As a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, I have many concerns and interests particularly creating the exact dynamic between form and content, beauty and necessity. These are aesthetic and intellectual concerns, but also ethical concerns. For the last forty years, I have been thinking and writing about ‘the Other’, examining the difficulties and possibilities of reconciliation. Concerned with the ways through which culture creates history as much as history creates culture, I am fascinated by the manner in which history co-exists in the present. In a previous novel, What Dinah Thought [Viking, 1989] the contemporary story of an American Jewish woman and a Palestinian man is infused with the ancient Biblical story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, and Shechem, a Hivite. In The Other Hand, we find the imprint of Babylon, Daniel and Christ on a contemporary woman scientist who must scrutinize herself and the time in which she lives.
I have been passionately engaged, as a writer and teacher of writing, with the nature of Story as an organizing principle of our lives. This is investigated in my book on creativity, Writing For Your Life, A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds. I have also explored the ways in which Story can be invoked for the sake of physical, emotional, political and spiritual healing. This is the subject of Tree: Essays and Pieces, [North Atlantic Books, 1992] that contains several essays on healing and the journal I kept when I had breast cancer in 1977 as well as a novel in the form of a play, The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them."
I am currently writing Doors, A Jazz Novel. In this book, as in all my work, I try to render as best as I can the very nature of the complex and multi-dimensional reality in which we live. At its best, my work is a weaving of many themes and concerns and has, I hope, as an accompaniment, an appropriate music that conveys its own meaning.