Awards: What They Do (and Don't) Mean for Creative Artists

MIA in action last week - as I scurried out of town to boycott the snowstorm. When my husband and I landed in Sarasota to celebrate his birthday, I discovered a surprise: my book Crooked Lines: A Single Mom's Jewish Journey was a finalist in the Wishing Shelf Awards competition.

What does that mean? During the past few years, I've received a number of book awards and am very honored to say so. 

I feel lucky and blessed to have received The Wishing Shelf Award for The Beat on Ruby's Street and the Firebird Award in the Parenting and Family category for Crooked Lines. 

My play A Body of Water was also chosen by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture on the 350th anniversary of Jewish life in America as a play that "breaks new ground."

It's important to note here that while awards recognize the blood and sweat authors and playwrights put into our books and plays, they don't necessarily translate into sales or increased audience size. What they do mean is that certain designated readers who put the time into reading large numbers of books or scripts are choosing your book as one of the best. That, to me, is worth celebrating.

So, to all the other (many) award winners out there, congratulations--for shutting yourself into dark rooms and bright days, for paying attention to the world around you and for spending hours at your computers, trying to get the words right.

Of course, writing is it's own reward and all that -- but how wonderful it is to be recognized. Thank you, awarding organizations and readers, for making that happen, too.

Choosing Your Genre-- or Does it Choose You?

 A very special present came in October and I'm excited to share it with you. Crooked Lines: A Single Mom's Jewish Journey won the Firebird Award in the Parenting/Family Category.

One of the interesting things about the Firebird Award (and there are many) is that they give you a spot on Speak Up Talk Radio, to share tips with other authors. You can hear my quick tips on how authors might choose a genre (and how the genre really chooses us) at https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-boombangomgwow-podcast

I'm also pasting the text here in case you're not in the mood to listen. :)

Author Tips Podcast 

Hi, everyone, I’m Jenna Zark, author of Crooked Lines: A Single Mom’s Jewish Journey. Today I want to talk about how to figure out which genre your book belongs to. When I started writing my first book some years ago I thought the only thing I would know how to do was fiction. I never thought about writing anything that connected to my spiritual journey or life.

Then someone in my community started a blog about Jewish life and asked if I wanted to participate. I didn’t know if I would have anything to contribute, but found to my surprise that I did, and that people were reading it and commenting much more than they had with my previous fiction.

If you have something to say, no matter whether it’s via fiction or a biographical nonfiction story, or anything else for that matter—think about why you want to write first, and the genre will choose you before you finish your book. Every story is really suited to its own genre, and books are really about sharing what’s most important to you.

In my own case, I wanted to let people know how I got through some really tough times by learning about the holidays and rituals in my heritage. That meant I needed to explore those holidays and rituals from a non-fiction standpoint. If I wanted to create characters, I would have moved to fiction—but the focus of my book was holidays and how they affected me personally.

So if you have a story to tell, pay attention to it and figure out what you want to say first. Then look at the possibilities—and let the genre find you. To learn more about my book, visit jennazark.com and go to the Crooked Lines page. Thanks for listening today!

*****

More on the Firebird Awards:

October 21, 2022

Speak Up Talk Radio announced the winners of the recent FIREBIRD BOOK AWARDS contest. 

One of the winning entries was from Twin Cities author Jenna Zark, whose book Crooked Lines: A Single Mom’s Jewish Journey won in the Parenting/Family category.

Authors and publishers from around the world submitted their work to the International Firebird Book Awards. Two judges from a select panel of 25 judges read each book in its entirety, and independently score each entry. All judges commit to a set of standardized criteria that evaluates the quality of the writing as well as production aspects. Only entries with the highest of scores are awarded the coveted Firebird.

Patricia J. Rullo, founder of the Firebird Book Awards, says, “the Firebird Book Awards adds a charitable twist that allows the author’s entry fee to be tax-deductible. In return, we personally make and send handmade fun and colorful pillowcases to women and children in homeless shelters via Enchanted Makeovers, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. I

n this way, authors get notoriety for their work while helping to transform homeless shelters into bright and happy homes. It is a rewarding venture for everyone.”Pat adds, “this quarter we also sent many large boxes of children’s books to the shelters. The children appreciate falling asleep on our pretty pillowcases while reading happy bedtime stories.”

The Firebird Book Award judging panel grew again this quarter and includes a diverse group who represent a cross section of ages, cultural heritage, race, religion, gender, and experience.  At Speak Up Talk Radio, our mission is to offer authors and others a welcome place to promote themselves and their books via book awards,  podcast awards, radio interviews, audiobook production, voiceover marketing tools, and podcasting services, including our BOOMBANGOHMYGOSHWOW podcast where authors share short but helpful tips with fellow authors.”

The Firebird Book Awards run quarterly contests so authors can receive recognition on a timely basis. Authors from all genres, mainstream, independent, and self-published are welcome. For additional winning authors, titles, and entry information:

https://www.speakuptalkradio.com

First Review of Crooked Lines

 

I've been away this week visiting family and celebrating my birthday - and honestly, that's taken up all of my head space so I didn't have time to write very much, and I'm sorry. I had all kinds of ideas and then I was so excited to see everyone, every thought I had floated away.

What I WOULD like to share is my first review of Crooked Lines: a Single Mom's Jewish Journey. It was published four days ago in the American Jewish World:

https://www.ajwnews.com/writer-jewish-questions/

"... A reader needn’t be divorced or even Jewish to connect with Zark’s thoughts and experiences; many are universal.

For example: “For the first year of my son’s life, I was done wanting to be an award-winning playwright or write novels or musicals. All I wanted to do was to sleep. I did not succeed.”

Nor need one live in the Twin Cities area, although that adds enjoyment.

“It was late August and I was packing up everything I own to move across town to the bottom half of a duplex,” Zark says. “My son, age 4, would live there part of the time with me and part of the time with his dad in our old house,” she says.

“I was moving to St. Anthony Park, hardly known for its Jewish traditions.” But she brought two sets of dishes to continue keeping kosher and confronted the new experience of buying a mezuza.

Single, “my invitations dried up. … I discovered that Jewish Minnesota can be a notoriously close-knit community.” (Amen.) She writes movingly about efforts to get invited to a seder. 

The pieces in Crooked Lines are brief, insightful and easy to read...

Zark is surprisingly revealing about the difficulties of being a working single mother; needing to learn more about Jewish traditions; deciding which to observe and how; and choosing a second husband."

--American Jewish World writer Neal Gendler

Crooked Lines will be published September 5, 2022. You can preorder at jennazark.com. And if you're a single mom - or dealing with intermarriage - or losing your parents -- I'd love to hear your story, too.

Start of the Story

It wasn't like Dorothy, dancing down the yellow brick road to Oz. In fact, it was anything but a fairy tale. Crooked Lines: a Single Mom's Journey began with a divorce and the overwhelming feeling of being alone.

It began with a friendship, two souls tossed overboard and trying to survive.

It began with a young son, who was depending on me to soldier through. And a raft of Jewish holidays that I'd always celebrated with family, and now had to navigate alone.

If you are divorced, you know what I'm talking about.

If you are a single parent; losing your own parents to Alzheimer's and eventually death--

You understand.

Or maybe you just know someone going through this and want to be there for a friend.

I can only say those curve balls keep coming. But friends and rituals and holidays can give us insights that help us deal with them.

I can also say that sometimes, when you least expect it, better things come your way. It could be something cool with your career; or a new relationship that brings it's own transitions to navigate.

What I discovered is what a friend told me: God paints in crooked lines to lead us to the people we are meant to meet.

You can meet that friend (and a lot of others) in this story, as of September 5.

Single Parent or Just Single: Co Housing Could Be Just What You Need

When my son was about three, his father and I split up, and I was completely at sea as to where I would move. Searching for a roommate can be hard enough, but searching for a roommate who is OK with living with a toddler or young child can be brutal.

At one point, a friend recommended the idea of co-housing. It was a fairly new idea then, and I wasn't able to find something close enough to work and child care, but it did make me stop and think about the whole notion of living in community, and how the world seems to be set up for nuclear families rather than people on their own.

What is co-housing, exactly? It's an intentional community, said to have begun in Denmark in the 1970s and introduced in the U. S. during the 1990s. It might be an apartment building or small community with 15 to 35 homes that offer common areas such as kitchens, gathering places and other amenities that residents find helpful. What I think co-housing offers is the chance to live in a supportive community that brings authentic connections and relationships into your life.

While I hoped to find a co-housing space when my son was small, I ended up renting the bottom half of a duplex with the owner couple living above, and we had a wonderful experience there. When I did get married a few years later, we moved to another duplex nearby--but I kept thinking about how things might have turned out if I'd been able to find a co-housing setting. Working with older adults these days has also shown me how isolated most people are, and how little attention we give to people who are not "coupled" -- no matter what their ages might be.

This week, my view was validated by an article by New York Times Reporter David Brooks in The Atlantic. Brooks writes astutely about how the nuclear family was a mistake and  shows the consequences we all pay for it. He believes it tends to work better if you are affluent and I agree -- it can be a big fail for everyone else, economically, mentally and socially. As social beings, we need community support and friendships. We also need more generational interaction for resilience and strength.

Brooks talks about how older generations, single people and/or parents and children suffer most when the nuclear family ideal is held up as the ideal. Co-housing can change that and level the playing field in ways nuclear families cannot. The article lists a few different options in The Atlantic article that I wish I had known about in the early years of single parenting.

Brooks mentions CoAbode, a website that helps single parents find homes to share with each other all across the country. He also says a group called Common offers 25 co-housing sites to young people and is teaming up with another developer to start Kin, which caters to single parents. While each family would have its own living space, shared commons spaces will include play spaces, child care services and family-oriented gatherings.

If you are looking for housing that offers community support, I highly recommend the Brooks article and other articles about the co-housing option. The most important thing to know is that you don't have to fit in to some ideal of the perfect family to find like-minded people. A new kind of family life is out there -- and it may be exactly what you need.

Other articles about co-housing may be found here:

What the Heck is Co-housing?

4 Reasons Why I Spent 14 Years in Co-housing and Why I Plan to Stay


There's Community and Consensus - but it's No Commune


Gardening photo: d-olwen-dee

Surrealistic Moments: Getting Married Because of the Indigo Girls

Did you know there's something like 200 surreal moments we experience every day? I didn't either and who knows if it's true. It IS something I read in a magazine this week in a New Yorker story about Iceland.

True or not, it got me thinking about the surrealist moments in my life. First of all, what would I define as a surrealist moment? A long-lost acquaintance surfacing who turns out to be a relative? A doppelganger? A warp-speed change in the universe that suddenly makes a wish come true?

About the latter. I know I don't have 200 such moments a day, but I did have one I remember for its very significant result: the Indigo Girls being the reason I got married.

What happened was that I was minding my own business more or less as a single mom, and as people will, I started seeing someone. He had actually been a friend and a very fine one, but I had not expected things to go the way of dating, so I suppose that might have been a surrealist moment in and of itself.

In any case, a few weeks into our dating life, this fellow, we'll call him Pete because that's his name, asked if I wanted to go to an Indigo Girls concert. I knew this was because he knew I liked the band; his taste ran more to heavy metal.

That in itself should have given me a clue this man wanted to go the extra mile to make me happy, but I was, as they say in post-divorce parlance, taking it slow. Never mind that he was fun, handsome, kind, sexy and funny, that he genuinely loved my son and we had genuine chemistry; or that I should know better than to look for talismans instead of seeing plainly what was in front of my face.

God help me, I wanted a sign.

There was little likelihood of getting a ticket because the event was sold out; but Pete thought we might be able to find something by showing up a few hours before the concert started. Oh, and did I mention this was right around the time of my birthday? (Is that another surreal event)?

We walked up to the box office and asked if there were any tickets left, and someone said "no." And that, I thought, was that, and I'll tell you what else I was thinking. I had decided that if there were no seats, the universe was telling me that Pete and I would or should not be together. I don't really know why I decided this, but there you have it, thinking I could or would be able to design my own life.

We were starting to walk away when a woman entered the box office and looked at us. Her eyes met Pete's and she said, "Looking for tickets? Come here."

I promise you she looked directly at Pete. As we approached, she handed him two tickets which turned out to be front row seats for the concert. Looking directly at him, smiling the whole time, and putting us mere inches away from the singers.

If that's not a bona fide Surrealistic moment, what is?

Watching the concert, which was amazing, by the way, I decided maybe this guy and I could have a future. The rest, I believe, is history, because we married about a year and two months later and have been married ever since.

I guess this is where I admit I owe this good fortune to the Indigo Girls, capricious as it was. Would I have married him without them? Let's just say... sometimes you need a push from the universe. Fortunately, I got one.

If you have a surrealistic moment that changed your life, I'd love to hear it. You can either comment here or send it to me via my website at jennazark.com.