Oct 31, 2008 12:18
I was trying to enter a fiction contest in a Jewish feminist magazine. The magazine is looking for "unpublished original stories with heart, soul and chutzpah illuminating issues in the lives of Jewish women."
It should be pretty easy to write a story considering that I am a Jewish woman.
However, the issues present in my life are not the issues present in the lives of most Jewish women. I have no marriage, dating, divorce, childrearing, assimilation, mikvah, generation stories. I could try making one up, but it will suck because I wouldn't know what the heck I was talking about.
It was suggested that my stories of unemployment, voting Republican, living in Israel, Shomer nagia guys, being a militant virgin, thoroughly disliking my sister, might be interesting material because these stories don't fit the stereotype at all.
But then I realized that the fact that these were my stories meant that I didn't want to share them. If they were someone else's stories, I might want to read them. But these being my stories, I don't even want to write them under fictional names.
Funny, back when I was in middle school and high school, I longed to be interesting enough to have stories that were worth sharing. Now I have them and I have no desire to share them.