, which is the reason he picks pockets himself and always has been. He is a good teacher. He makes sure they excel because he wants them to survive.

Bill Sikes and Nancy Reed fall in love at first sight—both of them. It has the quality of a great love story, even a love triangle. Jacob, with his love-hate relationship with jealous, dangerous Bill and his concern for Nancy's safety, is the third. For more, you'll have read the book. It's beautifully written, well researched, and a satisfying story.

Best First Novel by An American Author: Zoe B. Wallbrook, History Lessons
Wallbrook gives us a Black feminist perspective on academe red in tooth and claw in a savvy, distinctive, and often hilarious voice and a clever mystery that keeps the surprises coming.

Newly hired assistant history professor Daphne Ouverture, "a Bambi in the eyes of her colleagues," has to deal with all the usual tenure battles, shredding of reputations, sexual shenanigans, and plagiarized student papers in the age of AI, along with the traditional sexism and racism that clings like ivy to the older tenured white male professors. The rich intellectual and cultural context of Daphne's life makes this book far more than just another academic mystery.

   Daphne, Sadie, and Elise became best friends after finding one another at some university-sponsored mixer for faculty of color last term. Daphne thought she had been making do just fine with her white colleagues—until Elise and Sadie barged into her life. ...The conversation took off the moment Daphne and Elise realized they'd been raised by tough, immigrant mothers. At some point when swapping strategies for surviving varying punishment methods, a tall Brown Amazonian goddess..had leaned across the bar and asked if she could compare notes. By the third margarita, they were screaming with laughter about the merits of surviving middle school with a mother who refused to pack sandwiches like the white moms. By one in the morning, the trio was dancing to Lil Wayne at a bar downtown and making plans to meet for brunch the next day.
   Brunch lasted approximately ten minutes. ...They'd napped away the rest of the day in Sadie's living room like toddlers at preschool until their hunger woke them up. ...Something had clicked for Daphne that day—an actual physical feeling of her brain making sense of herself. Sadie and Elise had gifted her with the greatest freedom through their friendship. The freedom to be her most honest, messiest self.

Daphne tells Elise about a disastrous first date.

     "Did he like your story about Belgium, at least?" Elise asked.

     "You mean how nineteenth-century Belgian colonial administrators in the Congo dismembered indigenous Africans for the purpose of scaring local villagers into creating profit for their newly emerging rubber industry?...No, Elise, it turns out that explaining the evils of late-nineteenth-century European imperialism on a first date isn't exactly a seductive move."

The mystery itself is the murder of Sam Taylor, the university's most popular professor, a rising star whom everybody loved—or did they? a man who could do no wrong—or had he? Daphne finds herself increasingly embroiled in the investigation, which is somehow connected to her. This complicates her growing interest in Rowan, a former cop turned bookseller, who works with the police. She can't walk away, because for some reason, Sam's death has earned her enemies who threaten her career and perhaps her life.

Best Paperback Original: Abbi Waxman, One Death At A Time
I'm not usually a fan of Hollywood or LA novels, but the sleuthing duo in this one won me over: Natasha Mason, age twenty-five, three years sober, recovering from alcohol, drugs, and intrusive psychiatrist parents in Berkeley; and Julia Mann, age sixtysomething, fading Hollywood star: formerly famous, still glamorous, served her time for murdering one husband and can't remember if she killed the one who's been found floating dead in her swimming pool, because she was in an alcoholic blackout at the time. Mason volunteers to be Julia's interim AA sponsor and finds herself cast as personal assistant, dogsbody, chauffeur, and unlicensed PI charged with detecting the real killer, preferably before Julia is convicted of the murder.

I'm a pushover for funny books about recovery from alcoholism and addictions, and this one is both on target about what it's like and very funny indeed. The wisecracking narrative voice elicits not only laughter but compassion for both protagonists, who start out bristling with antagonism toward each other and slowly form an unlikely alliance that works for both of them and satisfies the reader. The mystery is convoluted and takes in the machinations of the varied participants in the complicated business of making movies.

Applying the Bechdel Test to Real Life

SleuthSister Melodie Campbell and I have written about the Bechdel Test, a measure of whether a movie has 1. two named female characters; 2. who talk to one another; 3. about something other than a man. Both Melodie and I came up with excellent lists of movies that met the Bechdel criteria, neither of which included most of the movies our SleuthBrothers spend a lot of what journalists used to call column inches writing about.

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2024/06/sleuthsisters-movies-and-bechdel-test.html
https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2024/06/sleuthsisters-movies-and-bechdel-test_01994901369.html

The thought that bubbled up one morning, as I lay in that state between sleeping and waking when so many of my creative notions come to me, was that it might be illuminating to apply the Bechdel standard to real life. We get a strong cultural message that when women talk to each other, it is mostly about "men," as in the award-winning country song: I'm gonna love you forever/ forever and ever, amen/ as long as old men sit and talk about the weather/ as long as old women sit and talk about old men... or in these enlightened times, about intimate relationships regardless of gender—or else about sex, clothes, and shopping, as in Sex in the City. Maybe that describes some women's lives, but it has nothing to do with mine.

So what do I talk about with the women in my life?

Let's start with my SleuthSisters: Melodie Campbell and Eve Fisher, with whom I share an ongoing conversation via daily comments on the SleuthSayers blog posts, sometimes joined by Janice Law and blog newcomer Anna Scotti on literature, writing, language, movies and tv; and on to one-on-one emails for fuller exchanges on politics; sharing, comparing, and discussing our own childhoods, ethnicities, families, and environments; telling funny stories, and laughing at each other’s jokes.

I meet weekly on Zoom with a group of women in our sixties, seventies, and eighties to discuss how we experience the aging process. There's a lot of common ground as well as striking differences in how we're doing and how we're taking getting older. Many of us have become friends who stay in touch via group and individual texts as well as phone calls and Zoom visits. Some conversations are the proverbial “organ recital” of consequences of aging, from deficits in hearing, mobility, and memory to diagnoses such as Parkinson’s, heart disease, and cancer to procedures from colonoscopy to hip and knee replacement to nuisances like shrinking in height. We also talk about our children, grandchildren, and aging parents if we still have them. We also talk about retirement, which everybody perceives differently; creativity, which does not diminish with age; travel, which some of us do extensively; and how we use structured and unstructured time. We talk about loss, death, and sexuality from the perspective of aging women, which is a far cry from "talking about old men." We talk about self-care, including exercise, bodywork, spiritual practice of various kinds. Occasionally we talk about our childhoods and families. And like everybody else in these complicated times, we compare notes on how we deal with the state of the world without freaking out.

As for my longtime friends of sixty and seventy years: what don’t we talk about! My surviving friends in other countries (six in France, one each in the Netherlands, UK, Africa, and Australia) are always interested in my perspective on what’s happening in the US, political, economic, and sociological. With my Jewish women friends from childhood on, I always had a tremendous amount of common ground. Now political challenges have fragmented our opinions, but we still call on longtime affection and frankness to connect with each other across various divides. So we still talk about family, aging, losses, life cycle changes, activities and new ventures, the organ recital, what the kids and grandkids are doing, and what happened to the world we tried so hard to make a better place.

What about my most active friendships? With one friend, who lives in New York, I talk about the state of academia, finances, and music. With another, who lives in San Francisco and whom I've known since we were eleven, we talk about our mothers and our sisters; good food—she's a recreational cook, and we both live in foodie cities; memories, mutual friends, and losses; she talks about Bay Area culture, I about New York museums and concerts; she about her activities, bocce and knitting, I about my writing, my mystery activities, my garden, my photography, my ocean swimming, and my relationship with Central Park.

We all have plenty to talk about besides men!

Groundhog Day: Do you need to do it again?

Today is Groundhog Day, a peculiarly American holiday—or is it? It evolved from the medieval Christian celebration of Candlemas, to which weather prognostications involving the European hedgehog were added in Germany. When Germans emigrated to Western Pennsylvania, according to the website of the Punxutawney Groundhog Club, they chose a similar hibernating animal from among the local fauna. The first such festival in Punxutawney, PA recorded in the newspaper took place in 1886. Does the eponymous groundhog, Punxutawney Phil, ever really see his shadow? If he does, do six more weeks of winter follow? Does it matter? Does anyone care? The multitudes who flock to Punxutawney on February 2nd every year are surely folks who seize any excuse to join a crowd, make a noise, and enjoy whatever refreshments are on offer.

Since 1991, the term Groundhog Day has come to mean more than an annual weather prediction wrapped in a fur coat for all seasons. Bill Murray's portrayal of a cynical reporter who gets trapped in a time loop in Punxutawney became a movie classic, and his dilemma has become a metaphor for having to do something—in particular, to do it badly or to make mistakes—over and over until you get it right.

It's not much of a leap to the idea that there's something wrong with doing anything once. In our own field, I've heard numerous discussions in which some writers claim that if you're really a writer, you write every day...or if you're really a writer, you always want to write...or if you're really a writer, you'll never want to stop writing for good. If that's true, how do you explain Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird, which more readers than not consider the best novel of the twentieth century? It's the only novel she wrote. Wasn't Harper Lee really a writer? (I refuse to consider the unedited version that was published when she was 102 and imo incompetent to say no a second novel.) Of course she was.

In any endeavor, "doing it again" is considered the seal of approval on anything you do once, whether it's visiting Paris in the spring, whale watching off Cape Cod, sailing in the Caribbean, skiing in the Alps, or whatever you happen to think is exciting or romantic or adventurous. "This is wonderful!" you say. "We have to do it again." This sets you up for disappointment and a sense of failure, or at least a nagging feeling that you've missed out on the best that life has to offer. Because life is full of new experiences, as well as time-consuming challenges and catastrophes. You never do get back to Paris or the Alps, or not in spring or skiing season.

The older I get, the more I let go of preconceptions, ambitions, and burning desires that seemed immutable when I was younger. Last month I wrote about not having to live forever. Today, Groundhog Day reminds me that the things I have done once are sufficient unto themselves. I detest the marketing phrase "making memories." When you're there, wherever it is, be there. But I do have some perfect jewels that are my memories of experiences I have had once: visiting Timbuktu in 1965, camping in Yosemite in 1975. Not only could these experiences not be recreated, but Timbuktu has changed in 60 years, as has Yosemite—or camping in Yosemite—in 50 years. The world is not so welcoming; the wild is not so wild. I settled for a tame environment, ie a hotel pool, for swimming with dolphins in Hawaii. The dolphin kissed me on the lips and swam between my legs. It was enough for both of us.

Then there are physical experiences that I never would have mastered. I'm glad I did them once.

Skiing: the smell of cold andevergreen, blue shadows on snow and white birch, the crunch of snow as I told myself over and over to keep my weight on the downhill ski. I made it down the novice slope triumphantly. Riding a horse: okay, three times: once at age 6, once at age 23 with a Western saddle, once in my 50s with an English saddle, never faster than a walk, thank God, even when we unexpectedly met a deer on the trail through the brush. Just enough. Flying a plane: I logged 30 hours in a Cessna 150. The “once” would have been when I soloed, but I had to quit before that happened. I confess I was relieved.

A few more experiences that could only have happened once:

Visiting Narita-san Temple in Japan, ten minutes by train from the Narita Airport that serves Tokyo. We were on our way to my son's wedding in Manila. A French artist friend and his Brazilian wife turned our dreary stopover into a magical side trip. It was February: almond blossoms and light snow were falling.

Chipping rock for garnets on a mountain in Vermont in 1950. I was six years old, at summer camp, and only remembered this recently. This is definitely illegal now; I don't know about then.

An English country house weekend fifty years ago. No, there was no murder. Yes, I fell in love. I eventually got six poems, three flash stories, and, um, a great deal of emotional growth out of it. I didn’t need to do it again. I didn't even need to write a novel.

Do you have a memorable experience you've always said you have to do again? On reflection, can you leave it at that memorable once?

What Happened to Living Forever?

I've written so many January posts about why I don't make New Year's resolutions that I'll mention only two points: one, living one day at a time works better; and two, within a few weeks, many of the most fervent resolutions, such as dieting, economizing, and refraining from smoking and other compulsive behaviors, will have been broken. Another issue, however, has come to seem equally appropriate for reflection at the turning of yet another year.

Everyone knows the young believe they're going to live forever. Why else do they take the risks they do? The moment teens age out of supervision by adults, many of them drive recklessly, drink to excess, experiment with drugs, try extreme sports, hook up with strangers, and otherwise play Russian roulette with their lives, convinced they'll be the lucky ones who'll always beat the odds and dodge the consequences. As we get older, our beliefs about our own vulnerability to death diverge, depending on a number of factors. As a healthy middle class American from a family that took few risks and had a genetic predisposition to longevity on both sides, I have lived my whole adult life confident that death wasn't coming for me any time soon—in other words, believing that I would live forever.

I was born a couple of years before the Boomer generation, and the world has changed by three paradigm shifts (if you count the one in progress) in my lifetime. As an octogenarian, I no longer say "forever." I tell my dental hygienist, "These teeth have to last another twenty years." I tell my husband, "If I live to be 100, let's go to Paris on my birthday." However, it's no longer up to me, ie how my body, mind, and DNA weather time. For me to live my full span, a couple of other things have to beat the odds. The planet has to refrain from falling apart or boiling over. The human race has to refrain from blowing itself to oblivion. I'm not as concerned for myself as my younger self would have been, having had one helluva run till now. The worst is that time needs to keep rolling out long enough to accommodate my hostages to fortune—my granddaughters.

Here are three poems from my new poetry collection, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle, that speak to this concern. "Once Upon A Time" and "Dissonance" first appeared in Yellow Mama.

If The Plot Unravels

in 1654 the Montaukett warriors met
at the highest point of the bluff
the Naragansetts won the battle
the Montauketts were defeated
they had already sold land to the settlers
their way of life was about to unravel

today a great boulder marks where they met
Council Rock overlooks the ocean
it anchors Fort Hill Cemetery
a municipal burying ground
where all the dead are welcome
founded thirty years ago, when we
had just acquired our crumb of Hamptons heaven
and were looking for accommodations after death

no graves had yet been dug when we first visited
we walked hand in hand over the wild hill
admired the Rock and the ocean view
joked about how this six-foot double decker bed
was the classiest real estate we’d ever own
later, I wrote a poem about that day, a love poem
it felt like permanence

now the planet is unraveling
the Montauk Point Lighthouse, built
three hundred feet from the cliff’s edge
now stands only one hundred feet
from tumbling onto the rocks below
having reached an age that visits doctors and reads obits
we wonder if our plot will be there when we need it
or by then have fallen to earthquake or tsunami
wildfire or flood, some implacable disaster
one of the many that unspool, relentless
now the world’s no longer tightly wrapped

riding in the limo to my father’s funeral
I heard Aunt Hilda dither: if she sold the country house
should she dig up Uncle Bud’s ashes or leave them in the garden
that’s when I vowed I’d never be cremated
on top of all the movie sight gags, it was the last straw

but the last two in-ground plots in Manhattan went
in 2015 for $350,000, and in 2023 a single grave
in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood runs as high as $26,000
so if Fort Hill is swept away or crumbles into the sea
and the $750 plot in Montauk is a write-off
you might as well send me up in flames
with the rest of the planet, sere as dune grass
ready for a conflagration we can’t stop


Once Upon A Time

once upon a time I walked through Timbuktu
city of sand, its hushed streets sifted fine, its buildings
rounded like sandcastles shaped by tidal winds
long before terrorists destroyed what I remember
passing Tuareg draped in indigo
I watched them drift beside their camels
toward the desert, the stone well and leather bucket
the salt mines that lie beyond the sunset

once upon a time I spent a week in Lahaina
before the fire consumed it, I remember
wearing a white tuberose lei, hearing laughter
the breeze carrying music and the scent of food
sunset tinting the water, slate blue mountains rising
not far from shore, humpback whales and their young

once upon a time I climbed the tower of Nôtre Dame
ancient stone rose into darkness all around me
my young knees made nothing of the winding stair
or if I breathed a little faster at the top
it was worth it to say salut to the gargoyles
and stick out my tongue at Paris

once upon a time in Côte d'Ivoire, in Bouaké
when independence was long fought for, newly won
before the civil war, before the hate and anger
when nobody had a television and the nights
were for drinking and dancing, oh, the dancing
for two years I always fell asleep at night
to talking drums in every courtyard
all across the city chanting lullaby

it's not looking like much of a happily ever after
this grumbling planet is exhausted
me, I'm glad I had my once upon a time
now I'd like to ask for a generation longer
until my granddaughters have had their time
squeezed joy to the last sweet drop
embraced love and laughter and adventure
why is it so hard to hold back the fire and flood
that's been baying for release since they were born


Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that occurs
when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326738

if they'd only leave us in peace
how we'd relish our longevity
our gift for the unmeasured moment
the giant tortoise, the African elephant
the koi with its splashes of sunset red and gold
and humanity, the genetic booby prize
our extra burden, values and beliefs
responsibilities and ambiguities

who holds as few as two beliefs?
what two values fail to contradict each other?
the dissonance of my choices every day
would crush me if I didn’t push
with all my strength against their weight

I could spend my birthday scanning the news
read how many missiles one country launched
and the other guys shot down
grind eighty-year-old teeth, those that remain
over loss and disappointment, how we fail
and fail and fail to distinguish truth from lies

instead, I will walk in the sun
rejoice in my loves and my adventures
marvel that I've survived until today
when little girls wear fairy wings and tutus
and princess crowns in the New York streets
and grow up to be neurosurgeons and CEOs
and astronauts as if they have forever
I'll wear a sparkling tiara to my birthday dinner
and dance down Columbus Avenue if I want to
as if they have forever

The thing about fiction and poetry

As a fiction writer who’s also a poet, I was happy to receive an invitation to talk about how one literary art informs the other on a podcast interview. The series was canceled, sadly, for reasons beyond the podcaster’s control, before I could have my say. That left me popping like a firecracker with thoughts on the topic. Luckily, as a SleuthSayer, I have a forum close at hand.

Decades before I ever wrote a publishable novel or short story, I was writing poems that did the same thing in fewer words. What is “the thing,” you ask?

Some poems tell a story.

on the stage of Carnegie Hall
rich and dark and gleaming
they seem to surround me
each tier’s apex a velvet throat
hidden in the depths, the rows of jaws
yawn wide as if to snap
on this twelve-year old girl

from “Orchestra Class,” first published in Yellow Mama; in my new collection, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle

Some poems make people think.

I am the daughter of the son of the daughter
of a woman whose name no one remembers
though all the oldest still alive and sane
were there last time I asked

from “I Am the Daughter,” the title poem in
my first collection, I Am the Daughter

Some poems make people laugh.

my mother rejects the unconscious...
her house is clean...
when she visits the optometrist
she peers fiercely at the eye chart
and tries to put her glasses on
she is 20-20 at life
but wants an A in both eyes too.

from “My Mother Rejects the Unconscious,” first published in Sojourner;
in my first collection, I Am the Daughter

Some poems make people cry.

when I sleep in my parents’ house
they make up the bed I traded in my crib for
the pine tree outside my window
still catches stars in its branches
the pine tree is still growing
it frightens me
having so much to lose

from “On Borrowed Time,” in I Am the Daughter

Some poems surprise people.

then there was the day I took them to the zoo
riding the subway up to the Bronx...
we looked as normal as anyone in the car...
three of the paranoid schizophrenics took a ride
on the aerial tram, but I was too scared
of heights to go along
they snapped my picture smiling

from “Outing,” first published in Home Planet News; in my second collection, Gifts and Secrets

Some poems hold up a mirror to our conscious or unconscious selves.

Whether I’m writing a poem, a short story, or a novel, the creative process is the same. Some call it it inspiration or being "in the zone." The process of writing a new short story may begin with what I call “my characters talking in my head.” A novel requires such a long period of sustained effort that it demands a high ratio of slogging to inspiration. But those moments are equally familiar to my inner poet. I wrote about one such moment long before I realized that other writers had the same experience.

it's like The Red Shoes only instead of dancing
I keep getting up to write poems
a dozen times between 3 and 6 AM
I curl back around you in the dark
and pull the blankets up
but then a line tugs at my mind
and I go stumbling through the hall
groping for light and pen
each time I lie back down
the images pop up like frogs
clamoring to be made princes
and you grumble and roll over
as I shuffle into my slippers once again
and go kiss the page

from “Night Poem,” in Gifts and Secrets

For me, the main difference between the two crafts is that, like other fiction writers, I say, “I tell lies for a living,” and I’m only half kidding—well, completely kidding about the “living” part. As a poet, I say, “All of my stories are true.” In my novels and short stories, my goal is to create fictional characters who leap off the page, made-up characters so real that the reader not only believes, but falls in love with them. In my poetry, the ring of authenticity comes from lived experience.

Some poems have something to say.

The poet’s craft is speaking my truth and turning it into art as opposed to hitting you over the head with it. My new book, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle, took more than two years to write. When I started writing poetry again for the first time in twenty years, I was much too angry at the state of the world to create art rather than polemic. It took everything I’d learned about patience as a novelist and about revision as a short story writer to write good poems that said what I wanted to say. Over that period, as the world got even more chaotic and the future more uncertain, I learned that I also had something to say about hope, connection, love, and peace of mind.

but ah, the whale! there’s a creature of the now
no anxiety, no regret, a vast serenity
in the greater vastness of the sea
singing while we moan about how to fix it all
swimming parallel to our troubled world

from “Afternoon On the Beach,” first published in
Yellow Mama; in The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle

All poems © Elizabeth Zelvin
The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is available as paperback or e-book.

Liz's other poetry collections, short fiction collections,
and novels are all available as e-books.


Poetry by Elizabeth Zelvin
Bruce Kohler Mysteries
Mendoza Family Saga

The Old Lady Shows her Mettle

Why is this book different from all other books?

If you're Jewish, you'll get the reference.

"This book" is my new poetry book, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle.

First, let me tell you my numbers. I'm 81 years old. I've been a writer since I was seven. My first book of poetry was published when I was 37. My first short story was published when I was 63. My first novel was published when I was 64. I've published three poetry books, seven novels, and more than 60 short stories. As a novelist, I've had and been dropped by three agents and five publishers. I've had novels in hardcover and poems in journals that folded before some of you were born.

So why is this book different?

1. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is the voice of a vanishing generation. My poems were published widely during the Second Wave of the women's movement. I was a New York Jewish feminist poet. My first book, I Am the Daughter, was about that political sensibility as well as being a young mother and my love life at the time. As I discovered when I looked for old poet friends to ask if they would consider blurbing the book, not many of us are left. In the late 1970s, a group of young mothers traded poetry critique on the Upper West Side. One of us went on to become revered, a household name, a Pulitzer winner. Her assistant wrote she sent best wishes but her health was too poor even to read emails. That's the way it goes when you're over 80.

2. I self-published The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle in print and e-book editions, after shopping it for a year. The poetry world is different from the mystery and crime fiction world I know, so I asked an old friend, a highly regarded award-winning poet, about reading fees. I was surprised when he didn't say he turned up his nose at them. "Not any more,"he said. So I did what I had to and got two offers. The catch was that the contracts were for print books. The publishers insisted on owning the electronic rights but did not intend to issue an e-book.

That made no sense. I turned the contracts down. In the end, I realized that I preferred to do it myself, have all the control, and get exactly what I wanted.

When I started out, it was shameful to self-publish a book. Today, it's one of many options. With poetry especially, the author does all the marketing—the hard part—in either case. Since the book came out a month ago, half its readers have chosen paperbacks, the other half e-books. So it seems I had the right idea about the need for both formats.

3. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is my only poetry book available in print as well as e-book form. Both I Am the Daughter (1981) and Gifts and Secrets (1999), my mid-life book, which was about my work as a therapist, being a mother, and the beginning of losses—the death of friends and eventually of my parents—were originally published before the digital world existed. But I re-issued them as e-books a few years ago, the rights having reverted, with a few editorial tweaks I'd been longing to make for forty years.

4. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is my "Jewish book" in a way that even the Mendoza Family Saga, my Jewish historical adventure series set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is not. For one thing, fiction, as we fiction writers like to say, is "telling lies." Poetry, at least for me, is always about the truth. "All my stories are true," I say at readings. Some of these poems tell stories about the emigration of my family from Hungary and what we then called the Ukraine to New York and what happened to those who stayed, those left behind, and any who got homesick and went back. Others, the most difficult to write, were my way of working through the divisive effect that political and environmental events from 2019 to the present have had on the world and various entities and institutions, including publishing, the American left, and the community of Jewish friends on whom I've depended all my life. All this and the rise of anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world have made me aware of and willing to declare my identity as a Jewish woman in a way that I never have before, certainly not in my poetry.

5. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle includes grandmother and granddaughter poems that are not about a grandma rocking or hugging the grandchildren or feeding them, cooking, or otherwise confined to the kitchen. While I was looking for places to submit my new poetry, I was horrified that I could find no current poetry by men and little by women portraying grandmothers outside traditional gender-based roles. As these poems attest, my granddaughters and I order in, go out, and talk about stuff that matters.